The Most Secure Option

"The auditors have finished examining our codebase."

That was how Randy's boss started the meeting, and she delivered the line like a doctor who just got the tests back, and is trying to break the news gently.

After someone in another department did the whole "I found a thumb drive in the parking lot, let me plug it into my work laptop!" thing, management realized that they hadn't done any kind of security evaluation in years, and brought in a bunch of highly paid consultants to evaluate their practices. Part of that meant doing audits of their software portfolio for compliance with the new security standards.

Now, Randy's boss was running a cross-functional meeting- developers, operations, and even a few support desk representatives, to review the audit results. Most of the hits they took on the audit were the kind of slipshod stuff that accrues over years of under-budgeted, over-specced projects. Passwords stored in source control. A few SQL injection vulns. But the one that seemed like an easy win was the fact that they didn't use any SSL on their web applications.

"Oh, we should be able to fix that, easy," Randy said.

"Oh, we should, should we?" Benny, the sysadmin said. He leaned over the table, with his hands clasped. "How many SSL certs have you provisoned?"

"Well, a bunch, I've-"

"Because I have, and it's no walk in the park, and it's very expensive."

Randy blinked, and glanced over at his boss. She didn't have anything to add.

"That's" not true?" Randy said. "It's not that expensive to buy a cert, but we can also go with LetsEncrypt, which is free."

"Ah ha!" Benny said. "It's very expensive to do it right. You can't just use some service from the Internet. We're here to talk about our security audit, and using LetsEncrypt is not possible. Anything hosted externally and accessible via the Internet poses a huge organizational risk. Free SSL from the Internet is an easy target for a hacker."

"Right," Randy's boss said. "We'll table this for now, but it looks like we probably won't add SSL until we have a better sense of the costs."

"My advice is that we don't use SSL at all," Benny said. "That will be more secure than what Randy's proposing."

The audit happened early this year. No one has yet formulated a plan to move to SSL.

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