Governance Lessons from the Death Star Architect
I had not seen this excellent presentation by the engineer who built the Death Star’s exhaust system.
In it, he discusses the need to disperse energy from a battle station with the power draw to destroy planets, and the engineering goals he had to balance.
I’m reminded again of “The Evolution of Useful Things” and how it applies to security. Security engineering involves making tradeoffs, and those tradeoffs sometimes have unfortunate results. Threat modeling is a family of techniques for thinking about the tradeoffs and what’s likely to go wrong. Doing it well means that things are less likely to go wrong, not that nothing ever will.
It’s easy, after the fact, to point out the problem with the exhaust ports. But as your risk management governance improves, you get to the point of asking “what did we know when we made these decisions?” and “could we have made these decisions better?”
At the engineering level, you want to develop a cybersecurity culture that’s open to discussing failures, not one in which you have to fear being force-choked. (More on that topic in my guest post at the Council on Foreign Relations, “Cybersecurity Lessons from Star Wars: Blame Vader, Not the IT Department.”)
More broadly, organizational leadership needs to focus on questions about appropriate policy and governance being in place. That sounds jargony, so let me unpack it a little. Policy is what you intend to do: such as perform risk analysis that lets executives make good risk management decisions about the competing aspects of the business. Is a PHP vuln acceptable? If it happened to be in the Force Awakened site this week, taking that site down would have been an expensive choice. It’s tempting to ask what geek would do more than add a comment? And that gets into questions of attacker motivation, and it’s easy to get it wrong. Even Star Wars has critics (one minute video, worth sharing for the reveal at the end):
If policy is about knowing what you intend to do in a way that lets people do it, governance is about making sure it happens properly. There are all sorts of reasons that it’s hard to map technology risk to business risk. Tech risk involves the bad things which might happen, and the interesting ways technologies are tightly woven make it hard to say, a priori, that an exhaust port technical issue might have a bad business impact, or that an HVAC system having a bad password might lead to a bad business impact.
Exhaust is likely to generate turbulence in an exhaust shaft, and that such turbulence will act as a compensating control for a lack of port shielding. That is, whatever substrate carries heat will do so unevenly, and in a shaft the size of a womp rat, that turbulence will batter any projectile into exploding somewhere less harmful.
A good policy will ask for such analysis, a good governance process will ask if it happened, and, after a failure, if the failure is likely to happen again. We need to help executives form the questions, and we need to do a better job at supplying answers.
Einstein said, paraphrasing, “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on it, I would spend the first 55 minutes thinking of the right question.”