On Tue, Aug 23, 2022 at 10:35 AM Salz, Rich <rsalz=40akamai.com@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
If the rules say one thing, and literally everyone else does something else, who is at fault? It seems that a case can be made for three possibilities:
- Those who didn't follow the rules
- The rules are wrong
- The rules were not clear enough
Does it matter? The only thing that we have left to do now are:
* Decide if we want to fix the issue for the future
* If so, decide how to fix it
* Try to work out some general principles on how to design such systems.
The only one that interests me here is the last because I think NOMCONs smack of the sort of schemes Trotskyites used to engineer to ensure they maintained control over organizations. The real function of the scheme is to insulate the appointees from accountability by making it impossible to know who they will end up being accountable to.
The general principle I learn from this is that if you want a system to be unambiguous, reduce as much of the system as possible to code. Introducing ceremony is one way of doing that. It isn't an accident that there is a shinto ceremony for making sword steel, the ceremony is the embodiment of the knowledge of how to make a particular quality of steel in a repeatable fashion.
One of the main reasons security policy schemes fail in deployment is that you cannot apply security policy effectively unless the policy data itself is reliable. And that is only possible if the generation of that policy is automated.
