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bottlepalmyesterday at 11:33 PM1 replyview on HN

People make mistakes, and people don’t know everything either. The software you write is on top of a house of cards of software and hardware. It all has to be perfect to not be hacked.

It isn’t perfect, even if you try your hardest it won’t be perfect and to argue it’s not difficult is absurd.

You don’t know everything, you don’t own the stack. So how are you going to create a secure anything top to bottom - you can’t.


Replies

insanitybittoday at 12:48 AM

> It all has to be perfect to not be hacked.

This is absolutely not true. It's a matter of cost. Exploitation can cost on the order of 10K, 100K, 1M, 10M, etc. A straightforward one would be something like "MD5 collisions are on the order of $100K-1M" (a while ago, at least) so if you used MD5 you knew that it costs about that much to bypass the control. Moving to SHA1 pushes you massively out of that space, even if that algorithm has flaws.

I'm sure that Firecracker has vulnerabilities. Cost of exploitation is likely >100K, likely >1M. gVisor is likely on the same order of magnitude and these two technologies stack because they address the same surface and can be used in conjunction.

Software absolutely doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be costly to attack and it's hilariously easy to drive costs way way way up.