[earthrise]

Security is half a technical problem and half a usability problem (for developers). We need more emphasis on the usability half.

For example, we should be doing everything we can to ease the mental burden of writing secure code. Whenever we can reasonably eliminate the possibility of a vulnerability, we should. Even if someone has to be an idiot to make the mistake, just don't make it possible to make the mistake in the first place. We should also try to reduce the amount of potentially-malicious input, reduce the amount of options and special cases, etc. Simplify.

Usability improvements pay off multiple times. They make developers' jobs easier because there's less code to write and the code that does get written is easier to reason about. They make security auditors' jobs easier because there are fewer "dumb" mistakes to check for, and that means more of the audit time can be spent looking for deeper flaws.

(Nitpick about the phrase "validating user input": The user's input should never be trusted, but that doesn't mean we should write code to try and decide whether the user's input is "safe" or "unsafe", as that can be impossibly-hard depending on what's happening after the validation check. The code should just be secure no matter what the input is.)

[joatmon-snoo]

> Usability improvements pay off multiple times.

There's a bit in Google's paper about the Chubby lock service where they note that a big reason for the success of that project was all the concessions they made for developer usability.