by quotemstr | 2026-01-21 23:43:29+00:00
I see the split too. I'll add that each camp is frustrated and feels the other is missing the point and would make information security worse if its worldview won.

You can do some empirical analysis. Someone downthread linked to a paper claiming to being able to reach a few million vulnerable devices over IPv6 and not IPv4. This kind of analysis isn't dispositive, though, because there are all sorts of second-order effects and underlying philosophical differences. Facts seldom change minds when you can build multiple competing true stories around these facts.

I'll call one camp the "veterans". They see security mostly as a matter of increasing the costs incurred by attackers relative to defenders, looking at the system holistically. Anything that increases attacker workload is good, even if it's an unintentional side effect of something else or interacts with software architecture in a cumbersome way. It's vibes-bases: whether a give intervention is "worth it" is an output of a learned function that gives in the stomach of a seasoned security researcher who's seen shit.

The other camp I'll call the "philosophers". (My camp.) The perspective here is to build security like Euclid's elements, proving one invariant at a time, using earlier proofs to make progressively more capable systems, each proven secure against a class of threat so long as enumerated assumptions hold. They read security as an integral part of system architecture. Security comes from simplicity, as complexity and corner cases are the enemy of assurance.

The veterans see the philosophers as incoherent. There's no such thing as a safe system: only one not yet compromised. You can't solve problems for good anyway, so there's no use trying to come up with axioms. Throw away the damn compass and strait edge and just draw siege map in the dirt with a stick.

The philosophers see the veterans as short-term-oriented defeatists who make it harder to reach levels of provable security that can solve problems once and for all so we don't have to worry about them anymore. You have to approach complex systems piece by piece or you can't understand them at all -- and worse, you'll do things in the name of security gutfeels that compromise other goals without payoff that feels worth it to them. They say, "Without my compass and straightedge, how can I design my star fort with firing lines I know cover every possible approach?"

The divide shows up in various projects. TLS is a philosopher project. Certificate transparency is a veteran project. Stack canaries are a veteran project. Shadow call stacks are a philosopher project. I think you get the point.

This thread reveals a surprising split between veterans and philosophers on NAT. In retrospect, it's kinda obvious that the veterans would insist that "duh, of course IPv4 prevents inbound connections and it must because otherwise the Internet won't work", and the philosopher camp is "Hold up. One thing at a time. What's the actual goal? How can we achieve this goal minimally without side effects on Internet routing?"

My camp sees the NAT configuration issue as a red herring. We see "the UX makes it too easy to run unsafe" as an HCI issue distinct from the underlying network architecture. The veterans say "Well, you can't build that button if you have NAT, so we are led not into temptation."

Both camps have something to contribute, I think, but the divide will never fully disappear.