As the year wrap's up, let's run through some of the worst public security mistakes and delays in fixes by AWS in 2020. A thread.

First, that time when an AWS employee posted confidential AWS customer information including including AWS access keys for those customer accounts to github.
https://t.co/3Y7vgOwDtV
Discovery by @SpenGietz that you can disable CloudTrail without triggering GuardDuty by using cloudtrail:PutEventSelectors to filter all events. https://t.co/pR4TzI5xHV
Amazon launched their bug bounty, but specifically excluded AWS, which has no bug bounty. https://t.co/bPSw6GbnoV
Repeated, over and over again examples of AWS having no change control over their Managed IAM policies, including the mistaken release of CheesepuffsServiceRolePolicy, AWSServiceRoleForThorInternalDevPolicy, AWSCodeArtifactReadOnlyAccess.json, AmazonCirrusGammaRoleForInstaller.
The worst IAM policy mistake came later in the year with ReadOnlyAccess purging all of its privileges to replace them with read/write access to cassandra. https://t.co/YI4Y32UPAR
Kesten shows a flaw in how many vendors use IAM roles. Although not technically a mistake by AWS (shared responsibility blah blah blah), this is something AWS is entirely capable of identifying and pushing vendors to correct, but did nothing. https://t.co/8KSZegSKqn
AWS finally fixed a deficiency in the Route 53 and VPC APIs where if an attacker rerouted traffic via private hosted zones, you would not be able to audit for it. I list this here because this deficiency existed for 6 years! https://t.co/n3tnxEH1Lt
XSS on the web console. This issue was reported and fixed a few years ago but never disclosed until this year. https://t.co/6LksOQkXLw
Discovery that in the terms and conditions of AWS, when using machine learning services, AWS will use your data to improve their services and move that data outside of the regions you put it in. This was added to the terms in late 2017 but not noticed. https://t.co/kZd8s4yCZc
Crypto vulns found in AWS SDKs by Google employee @SchmiegSophie
https://t.co/D8w7mtR5yV
AWS finally provides a fix for the HTTP desync issues that had been reported to them almost a year prior https://t.co/8tXOoFArw3 and https://t.co/9hXvh6dEZh
AWS released CloudTrail Insights as a separate service, instead of integrating that functionality into GuardDuty. https://t.co/Z2TCcl9bpI 🍕🍕
AWS continues to make a mess of their managed IAM policies, creating AWS_Config_Role, AWS_ConfigRole, AWSConfigRole and AWSConfigServiceRolePolicy, along with 3 versions of AmazonMachineLearningRoleforRedshiftDataSource https://t.co/aK4c6ZVmYj https://t.co/Dao9JuXydU
Aiden manages to gain access to an AWS account run by AWS for one of their services where he was then able to see credentials to gain access to AWS customer accounts. This is IMHO the most epic issue of the year for AWS. https://t.co/qucuKEzNd3
Karim does a security audit of an AWS project, that points out enough issues that AWS deprecates the project. https://t.co/jBLzEMJ5KX
Another Google employee continues the trend of doing free work for AWS by finding more crypto issues: https://t.co/cjUV54g5ZE
Ian finds tagging privileges are not properly enforced by AWS calling into question the ability to use ABAC as a security boundary. https://t.co/buuMhoQjL5
Nick discovers a trick to test whether you have access to about 40 services without that testing being logged by CloudTrail. https://t.co/KJEjoiGuPm
AWS rolls out a new S3 web console which unfortunately once again allows people to set the "AuthenticatedUsers" ACL, which they haven't had in the console since 2017 because it is always misunderstood and wrong. https://t.co/VmKWySZtwE
AWS released their SOC 2 Type 2 for April-Sep 2020, with concerning issues in it. Unfortunately you aren't allowed to discuss these reports, but the issues are on page 120 and 121.
That wraps things up. Let's hope AWS figures out wtf they are doing with IAM managed policies next year.

End.

More from Software

The Great Software Stagnation is real, but we have to understand it to fight it. The CAUSE of the TGSS is not "teh interwebs". The cause is the "direct manipulation" paradigm : the "worst idea in computer science" \1


Progress in CS comes from discovering ever more abstract and expressive languages to tell the computer to do something. But replacing "tell the computer to do something in language" with "do it yourself using these gestures" halts that progress. \2

Stagnation started in the 1970s after the first GUIs were invented. Every genre of software that gives users a "friendly" GUI interface, effectively freezes progress at that level of abstraction / expressivity. Because we can never abandon old direct manipulation metaphors \3

The 1990s were simply the point when most people in the world finally got access to a personal computer with a GUI. So that's where we see most of the ideas frozen. \4

It's no surprise that the improvements @jonathoda cites, that are still taking place are improvements in textual representation : \5
buffalo uses dominion scoreboard software so not really


DEAD PEOPLE SCORED FOR BUFFALO!

A truck delivered off a suitcase full of points at halftime from Canada for Buffalo.

#StopTheSteel !!!!

I’ll be submitting sworn affidavits from Steelers fans than they saw the Buffalo rigging the game but I want to emphasize that I’m not under oath.
🚨 🦮 Seven ways to test for accessibility using only what is already in browser developer tools of Chromium browsers https://t.co/C7kdbigHGE

@MSEdgeDev @EdgeDevTools @ChromiumDev
#tools #accessibility #browsers
Also, a thread: 👇🏼


Issues pane, powered by @webhintio, listing accessibility issues with explanations why these are problems, links to more info and direct links to the tools where to fix the problem.
https://t.co/4K5RynHhbg


The inspect element overlay showing accessibility relevant information of the element, including contrast information, ARIA name, role and if it can be focused via keyboard.


Colour picker with contrast information offering colours that are AA/AAA compliant. You can also see compliant colours indicated by a line on the colour patch.
Note: the current algorithm fails to take font weight into consideration, that's why there will be a new one.


Vision deficit ("colour blindness") emulation. You can see what your product looks like for different visitors.
https://t.co/bxj1vySCAb
Developer productivity, y'all. It is a three TRILLION dollar opportunity, per the stripe report.

Eng managers and directors, we have got to stop asking for "more headcount" and start treating this like the systems problem that it is. https://t.co/XJ0CkFdgiO


If you are getting barely more than 50% productivity out of your very expensive engineers, I can pretty much guarantee you cannot hire your way out of this resourcing issue. 😐

(the stripe report is here:

Say you've got a strategic initiative that 3 engineers to build and support it. Well, they're going to be swimming in the same muddy pipeline as everyone else at ~50%, so you're actually gotta source, hire and train 6, er make that 7 (gonna need another manager too now)...

...which actually understates the problem, because each person you add also adds friction and overhead to the system. Communication, coordination all get harder and processes get more complex and elaborate, etc.

So we could hire 7 people, or we could patch up our sociotechnical system to lose say only 25% productivity to tech debt, instead of 42%? 🤔

By my calculations, that would reclaim 3 engineers worth of capacity given a team of just 17-18 people.

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