Smaller, Provable, and on Hardware You Own and Operate

Dino Dai Zovi made an argument recently that I want to build on. “If you agree that AI will help attackers discover and exploit vulnerabilities 10-100x more easily, then your excess attack surface has also just become 10-100x more of a liability. The right defensive strategy is to prioritize reducing attack surface and trusted computing bases.” The argument is right. It is also not new. We have been working on this problem for fifty years Operating system designers gave this set of principles a name in 1975. Saltzer and Schroeder published The Protection of Information in Computer Systems and laid out economy of mechanism, least privilege, separation of privilege, complete mediation, fail-safe defaults, and open design. The Orange Book formalized “trusted computing base” a few years later, with the central observation that the security of a system depends on what is inside the TCB, and that smaller TCBs are easier to make trustworthy than stronger ones. The microkernel debate that ran…