It shouldn't be hard for a dev to update a dependency which should trigger an auto build and roll your pipeline. Shouldn't be hard for an upstream vendor to patch and have that pulled to kick off a new build.

IDK where this idea that no one can know what's in a dependency tree is coming from but is not ops best practice for more than a decade.

> IDK where this idea that no one can know what's in a dependency tree is coming from

I’d guess people running commercial non source available binaries in production. And outside startups and unicorns, that’s almost everybody.

How do you find the dependancy tree for your on prem Oracle db, or your self hosted Atlassion stuff, or your non cloud ServiceNow or PeopleSoft stuff, or your Huawei network management stuff, or or or…

And what can you do for any of your cloud hosted saas stuff, beyond telling legal “I dunno, their website hasn’t said whether they’re vulnerable to exploit de jour yet”?

Presumably you would go ask Oracle, and then patch it when they provide a patch.

Hope you’ve got a pretty sweet support contract or you’re going to be waiting awhile.

Depending on the product, maybe forever.

My point is that patching third party binaries is generally not something companies take responsibility for. They wait for vendors to patch the binaries and ship them.

> generally not something companies take responsibility for

I have some bad news for you: viruses and hackers don't care about your support contracts and the delays they cause.

Actually, I tell a lie: the hackers love them.

That's not relevant? The original premise here is "compiled languages will make things worse because they're harder to patch" except:

a) It's very rare to patch things manually

b) It's very rare to develop patches yourself (for 3rd party software)

I'm sure some companies out there with many decades old deployments have to do stupid shit like that, but it's hardly the standard.

Having been on the receiving end of waiting a long time to get a patch for a actively being exploited zero day - the point is, even if you want to fix it yourself (which I desperately did), you can’t.

If it’s some important piece of software you also can’t stop or the business stops - well, you and everyone else is just going to take it in the pants.

Many enterprises are in exactly this bind. And support contracts only get you so far.

I'm losing your point. So, you wanted to patch it, and you couldn't, so how is it bad then that a compiled binary would make patching more difficult?

It was impossible to fix because it was a compiled binary with no available source. That’s the point.

Why would you have oracle without a super sweet support contract? That's the whole point.

People don’t get Oracle because they want to get stuck with a super expensive (and still only ok), or super insanely expensive (and maybe sweet) support contract. They get it because they usually don’t know about these things, are trying to do something and BLAM they get hooked.

Many people don’t even realize how long it can take to get a real issue fixed even with a super sweet support contract. For instance, I once was a wet behind the ears Oracle DBA, and when creating a schema i dumbly used a feature in the documentation without checking to see how long it had been released. Unfortunately, it had been released about 6 months before, as I found out later.

It took 6 months for them to figure out that it was the cause of our sporadic ORA600 errors (aka core dumps), by which point we’d already migrated to MySQL for many of the workloads because the database was having at best 95% reliability because of it.

Once we migrated the table off with the feature, somehow our problems ceased, but that was still well before they told us what was going on.

It is! But a lot of ops departments have problems! OPs point is that a lot of deployments out there make it really hard to remediate this kind of vuln.

Moreover he is arguing that java, as opposed to fat binaries with potentially stripped symbols, made things solvable. He fears that many companies would be much worse off with a big vulnerability in e.g. a rust crate.

Yes, some places suck. They're going to suck either way. If their system is so backwards that they need to manually patch services because everything is EOL, and compiled code will break their workflow, they have plenty of other shit to deal with.

I don't think we should optimize for garbage companies with garbage practices.

I'd say places lie on a spectrum of sucking. With a lot of places being very important and far from perfect. Those places really should get good security. That means designing for security in the common situation rather than the situation of 'best practices'.

I think we should optimize security for say the 80th percentile company as far as not following best practices (i.e. 80% of companies have better practices than what I suggest targeting).

In no way is manually writing a patch and then live patching the common situation.

The vast majority of cases, and this has been the case for decades, will be that you take responsibility for your own dependencies, and you let your vendors take responsibility for theirs.