Also reminds me of the (hyped?) "outrage" when a former facebook developer stated that they used to have a "default password" that allowed fb devs to log into every account and the media were like "omg they could have logged in and seen your photos". I mean... yeah they're the developers they could always do that even without the password
Not really. Obviously facebook the company can always access your data. Weather or not an individual developer can do the same, which developers can do it, how they can do it, and under what level of supervision this would be is a design choice.
It is possible to design a system with very high level of security and ones with none too. As with any design considerations it has trade-offs. A super secure system might introduce dev and operational frictions which the company might deem unnacceptable. But even with that consideration the question is a lot more complicated than a simple “yeah they’re the developers”.
Unless a business is heavily regulated and checked for compliance, the burden and friction introduced by developer access controls to the data of the software they write is anecdotally not seen as a positive investment in any company I've seen the internals of.
There are so many zero days in regular consumer software, just imagine how many are in closed source public facing Amazon services.
Now multiply that by 100 to get the number of zero days that probably exist in Amazon's closed source dev only back end environment.
Wise rule to live by. I would certainly advise everyone to assume that.
On the other hand geek_at was talking about a slightly different thing. They were talking about how the media criticised FB for having too lax controls on private information. geek_at even called it an "outrage".
We can and should absolutely ask platforms to do better while at the same time playing it safe ourselves with the data we control. There is no contradiction there.
There is an other layer in which it feels we are talking by each other. You mention zero days, and yes those are a thing and yes an insider is in an excellent position to find them and exploit them. Finding them and patching them is a good idea for sure. (For many reasons.) But the FB thing mentioned wasn't about an exploited zero day. It was a company sanctified system and associated work practices. We can demand that a company develop better practices (where not every engineer needs this high of a level of access to do their job) without expecting them to find and patch every single vulnerability.
This was early-early facebook. Like under 10 developers back in the day. But obviously today a facebook frontend developer should not and probably has no access to the database
Maybe AWS should have another object storage product that's specific to sensitive material. I know that would flip Corey Quinn's lid because it would be yet another AWS product (h/t to him for actually have a valuable twitter post and not just snark) but I honestly don't care - I'd rather have extra level of confidence. For this there would be absolutely no data access.
Tangentially, I wonder if this role has been deployed to GovCloud?
I get the idea, but also realize this is fundamentally incompatible with using the range of services at AWS. Fringe-future tech aside, you need unencrypted data to process it and use it. AWS isn't just S3, it's lambda, it's hosting and data science and databases.
Having just read the tweet, as weird as it is to give AWS the benefit of the doubt, I agree with others in that thread. If you KMS encrypt your data, then the engineers will likely only have the ability to see encrypted data. My guess is that there are processes and monitoring in place to ensure this is only used as a break-glass.
Have you ever dealt with automation of AWS resources? There are definitely issues where, by putting incorrect permissions on a KMS key or an S3 bucket, not even root can get your data back. This is likely what this is for. Customers would rather have a non-removable AWS break-glass than their own root account.