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Comment by ethbro | Hacker News Reader

> We haven't mastered these systems and anyone who thinks they have is just waiting to get bit in the ass.

We've absolutely mastered these systems.

We just prioritize rapid development time and ease of use over security.

People make fun of DoD / space price tags (and admittedly, there's still a lot of crap sold there), but it's a trade off.

If we wanted computers to cost $x0,000 and OSes to cost $x,000, and the pace of progress to be glacial, we could have completely secure systems today.

It's a choice, not an impossibility.

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> We just prioritize rapid development time and ease of use over security.

> If we wanted computers to cost $x0,000 and OSes to cost $x,000, and the pace of progress to be glacial, we could have completely secure systems today.

> It's a choice, not an impossibility.

Progress in core OSes and conventional hardware has already slowed down to a glacial pace, compared with previous decades. Rapid development is often used to just create a churn of useless sidegrades and other poorly thought out things (deceptively sold as upgrades).

It might be time to make that different set of choices.

>If we wanted computers to cost $x0,000 and OSes to cost $x,000

That's an interesting theory that's not supported by historical evidence as far as I can tell. When computers were expensive, there just were less people with access. The systems were not any more secure.

I think ethbro is saying that focusing on absolutely secure systems would drive up costs, not that if we make them more expensive we'll somehow get more security just because they're more expensive.

I think this is overlooking the real criticism, which is that there is no evidence that simply wanting something to be secure would make it so.

For example, the parent article, the one this comment is ostensibly in response to, has nothing to do with operating system security.

They weren't suggesting we need more secure OSes specifically, that was just an example.

A better example is maybe instead of Google spending $xxx,000 to develop the system that was found insecure they should have spent $x,000,000 so they had more resources devoted to the security aspects.

Perhaps this is too high for this system to exist; well maybe that system just shouldn't exist if it can't be secured properly with the budget for it.

it is an impossiblity in all practical senses. This is the entire premise of Chromium. Knowing that there will always be bugs but designing the system so they are unlikely to be able to do bad things.

there's two points there

acknowledging it's impossible to have zero bugs ... and ... acknowledging that there will be exploits.

sure you can do better than average but "completely secure" is a myth

as for DoD there's this from 3 days ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18177617

It's only impossible when you look at rapidly developing, easy to use systems.

Which is my point and why the broad assertion is wrong.

Look at a VxWorks type OS. Or OpenBSD. Limited capability and compatibility, very strong security guarantees.

"Completely secure" isn't a mythical unicorn. It just costs time and money. A LOT of time and money.

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