Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
Neither is correlated with good security outcomes against the prevailing threat landscape of profit-motivated, commercial, professional attackers with tiny budgets of a few million dollars. The standard is not "better", it is "adequate".
Correlation is not an absolute measure here, it’s relative. As is the entire concept of security.

As is what constitutes the standard of “adequate.” Which BTW is the standard in ALL engineering (not just security or software) because we live in a world where economic pressures apply and costs must be managed. Trivial example: bridges only use an “adequate” amount of steel and concrete because they are not free. The word “adequate” fundamentally involves the concept of tolerances. There’s a reason we consider over-engineering a bad thing.

So which development approach would you say is better correlated with good security outcomes?

Adequate is making it uneconomical, or cost ineffective, for threats to your organization to attack you either deliberately or indiscriminately. Absent a specific organization, we can use a profile of commonplace, prevailing threats as a proxy. A profile of commonplace threats is, as I said before, a profit-motivated, commercial, professional group seeking a multi-million dollar payout and thus being profitable at a cost of a few million dollars per commercial target. That is "adequate" in the prevailing threat landscape if you are the "average" organization.
loading story #50309655