| > Remember when I mentioned "cyber"? That's because I'm using the terms in the context that professionals do in cybersecurity contexts. What that means is that the pudding analogy is irrelevant. 1. Well, one thing that IT security professionals surely don't use is "cyber", that's a term from the snake oil corner of the industry. 2. People in IT security most definitely do not distinguish between security problems that the manufacturer intended as a feature and security problems that were caused any other way. You create a model of things you want to protect, and if a property of a product violates that, then that is the definition of a security problem in your overall system, obviously. The only difference would be whether you report it as a vulnerability or not, as that would obviously be pointless for intentional, publicly announced features. > It's not a good analogy for a whole host of other reasons, but that's one of them. Really, even that would not be a good reason, as it smells of essentialism. > You're using a nonstandard definition of computer security. That's your prerogative, but don't be surprised if it continues to cause confusion for those you interact with. No, I am using the exact standard definition, and the only sensible one at that. It obviously makes no sense to have a definition of "security" that says nothing about whether your system is secure. If you consider Google having access to your data a threat in your threat model, then whatever properties of your system that give Google access to your data is a security problem in your system, it's as simple as that. The only thing that matters is whether your overall system reaches its protection goals or not, not whether some component by itself would be considered vulnerable in some abstract sense. And that obviously applies in the opposite direction as well: If you run some old software with known vulnerabilities that you can not patch, but you somehow isolate it sufficiently that those vulnerabilities can not be used by an attacker to violate your protection goals, then that system is considered secure despite the presence of vulnerabilities. |