For all the talk of security being a rapidly changing field, it's only true in the same sense that JavaScript frameworks are rapidly changing, lots of churn but not so much progress.

Smart pivot. I mentioned that in my own comment. The tool building, if done right, can give you knowledge or code that can be reapplied to all kinds of use cases. Especially in static analysis since there's a few techniques and constructions that keep showing up in tools whether it's system, web, whatever. If you ever went for formal verification, the stuff you came up with might again be reusable on new problems.

Much higher payoff on tool building than just hunting and patching vulnerabilities.

At that point, you get a chance to find a new attack. People really care. The government adds a new task order to your contract and then you get working on the problem.

You can't keep building on top of your work as you can in other parts of CS. Personally, this lead to a desire to keep bugs private since then at least you could privately chain things together in interesting ways.

It can be a very lucrative career, and it can be a lot of fun if you enjoy turning puzzles over in your mind (though this really applies more to tricky exploit dev), but I did not find it satisfying in the long term.

Security is just another knowledge domain. More than any other domain, security has a clear divide between understanding the math behind cryptography (primes, elliptic curves...), understanding how to implement correct and high-performance code (sse4, avx,simd..), and high-level use of crypto implementations to create secure protocols (diffie-hellman, tls...) On top of that there's a new category that's emerging in the field of what I would call embedded/root of trust security in the form of SGX and TPM.

If you stay with the mind-set of "use TLS and PGP" that's very commendable but probably not very challenging. Going all the way up and down the crypto stack is extremely challenging. Squeezing every last cycle out of CPUs is very lasting (we'll always need crypto )and very transferable (mobile devices, clients, servers, embedded, companies of any size, companies of any domain...) It's also political and philosophical at times. Basically it's a hacker's dream to work in security.

I think one of the good things about security is that it exposes you to so much domain knowledge (like cryptographic algorithms and bare-metal programming).

But executing well in security (and particularly software security) is more about a specific kind of problem-solving mindset. The unique difference between security and other subfields of CS is that security provides you with an adversary; it's intrinsically competitive in a way that other kinds of computer science aren't.

Surely you mean subjective, not objective.

Overall, though, it looks like it might have been more satisfying if I stayed on the automatic programming track. Doing things like program/hardware synthesis, static analysis, functional programming compilation, and so on. Have a steady stream of useful inventions plus more users happy to adopt them. Must be nice for those fields. ;)

Hah, my job is sort of in that area now, and it is satisfying. Even if happy users are still a bit harder to come by than one would like... (Working at a large company helps: we can just hire people to use our stuff, instead of having to market it.)

I particularly like how you can fruitfully mix PL with pretty much any other field and get something interesting. The intersection with security has always seemed particularly fruitful—you get a lot of bang for your buck with static analysis and automation.

You also have the advantage that "secure" is at least a partially objective criterion, sort of like performance. I personally care most about making systems that are more expressive but it's much harder to make a case for that than for "more secure".

It may be a truism or cliché but it seems correct from my perspective as a "devops type": security is a losing game in favor of attackers due to asymmetry between attack and defense.

Perhaps automation will change that? :)

All of them. There were secure computers far back as Burroughs, which was successful.

http://www.smecc.org/The%20Architecture%20%20of%20the%20Burr...

The drivers of most of the computing industry were more features and speed at lowest cost. Quality or security meant less of that. Tradeoff began there. By about 80's, we mostly knew how to secure computers from specs down to CPU. Market demand was so non-existent almost nobody was producing them. Per one of INFOSEC's inventors, Roger Schell, there was some demand by CIO's (?!) but they believed IT industry intentionally left bugs in products to sell them fixes & would never sell them bulletproof stuff. So, maybe they weren't dumb. ;) By 90's, DOD's Computer Security Initiative that promised to only buy secure products for certain stuff plus TCSEC critera for building them led to a number being on market. Almost nobody in DOD or regular market bought them. Rinse repeat with only a few niches doing higher assurance with high unit price due to low volume: safety-critical like aerospace, a few companies selling to military, TEMPEST industry, HSM vendors, and some smartcards. Smartcards being exception to low volume & high price. Even most on that list have been lowering amount of assurance & increasing risky features due to market demand.

Now, let's look at user side. Vast majority of time users get to choose between a secure/private or insecure/surveillance-oriented product they will choose the latter. Just look at whose dominating in messaging, storage, thin clients, remote access, calenders, document formats, etc. Almost got an exception in browsers with Chrome, based on OP Web Browser that was secure, but they watered down security because they knew demand-side wanted blazing fast over kind of fast but secure. There's now privacy-oriented, easy-to-use apps for various things on smartphones for $1-10. Desktop stuff free or even $5 a month on critical functions that are still easy to use. Almost nobody uses these even when they get a lot of press.

So, it seems demand for actual security is almost non-existent even when it gets main function done, performs acceptably, is plug-and-play, and is inexpensive to free. I mean, if they don't care at that point, what can you do? I think it's a fatal flaw of human nature in the way people's minds make tradeoffs. Now, I encourage people to instead get into established companies in senior roles or do startups where the product is good, people use the heck out of it, it stays competitive, and you just bake security into it. Or just avoid INFOSEC altogether for something not set up to fail. :)

"Perhaps automation will change that? :)"

I had some hopes for that. There were tools like 001 Toolkit by Hamilton, various 4GL's, logic programming, and so on that basically let you specify the problem where the tool would do everything else. One could do something like that which embeds good security into it. Opa language does that for web apps as an example. Additionally, the automated analysis tools for code with or without annotations are getting really good. They're at a point where users almost does no work. They also get almost no adoption even by companies that "care about quality." ;) Anyway, machine learning that studied tons of annotated codebases to learn what annotations go with what code patterns might result in tools that correctly annotate new code & just run in background of build process. There's potential there but manual effort will still be required due to false positives/negatives. And new domain logic.

So, there's some brainstorming on that.

On the other, after hearing about the crazy stuff hackers do, like stuxnet or the more trivial daily privacy news, make people think the task is impossible. And even what's possible - it's hard to quantify benefits.

Combine that with network effects , the marketing power of free apps and default apps, and the complexity of it all - it's natural that most users don't the time/money to spend on this.

I probably need to think on that angle more for the consumer side.

This also sounds a lot like the overall SRE org at Google. I've never worked with a more no-nonsense, brutally honest group who are open to everybody's contributions.

Incidentally this isn't the first time I've seen this connection between security and (Google) SRE. This talk at USENIX talks about the intersection between "privacy engineering" and SRE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jx2y2yi0rZc

SRE actually seemed one of the more educationally diverse organizations while I was there - it's a field where skills are easily measured and passion for the job you do tends to result in better performance than educational background. Search Quality was still overweight Stanford/Berkeley/MIT/IIT/etc at the time, as was Research and X. Chrome and Apps had a wide variety of backgrounds, including a number of really good people without college degrees. Ironically, the departments that seemed to have the biggest Ivy-League bias were AdSales and HR; when there are few objective ways of judging candidates, more weight gets placed on educational pedigree.

About as sad as a statement of a company's (or in this case, a specific department's) culture as one could make.

Edit: From Eric Schmidt himself:

> A few of the rules we had were: we didn’t want to hire your friends, we didn’t want to hire people from “lesser universities,” we only wanted to hire people with very high GPA’s. The constant problem was somebody was a good employee, had someone they had worked with, who was very loyal, but not from a great university, did not have a high GPA. We would not hire these people. It was controversial. We relaxed it a bit now, but the fact of the matter is it got us to the point of where we are today. They got us these intelligent generalists from top Universities.

https://medium.com/cs183c-blitzscaling-class-collection/clas...

and Marissa Mayer:

> "Even though the actress Gwyneth Paltrow had created a best-selling cookbook and popular lifestyle blog, Mayer, who habitually asked deputies where they attended college, balked at hiring her as a contributing editor for Yahoo Food. According to one executive, Mayer disapproved of the fact that Paltrow did not graduate college."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-whe...

And -- how can you possibly know that, Eric? Are you saying because B follows A, that A caused B to happen? Maybe the early Google succeed despite the now-discredited filtering processes it used in its early years.

According to one executive, Mayer disapproved of the fact that Paltrow did not graduate college.

But this quote is just exquisite. Presumably she filters picks for her bookshelf (including, most especially, cooking and lifestyle books) based on a hard floor for the authors' educational backgrounds, also. And of course the movie she watches, with respect to the pedigrees of their actors, likewise.

I find great interest in finding bugs. Writing code is actually an easier job: it is well defined with inputs, outputs and your keyboard in between.

Human error, in contrast, could be anything. Someone made a typo. Someone used a compiler that had a bug. Or the CPU had a bug. Or they didn't ship the product right. Or they wrote the password on a postit. Human error is unbounded, which is what makes it so intellectually challenging and interesting to find.

It's kind of sad when you realize that a lot of the code you write will eventually be rewritten or lapse out of use, or be replaced by something better.

It's very hard to find truly "lasting" work in this world. Maybe research?

It's funny, I actually get sadder when I find out code I wrote a long time ago is still in use. The deployment tool I wrote for reddit ended up lasting six or seven years. Some of the stuff I wrote at eBay is still in use today.

We don't pine for bridges that need to be torn down every few years.

Even if your code shows you were less competent, it worked (hopefully)! A lesson was still learned.

yep. try using the websites you've built as a resume

even worse when all people look at is the UX and if you'r enot a UX person how to even show how goo dyour code is, how maintainable it is etc.

I realised this to me detriment when my last employment came to a natural conclusion. I have no degree and suddenly no portfolio of active production code - all I had was one reference from a guy I built a website for which now doesn't look very good since the new guy butchered it.

I invested in becoming a certified Autocad Operator instead and never looked back.

security guy: You accumulate lots of experience over the years, where most errors happen, common culprits, but you _know_ the actual application of these ideas will always be different over time.

frontend guy: You gain lots of experience over time about common architectures, common best practices, common tooling, you _hope_ that the knowledge you accumulated will stay relevant over the following years, but in reality, except some basic concepts, everything changes. :)

I really liked his post. He pointed out to some deep issues like "Intellectual honesty" which I've been concerned about too(yea even in math) but I don't think the security sector is immune to these.

The lifetime of exploits/defenses (in an ever-evolving threat landscape) is likely to be shorter than the lifetime of widely adopted application software.

Dullien is a software developer; he's the author of BinDiff, the first popular binary diffing tool, and of a suite of other reversing tools like it (he's been at Google for several years now).

That's the entire reason you have proofs of security in crypto: to show that breaks are unlikely. I don't quite see why crypto should be "blindly result-oriented", and whether that's even a good thing; when public key crypto was invented it was wildly impractical.

The vast majority of crypto is usually not about breaks.

There's no discipline in computer science that is more about breaks than cryptography. The whole field is refined down to the tension between performance and vulnerabilities. What you can do in a cryptosystem is defined by breaks; progress in the field is punctuated by breaks.

For what it's worth: Thomas Dullien is a cryptographer by training; he was one of Dobbertin's doctoral students.

Note that I'm speaking from an academic perspective.

One example: the CAESAR competition that is trying to select a portfolio of next-generation AEADs. Ciphers and constructions are entered, and submissions are sorted by the success of attacks.

Another example: databases and format-preserving encryption. It might look like Order Revealing Encryption is an exercise in building things, but it's also a response to vulnerabilities in Order Preserving Encryption. One team develops something like cryptdb; another tears up cryptdb and uses its findings to design Cipherbase (or whatever).

Unlike in generalist software development, most new things in crypto are responses to breaks, often by the authors of the breaks.

1. Verification of previously described properties of algorithms or protocols. This is basically math where key constraints could be done checklist style.

2. Building tools to support cryptography research or development. Cryptol is a great example of this.

3. Speed improvements on crypto algorithms that preserve mathematical properties. Analyzing against common flaws usually covers problems you could have here.

4. Usable crypto. There's some breaking that goes in this but it's mostly presentation stuff. Can often use battle-tested tools that come with tips for proper usage.

These come to mind as not directly related to inventing or breaking new schemes far as crypto itself. I wouldn't need someone with the security mindset to do these things do much as give them some training on what to do and not to do. I think you were referring to No 1 on my list.

The most trending kind of paper at last crypto was about cryptanalysis

You could always verify this feeling:

https://eprint.iacr.org/eprint-bin/search.pl?last=365&title=...

Similarly for MPC. Most work in MPC is about improving efficiency or proving security against stronger classes of adversaries; it is not in finding breaks of these protocols.

As I said earlier, tye majority of crypto research is in the following scenario: pinning down a battle-tested assumption, using that assumption in a provably secure manner to construct new systems. zero knowledge, MPC, ORAM, etc. all fall within this paradigm.

Constructing new assumptions is obviously a task where attacks are necessary, but new assumptions come along every 5-7 years; the intervening period is dominated by this black box use of assumptions.

EDIT: see this[1] listof most cited security and crypto papers; very few attack papers.

[1] http://saweis.net/posts/most-cited-security-papers-2013-2014...

Dave designs a ZKP protocol for a specific application.

Jane finds a side-channel in the protocol that leaks some data about the secret being verified and publishes it.

Is it still a zero knowledge proof?

> Similarly for MPC. Most work in MPC is about improving efficiency or proving security against stronger classes of adversaries; it is not in finding breaks of these protocols.

How do you prove security against stronger classes of adversaries without finding breaks in existing protocols, or at least trying to do so?

Sure, attacks can motivate some of the theory that is created, but most theory work only very loosely uses these attacks as motivation. A number of strengthening of the attack model are simply questions of curiosity: if we strengthened the threat model in this way, what guarantees do we have. Very rarely is it motivated by an actual attack.

In software engineering, we're solving problems we've known how to solve since the 1970s. The challenge is solving them as programming environments and user interfaces get more flexible and performant, and as the amount of code we have to secure increases at a rate that outpaces our ability to verify it.

That's not the case with cryptography. In fact, if you include constructions along with underlying algorithms, it's difficult (I can't do it off the top of my head) to think of anything we use today that was secure in the 1970s.

Most cryptography we use today wasn't widely available as recently as the 1990s --- not because nobody had invented the underlying basic concepts, but because the constructions that animated those concepts were terribly insecure.

work on determining the size of complexity classes like CZK and SZK;

Determining lower bounds of round complexity of MPC in various models;

Determining the kinds of assumptions different primitives can be based upon;

Determining the complexity classes supported by different delegation of computation schemes, and the assumptions these can be based on;

Determining whether you can obtain particular primitives out of others, such as OWPs from OWFs in a non blackbox manner, seeing what iO can be used for, etc;

Improving asymptotic efficiency of various primitives, like NIZKs (see SNARKs).

I think the difference in our viewpoints comes from the communities we're; I'm in the theoretical, rooted in complexity theory side of things, whereas you appear to be on the more applied side of crypto, given your emphasis on things that are being used in practice.

I guess I don't know if that qualifies as being fundamental since it's very modern but it seems to be quite a popular topic right now.

That's really my answer. Maybe I'm setting myself up for career failure, but I just enjoy having some Russian hacker lob a new puzzle at me every couple of weeks.

Sure, security can be/and is very challenging, exciting and lasting, but that's besides the point of the question.

The question was not whether security is challenging to the brains or "lasting", but more like "why do some programmers settle for less challenging jobs when they can do a lot more with their brains?"