Technical Debt part II: Security debt

I wrote previously about “technical debt,” the concept that the decision to defer necessary technical work (adopting an updated version of a new component, refactoring code to reduce cruft, etc.) accumulates across releases until it absorbs a project team’s entire capability to develop code. You “pay interest” on technical debt because it’s much harder and consumes many more resources to make a necessary technical change the further downstream you get from the point where the change becomes necessary.

It occured to me today that there’s a specific flavor of technical debt, security debt, that is both more insidious and much easier to see in operation, because we have so many prominent examples of it. It might not have cost the developers of Windows too much more to make the OS more secure at design time, but some of the decisions were deferred, until the point where you had whole features introduced to address security deficiencies in prior features, and the six month long security push that postponed Vista’s launch while the team took care of outstanding security issues in the already-shipped version of the OS.

What’s interesting about security debt to me is that it balloons over time. My once-favorite mix sharing site, Art of the Mix, is a good example. The guy who developed it didn’t really understand SQL injection or XSS, or at least didn’t code defensively against them, and it’s become a hive of malware as a result–and is now flagged as a “reported attack site” and blocked by Firefox 3. So, to carry the metaphor to its logical conclusion, the site’s security debt drove it into a kind of “bankruptcy” when it proved susceptible to drive-by SQL injection attacks.

So how do you avoid incurring security debt? Learning good development practices is a good start; keeping up on the prevalent attacks–the current risk space–is another. But there’s one key thing to remember about security debt: in many cases fixing the underlying flaw that permits exploitation is far far cheaper than getting hacked, or even putting bandaids like web application firewalls in place.

Leave a Reply
