this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2024
87 points (98.9% liked)
Programming
17443 readers
252 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Dependencies, scope creep, feature creep, off by one errors, misconfiguration, unclear/unenforced contracts/invariants... Most of those are trivial to solve at small scale, but the more moving parts you have, the more complex it becomes
Of course, but that just makes the case for security as a foundational principle even stronger.
Mistakes happen. They always will. That's not a reason to just leave security as the afterthought it so often is.
None of the things I mentioned have anything to do with errors and scope creep, but everything to do with building using sound principles and practices always. As in, you know, always. In class, during bootcamps, during design meetings, when writing sample code, when writing reference implementations, during the construction of the prototype that, let's face it, almost always goes into production. Always.
Sure, and then the big client bankrolling your company needs the feature in production for next week.
If you're gafam you can tell them to get screwed and that you need more time, but at least in my experience I've always been on the other side of the table, and sometimes you gotta change a setting in a production DB because the related GUI change was not approved since the guy doing the review was sick and the other reviewer was not sure which shade of green to use somewhere on the page.
I agree with that security is not something you add on the side, but circumstances change and things are not always in control. You say mistakes happen, but not everything I mentioned is caused by mistakes, sometimes the shortcut is completely intentional. Companies only care about security when it's too late, at which point they will blame you for writing unsafe software, but if your company or your job depend are at stake, that's often a risk you have to take
Take all the risks you want. Just be sure that you're the one actually taking the risk, not the people whose data you manage. I get really tired of people and companies who claim that it was a necessary risk when they're not the ones paying for the bad outcomes.
You risk something by standing your ground, not in agreeing to that which puts me at risk.