Adam Tyra’s Post

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Vice President and General Manager of Security Services at At-Bay

At the RSA conference this week... One of the big announcements for the event is CISA's Secure By Design pledge. Many technology leaders have signed on. Everyone get your resumes updated! We'll have better security soon, because they PROMISED! Okay, jokes aside. Are we to believe that the likes of Microsoft and Cisco could have been building secure technology this whole time and that all that was needed was for a government agency to convince them that they should? This is a massive over-simplification of the problem. First, it pre-supposes that technology companies are actually capable of building secure software in the first place. Many of these companies are going to market with technologies that are so complex that they struggle just to get their products to work at all. In many cases, no single person understands the architecture of an entire product, so a holistic view of security for a piece of software may not be possible. I would argue that building verifiably secure software is simply beyond the reach of all but the most sophisticated development teams. Now, let's imagine that many of these companies actually COULD build software that's secure by design. How long before the technology environment of the world becomes awash in these software products? Five years? Ten? Twenty? Even if every software company in the world today started doing this with 100% efficacy, it would take a decade or more for the technology portfolios of the world's businesses to be fully replaced with "secure by design" products. If ever there was a "boil the ocean" proposal for security, surely "get everyone to promise to rebuild all the software in the world, so it's secure by design" is definitely it.

Dustin Owens

Cyber Risk Thought Leader | Executive Level Strategist | Board Advisor | Board Member

5mo

I take it you're a glass half full kinda guy Adam :)

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