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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • A process owned by any user will be able to exploit a userspace vulnerability, whatever this user is. Selinux, chroot, cgroups/containerization add a layer of protection to this, but any vulnerability that bypass these will be as exploitable from nobody as from any other local user. It will protect a user files from some access attempts but will fail to prevent any serious attack. And as usual when it comes to security, a false sense of security is worse than no security at all.

    Remember that some exploits exist that can climb outside of a full-blown virtual machine to the virtualisation host, finding a user escalation vulnerability is even more likely.

    The only real protection is an up-to-date system, sane user behavior and maybe a little bit of paranoia.


  • Forewarning : ops here, I’m one of the few the bosses come to when the “quick code” in production goes sideways and the associated service goes down.

    soapbox mode on

    Pardon my french but that’s a connerie.

    Poorly written code, however fast it has been delivered, will translate ultimately into a range of problems going from customer insatisfaction to complete service outage, a spectrum of issues far more damageable than a late arrival on the market. I’d add that “quick and dirty code” is never “quick and dirty code with relevant, automated, test coverage”, increasing the likelihood off aforementioned failures, the breadth of their impact and the difficulty to fix them.

    Coincidentally , any news about yet another code-pissing LLM bothers me a tad, given that code-monkeys using such atrocities wouldn’t know poorly written code from a shopping list to begin with, thus will never be able to maintain the produced gibberish.





  • Others has answered the specific cases where TTM is paramount.

    When time is less of an issue, in my experience it’s in no particular order a mix of:

    • product owners or similar role wanting “everything and right now” for no reason whatsoever, except maybe some bonus;
    • bosses bossing around to try and justify their existence instead of easying progress ;
    • developers being not much more than code jockeys with a tendancy to develop by StackOverflow copy/paste;
    • operations lacking time, resources or knowledge to build a proper CI/CD pipeline - when it’s not an issue of operations by ServerFault copy/paste;
    • experts (DBA, virtualization, middlewares) being kept out of the project, and only asked for advice when things go terribly wrong later.

    All in all, instead of short term profit, it’s a lack of not-so-long term vision and engagement from everyone involved. They just don’t care.

    Yeah, I’m the one in charge of fixing the mess, why you ask?