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Funding Security and Playing God

Adrian Lane January 13, 2011 2 Comments

I was reading shrdlu’s post on Connecting the risk dots over on the Layer 8 blog. I thought the point of contention was how to measure cost savings. Going back and reading the comments, that’s not it at all. “we can still show favorable cost reduction by spotting problems and fixing early.” You have to PROVE it’s a problem first … This is why “fixing it now vs fixing it sooner” is a flawed argument. The premise is that you MUST fix, and that’s what executives aren’t buying. We have to make the logic work better. She’s right. Executives are not buying in, but that’s because they don’t want to. They don’t want to comply with SOX or pay their taxes either, but they do it anyway. If your executives don’t want to pay for security testing, use a judo move and tell them you agree; but the next time the company builds software, do it without QA. Tell your management team that they have to PROVE there is a problem first. Seriously. I call this the “quality architect conundrum”. It’s so named because a certain CEO (who shall remain nameless) raised this same argument every time I tried to hire an architect who made more than minimum wage. My argument was “This person is better, and we are going to get better code, a better product, and happier customers. So he is worth the additional salary.” He would say “Prove it.” Uh, yeah. You can’t win this argument, so don’t head down that path. Follow my reasoning for a moment. For this scenario I play God. And as God, I know that the two architectural candidates for software design are both capable of completing the project I need done. But I also know that during the course of the development process, Architect A will make two mistakes, and Architect B will make 8. They are both going to make mistakes, but how many and how badly will vary. Some mistakes will be fixed in design, some will be spotted and addressed during coding, and some will be found during QA. One will probably be with us forever because we did not see the limitation early enough and we be stuck. So as God I know which architect would get the job done with fewer problems, resulting in less work and less time wasted. But then again, I’m God. You’re not. You can’t prove one choice will cause fewer problems before they occur. What we discover, being God or otherwise, is that from design through the release cycles a) there will be bugs, and b) there will be security issues. Sorry, it’s not optional. If you have to prove that there is a problem so you can fund security you are already toast. You build it in as a requirement. Do we really need to prove Deming was right again? It has been demonstrated many times, with quantifyable metrics, that finding issues earlier in the product development cycle reduces at large costs to an organization. I have demonstrated, within my own development teams, that fixing a bug found by a customer is an order of magnitude more expensive than finding and fixing it in house. While I have see diminishing returns on some types of security testing investments, and some investments work out better than others, I found no discernable difference in the cost of security bugs vs. those having to do with quality or reliability. Failing deliberately, in order to justify action later, is still failure. Share:

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