[tptacek]

I feel like the "authentication company should have known" thing is unuseful; most developers at "security" companies are just ordinary generalist developers. Ironically, I think they boned themselves by trying to be too clever here, not too casual.

[smw]

You don't think a company whose entire reason for being is providing security services for other companies should have designs related to authentication reviewed by security experts?

[justin_oaks]

I was an employee of a company providing security services. I can attest to that company being filled with generalist programmers.

None were trained in security principles. None were security experts. And there was no security review.

[tptacek]

I think it's good to want things.

[re-thc]

> You don't think a company whose entire reason for being...

That's the assumption everyone makes and it's dangerous.

The fact that someone or some entity does something and only special doesn't make them the best at it (or even close). It's just what they do to survive (and earn).

[GoblinSlayer]

Ship early, ship often, we can add security later.

[TeMPOraL]

Cybersecurity != security in the technical/mathematical sense. It's related, but not the same.

For businesses, cybersecurity is (like everything else, ultimately) about minimizing costs related to digital threats. That is - any threat scenario can be modelled as T*D, where T is "how likely it's going to happen (per year)", and D is "how much it'll cost us when it does (per incident)"; the result is the expected yearly loss, denominated in dollars. The less of it you have (integrated over all scenarios you can think of), the better, but prevention and mitigation also cost money, so what you're actually minimizing is the (expected loss + mitigation costs); i.e. makes no sense to spend more on improving something than it'll save you.

The reason for this exposition dump is: actual security at the technical level is one of many ways of improving TxD, and usually is neither cheap nor the most interesting one. It's also mostly focused on the "T side" (minimizing risk of an incident), which is harder to move than the "D side" - reducing impact.

The service an authentication company is selling is not "cryptographically unbreakable authentication". What they're selling is roughly: "low-T auth sytem cheaper than you could build&operate yourself + if it breaks it's our fault". That is, more than lowering "T side", they're offering to let you shift part of the liability to them, which significantly lowers "D side".

Internally, how they do it is up to them. But there's only so much need for technical security experts - you obviously can't sell a broken system (everyone has to at least pay a lip service to real security, otherwise people get angry, politicians get interested, and costs start to multiply rapidly), but eventually, it's cheaper to focus on your ability to take on liability from your customers and discharge it somewhere else, which involves improving operations, customer service, etc. - all the stuff you need regular, non-security-expert programmers for.

Note the bit about discharging liability. After working in cybersec and GRC for a bit, I realized security is best understood in terms of managing liability (which corresponds to minimizing the D part of TxD from earlier). That's the primary product of most security service companies, as well as security frameworks and associated compliance audits. They do improve the technical side somewhat too, but that's not why those things are bought. They're bought so, when something happens (something eventually always happen), you could point at the SOC.2 audit results and a string of security contracts and say, "we've followed all the best practices, there was nothing more we could do; crime happens, not our fault" - and have the liability flow down the contractual agreements to other companies, which do the same, until, like spring rain flowing down the mountains, into rivers, into sea, it all gets turned into insurance payouts in the end :).

Might sound cynical, but it's probably the right and reasonable thing to be happening 90% of the time. Shit happens, criminals be criminals, opportunity costs are real, etc.

[pclmulqdq]

Being too clever and being too casual are the same thing when it comes to matters of math.