Getting product security engineering right

Product security is an interesting animal: it is a uniquely cross-disciplinary endeavor that spans policy, consulting,
process automation, in-depth software engineering, and cutting-edge vulnerability research. And in contrast to many
other specializations in our field of expertise - say, incident response or network security - we have virtually no
time-tested and coherent frameworks for setting it up within a company of any size.

In my previous post, I shared some thoughts
on nurturing technical organizations and cultivating the right kind of leadership within. Today, I figured it would
be fitting to follow up with several notes on what I learned about structuring product security work - and about actually
making the effort count.

The "comfort zone" trap

For security engineers, knowing your limits is a sought-after quality: there is nothing more dangerous than a security
expert who goes off script and starts dispensing authoritatively-sounding but bogus advice on a topic they know very
little about. But that same quality can be destructive when it prevents us from growing beyond our most familiar role: that of
a critic who pokes holes in other people's designs.

The role of a resident security critic lends itself all too easily to a sense of supremacy: the mistaken
belief that our cognitive skills exceed the capabilities of the engineers and product managers who come to us for help
- and that the cool bugs we file are the ultimate proof of our special gift. We start taking pride in the mere act
of breaking somebody else's software - and then write scathing but ineffectual critiques addressed to executives,
demanding that they either put a stop to a project or sign off on a risk. And hey, in the latter case, they better
brace for our triumphant "I told you so" at some later date.

Of course, escalations of this type have their place, but they need to be a very rare sight; when practiced routinely, they are a telltale
sign of a dysfunctional team. We might be failing to think up viable alternatives that are in tune with business or engineering needs; we might
be very unpersuasive, failing to communicate with other rational people in a language they understand; or it might be that our tolerance for risk
is badly out of whack with the rest of the company. Whatever the cause, I've seen high-level escalations where the security team
spoke of valiant efforts to resist inexplicably awful design decisions or data sharing setups; and where product leads in turn talked about
pressing business needs randomly blocked by obstinate security folks. Sometimes, simply having them compare their notes would be enough to arrive
at a technical solution - such as sharing a less sensitive subset of the data at hand.

To be effective, any product security program must be rooted in a partnership with the rest of the company, focused on helping them get stuff done
while eliminating or reducing security risks. To combat the toxic us-versus-them mentality, I found it helpful to have some team members with
software engineering backgrounds, even if it's the ownership of a small open-source project or so. This can broaden our horizons, helping us see
that we all make the same mistakes - and that not every solution that sounds good on paper is usable once we code it up.

Getting off the treadmill

All security programs involve a good chunk of operational work. For product security, this can be a combination of product launch reviews, design consulting requests, incoming bug reports, or compliance-driven assessments of some sort. And curiously, such reactive work also has the property of gradually expanding to consume all the available resources on a team: next year is bound to bring even more review requests, even more regulatory hurdles, and even more incoming bugs to triage and fix.

Being more tractable, such routine tasks are also more readily enshrined in SDLs, SLAs, and all kinds of other official documents that are often mistaken for a mission statement that justifies the existence of our teams. Soon, instead of explaining to a developer why they should fix a particular problem right away, we end up pointing them to page 17 in our severity classification guideline, which defines that "severity 2" vulnerabilities need to be resolved within a month. Meanwhile, another policy may be telling them that they need to run a fuzzer or a web application scanner for a particular number of CPU-hours - no matter whether it makes sense or whether the job is set up right.

To run a product security program that scales sublinearly, stays abreast of future threats, and doesn't erect bureaucratic speed bumps just for the sake of it, we need to recognize this inherent tendency for operational work to take over - and we need to reign it in. No matter what the last year's policy says, we usually don't need to be doing security reviews with a particular cadence or to a particular depth; if we need to scale them back 10% to staff a two-quarter project that fixes an important API and squashes an entire class of bugs, it's a short-term risk we should feel empowered to take.

As noted in my earlier post, I find contingency planning to be a valuable tool in this regard: why not ask ourselves how the team would cope if the workload went up another 30%, but bad financial results precluded any team growth? It's actually fun to think about such hypotheticals ahead of the time - and hey, if the ideas sound good, why not try them out today?

Living for a cause

It can be difficult to understand if our security efforts are structured and prioritized right; when faced with such uncertainty, it is natural to stick to the safe fundamentals - investing most of our resources into the very same things that everybody else in our industry appears to be focusing on today.

I think it's important to combat this mindset - and if so, we might as well tackle it head on. Rather than focusing on tactical objectives and policy documents, try to write down a concise mission statement explaining why you are a team in the first place, what specific business outcomes you are aiming for, how do you prioritize it, and how you want it all to change in a year or two. It should be a fluid narrative that reads right and that everybody on your team can take pride in; my favorite way of starting the conversation is telling folks that we could always have a new VP tomorrow - and that the VP's first order of business could be asking, "why do you have so many people here and how do I know they are doing the right thing?". It's a playful but realistic framing device that motivates people to get it done.

In general, a comprehensive product security program should probably start with the assumption that no matter how many resources we have at our disposal, we will never be able to stay in the loop on everything that's happening across the company - and even if we did, we're not going to be able to catch every single bug. It follows that one of our top priorities for the team should be making sure that bugs don't happen very often; a scalable way of getting there is equipping engineers with intuitive and usable tools that make it easy to perform common tasks without having to worry about security at all. Examples include standardized, managed containers for production jobs; safe-by-default APIs, such as strict contextual autoescaping for XSS or type safety for SQL; security-conscious style guidelines; or plug-and-play libraries that take care of common crypto or ACL enforcement tasks.

Of course, not all problems can be addressed on framework level, and not every engineer will always reach for the right tools. Because of this, the next principle that I found to be worth focusing on is containment and mitigation: making sure that bugs are difficult to exploit when they happen, or that the damage is kept in check. The solutions in this space can range from low-level enhancements (say, hardened allocators or seccomp-bpf sandboxes) to client-facing features such as browser origin isolation or Content Security Policy.

The usual consulting, review, and outreach tasks are an important facet of a product security program, but probably shouldn't be the sole focus of your team. It's also best to avoid undue emphasis on vulnerability showmanship: while valuable in some contexts, it creates a hypercompetitive environment that may be hostile to less experienced team members - not to mention, squashing individual bugs offers very limited value if the same issue is likely to be reintroduced into the codebase the next day. I like to think of security reviews as a teaching opportunity instead: it's a way to raise awareness, form partnerships with engineers, and help them develop lasting habits that reduce the incidence of bugs. Metrics to understand the impact of your work are important, too; if your engagements are seen mostly as a yet another layer of red tape, product teams will stop reaching out to you for advice.

The other tenet of a healthy product security effort requires us to recognize at a scale and given enough time, every defense mechanism is bound to fail - and so, we need ways to prevent bugs from turning into incidents. The efforts in this space may range from developing product-specific signals for the incident response and monitoring teams; to offering meaningful vulnerability reward programs and nourishing a healthy and respectful relationship with the research community; to organizing regular offensive exercises in hopes of spotting bugs before anybody else does.

Oh, one final note: an important feature of a healthy security program is the existence of multiple feedback loops that help you spot problems without the need to micromanage the organization and without being deathly afraid of taking chances. For example, the data coming from bug bounty programs, if analyzed correctly, offers a wonderful way to alert you to systemic problems in your codebase - and later on, to measure the impact of any remediation and hardening work.