[chickenbane]

I disagree; it's a focus of their existence that appears to be abandoned by the NSA - and that's dearly needed right now.

From the front page of nsa.gov: "Defending our Nation. Securing the Future." The second point from their What we do page - "Defends vital networks". In the opening paragraph of Wikipedia: "The NSA is also tasked with the protection of U.S. communications networks and information systems". Etc.

For all the prestige of the TAO, who claims that the US networks are secure and well defended?

I read the news and see the nation's voting, power, media, and other critical infrastructure are all being hacked. Notably Equifax, a steward of all Americans most valuable information, was compromised in trivial fashion.

Our peers working at Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc are being attacked nonstop by foreign actors and they are rightfully being held to account by congress. But in my opinion the social networks are secondary compared to the primary infrastructure that honestly does not have access to the best talent should be aided by NSA.

[someguydave]

Yeah but think about it - imagine government employees shift their entire focus onto "securing US networks". What would they do, exactly? Build their own open-source chip designs from scratch? Because that's pretty much step one.

[peoplewindow]

Do the same bug hunting they do now, but send all the exploits back to the vendors.

Do more work like SELinux.

There's lots they can do.

[chickenbane]

We are very far from trusted hardware. It's very easy to imagine what they would do - step one is helping American networks use the best practices - use open-source software, keep dependencies up-to-date, have bug bounties to find vulnerabilities in popular frameworks, etc.

Step two would be to consider some shared infrastructure, probably subcontracting with a cloud provider (AWS/Azure/GCP), hopefully multiple. Once we get to that step, then you can start considering things like Google's Titan (https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/08/Titan-in-depth-...). But there's a lot of low hanging fruit before we get there.