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DarkUranium04/14/20262 repliesview on HN

I know a lot of security researchers will disagree with this notion, but I personally think that security (& privacy, I'm going to refer to both as "security" for brevity here) are an overhead. I think that's why it needs to exist *and be discussed* as a sliding scale. I do find a lot of people in this space chase some ideal without a consideration for practicality.

Mind, I'm not talking about financial overhead for the company/developer(s), but rather an UX overhead for the user. It often increases friction and might even need education/training to even make use the software it's attached to. It's much like how body armor increases the weight one has to carry and decreases mobility, security has (conceptually) very similar tradeoffs (cognitive instead of physical overhead, and time/interactions/hoops instead of mobility). Likewise, sometimes one might pick a lighter Kevlar suit, whereas othertimes a ceramic plate is appropriate.

Now, body armor is still a very good idea if you're expecting to be engaged in a fight, but I think we can all agree that not everyone on the street in, say, a random village in Austria, needs to wear ceramic plates all the time.

The analogy does have its limits, of course ... for example, one issue with security (which firmly slides it towards erring on the safe side) as compared to warfare is that you generally know if someone shot at you and body armor saved you; with security (and, again, privacy), you often won't even know you needed it even if it helped you. And both share the trait that if you needed it and didn't have it, it's often too late.

Nevertheless, whether worth it or not (and to be clear, I think it's very worth it), I think it's important that people don't forget that this is not free. There's no free lunch --- security & privacy are no exception.

Ultimately, you can have a super-secure system with an explicit trust system that will be too much for most people to use daily; or something simpler (e.g. Signal) that sacrifices a few guarantees to make it easier to use ... but the lower barrier to entry ensuring more people have at least a baseline of security&privacy in their chats.

Both have value and both should exist, but we shouldn't pretend the latter is worthless because there are more secure systems out there.


Replies

suburban_strikelast Friday at 8:13 PM

You're not wrong. The entire cybersecurity industry is a joke. You cannot play defense forever. You can only dig a bunker so deep, walls so thick, and areas so compartmentalized, before you have dug your own tomb and suffocated inside of it, or opened up a backdoor by tunneling through to the other side of the planet.

It's called cyberwarfare for a reason. After mounting a defense, you're expected to stage an offense to proactively eliminate threats and deter future intrusions by fear of response. The only countries that understand this are Israel, Iran, Russia and China. The rest of us are content to burden ourselves with enduring global cyber-siege forever and acting like we're anything other than livestock building our own pens around us.

dundundundunlast Wednesday at 1:53 PM

In my experience, the proper infosec professionals both know and balance this well, it's the amateurs and posers who gets it wrong.