Well, no home is burglar-proof either. Just like with computer security, we define , often just implicitly, a threat model and then we decide which kind of security measures we use to protect our homes. But a determined burglar could still find a way in. And here we get to a classic security consideration: if the effort required to break your security is greater than the benefit obtained from doing so, you're adequately protected from most threats.
It's no huge loss if the sea takes all the cat photos off my phone. But if you're a hospital or civil services admin hooking up your operation to the Internet, you gotta be prepared for it all to go out to sea one day, because it will. Is that worth the gains?
(Possibly even negative, when people go out and deliberately install apps that, by backdoor or by design, hoover up their data, etc. And when the mainstream OSes are disincentivized to prevent this because it's their business model too.)
There was a time, not very long ago, when I could just tcpdump my cable-modem interface and know what every single packet was. The occasional scan or probe stuck out like a sore thumb. Today I'd be drinking from such a firehose of scans I don't even have words for it. It's not even beachfront property, we live in a damn submarine.
While I wouldn't have too much of an issue with that, I'm pretty sure I'm a minority with that
Correct.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_celebrity_nude_photo_leak
https://www.cybersecurity-insiders.com/glitch-makes-data-fro...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/apple-patches-clickl...
Of course there is, and things are only getting more secure. Just because a lot of insecurity exists doesn't mean computer security isn't possible.
Computer security is impossible at the prices we can afford. That doesn't mean we can't use computers, but it does mean we need to assess the threats appropriately. I don't think most people do.
> People are building new software all the time. It all has bugs. It will always have bugs.
No. Most bugs these days are due to legacy decisions where security was not an issue. We are making advances in both chip and software security. Things are already vastly more secure than they were 20 years ago.
20 years from now, security will be a lot closer to being a solved problem.
> The only way to build secure software is to increase its cost by a factor of 100 or more (think medical and aviation software). No one is going to accept that.
What are you basing that cost on?
> Computer security is impossible at the prices we can afford.
No, it really isn't. There's a reason some organizations have never been hacked and likely never will be. Largely because they have competent people implementing security that very much exists.
Our computer security analogies are modeled around securing a home from burglars, but the actual threat model is the ocean surging 30 feet onto our beachfront community. The ocean will find the holes, no matter how small. We are not prepared for this.