To be fair: the Compliance Regime didn't invent any of the technologies they create frameworks around, and if we followed every compliance framework's recommendations to a T, the systems produced would by-and-large be insecure. They paint with an extremely large brush; and its a toss-up whether the auditor has even been involved in anything technology-related beyond auditing for, well, decades. There's good ones and bad ones, but the integrity of many audit processes relies to a significant degree on the goodwill of the SMEs of the systems and processes being audited.

Just as a dumb example; an auditor says passwords need to be hashed with bcrypt. They find a code sample that says "store(bcrypt(password))". Awesome; complied to a T. But true security goes beyond that: are we using a library for bcrypt, or an internal implementation? Is the internal implementation well-implemented? Is the library free of CVEs (maybe they check that)? Did we trace that call to ensure the data generated is what is inserted to the db, or was it intercepted by some middleware? Did we name that function 'bcrypt' but its actually just MD5?

My point is really not to assert that auditing is pointless, but rather its fundamentally limited in what kind of attestations it can make.

One great example I can pull from a few recent audits I've been through: serverless tech like Fargate. This oftentimes blows auditors away (or, rather, it used to; nowadays they've seen it so often that they just know). It checks so many boxes. They'll present multi-page forms about data center colos and operating system security and operator SSH access and we'll say "We use Fargate". "Oh nice, ok we can check all of these and carve out with AWS's attestation for (ComplianceFrameworkX)". It saves hours, days, of time.

That's, I think, where homomorphic encryption can go. That isn't what this is, but it's a step toward that. It's not about meeting today's compliance frameworks; it's about evolving the framework. And, in the interim, as advanced R&D teams meet these auditors, they'll educate-up how, yeah, you've got a lot of questions here, but its not that we do or don't meet them: its that they're fundamentally the wrong questions to ask; but we understand the spirit, here's how we meet the spirit, and here's how we're actually better than if we had just checked Yes on all of them.

Third example: years ago, our team was the first time our auditor had ever seen LetsEncrypt and k8s certificate-manager (then it was called kube-lego). He wanted an attestation that TLS certificates were current and not near-expiration. We countered: they can't be near-expiration, because we have automated systems which renew them. He'd never seen anything like it; he was used to expensive certificates and operations runbooks for renewal; and we nerded out for ten minutes showing it all off. Instead of documenting a runbook for renewing certificates, he documented our runbook for maintaining this automated service and ensuring uptime. Win-win.

Its a slow process, and its made even slower because there are tons of people in the industry who treat the frameworks as gospel. But, ultimately; we control the technology, not them. We decide what is secure; they just attest to it and double-check.