Security and Cheap Complexity
I’ve been saying that complexity is the worst enemy of security for a long time now. ( Here’s me in 1999.) And it’s been true for a long time. In 2018, Thomas Dullien of Google’s Project Zero talked about “cheap complexity.” Andrew Appel summarizes : The anomaly of cheap complexity. For most of human history, a more complex device was more expensive to build than a simpler device. This is not the case in modern computing. It is often more cost-effective to take a very complicated device, and make it simulate simplicity, than to make a simpler device. This is [...]