When I say everything is run by magicians I speak of extremely smart people who are so smart they don't need or have process (they probably don't want it either so there's no incentive). They can do whatever needs to be done whenever it needs doing. The folks in the center are incredibly smart but they learned their skills on their own and don't know how to pass on knowledge. We have no way to pass knowledge on to others, many don't even know this is a problem. Magicians can be awesome if you have one, until they quit. New industries are created by magicians but no industry succeeds with magicians. There are a finite number of these people and an infinite number of problems.
This got me thinking a bit, and it reminded me of the Internet back in the early 90's.
If you were involved in the Internet back in the 90's, it was all magic back then. The number of people who knew how things worked was incredibly small. There were RFCs and books and product documents, but at the end of the day, it was all magic. If your magician quit, you were screwed until you could find and hire a new magician. The bar was incredibly high.
Sounds a lot like security today.
Back then if you had a web page, it was a huge deal. If you could write CGI scripts, you were amazing, and if you had root on a server you were probably a magician. A lot of sysadmins knew C (you had to), a lot of software was built from source. Keeping anything running was a lot of work, infrastructure barely held together and you had to be an expert at literally everything.
Today getting a web site, running server side scripts, or root aren't impressive. You can get much of those things for free. How did we get here? The bar used to be really high. The bar is pretty low now but also a lot more people understand how much of this works. They're not experts but they know enough to get things done.
How does this apply to security?
Firstly we need to lower the bar. It's not that anyone really plans to do this, it just sort of happens via better tooling. I think the Linux distribution communities helped a lot making this happen back in the day. The tools got a lot better. If you configured a server in 1995 it was horrible, everything was done by hand. Now 80% of the work just sort of happens, you don't need super deep knowledge. Almost all security work done these days is manual. I see things like AFL and LLVM as the start but we have a long way to go. As of right now we don't know which tools are actually useful. There are literally thousands of security products on the market. Only the useful ones will really make a difference in the long term.The second thing we need to do is transfer relevant knowledge. What that knowledge is will take time to figure out. Does everyone need to know how a buffer overflow exploit works? Probably not, but the tools will really determine who needs to know what. Today you need to know everything. In the future you'll need to know how to use the tools, interpret the output, and fill in some of the gaps. Think of it as the tools having 80% of the knowledge, you just need to bring the missing 20%. Only the tool writers need to know that missing knowledge. Today people have 100% or 0% of knowledge, this is a rough learning curve.
If you look at the Internet today, there is a combination of tons of howtos and much better software to setup and run your infrastructure. There are plenty of companies that can help you build the solution you need. It's not nearly as important to know now to configure your router anymore, there are better tools that do a lot of this for you. This is where security needs to go. We need tools and documents that are useful and helpful. Unfortunately we don't yet really know how to make useful tools, or how to transfer knowledge. We have a long way to go before we can even start that conversation.
The next step security needs to make is to create and pass on tribal knowledge. It's still a bad place to be in, but it's better than magicians. We'll talk about tribal knowledge in the future.
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