Anduril and Palantir Battlefield Communication System Has Flaws, Army Memo Says

Given this line from the article:

    Despite the early September memo’s scathing critique, Leonel Garciga, Army chief information officer and Chiulli’s supervisor, said in a statement to Reuters that the report was part of a process that helped in “triaging cybersecurity vulnerabilities” and mitigating them.

    Other deficiencies highlighted in the memo include the hosting of third-party applications that have not undergone Army security assessments. One application revealed 25 high-severity code vulnerabilities. Three additional applications under review each contain over 200 vulnerabilities requiring assessment, according to the document.

Especially when the cost of busted security in this context is “exceptionally grave damage.”

It is important to understand that the customers don't have a clear view of the types of access controls they want until they start field exercises. By having relatively limited access controls in the prototype, they discover in real use cases that allowing some data access which never would have occurred to them is highly valuable which can then be refined into specific types of data sharing. In a default locked down environment, these beneficial interactions would never be discovered because they can't occur. All of the ways the users access and use data in the prototypes is logged and studied.

Similarly, other types of data sharing expose real risks that can be reduced to specific scenarios developed during operational exercises. The problem with an exhaustive access control model is that it simply has too many degrees of freedom to be usable for most people.

During development, the universe of all possible uses of access control is reduced to a much simpler and more understandable model of the key data it is important to restrict and the key data it is important to share, grounded in real-world operational learnings. These models are simpler and more precise to implement, and also easier to verify the correctness of, than a default "access control all the things" approach.

We reject the notion of gating, pay-walling, or upselling core security controls like audit logging, single sign-on, and multi-factor authentication. Whether you’re a small business or a federal agency, you get access to every core enterprise security feature in our standard offering:

Mandatory encryption of all data, both in transit and at rest, that uses robust, modern cryptography standards. Strong authentication and identity protection controls, including single sign-on and multi-factor authentication. Strong authorization controls, including mandatory and discretionary access controls. Robust security audit logging for detecting and investigating potential abuse. Highly extensible information governance, management, and privacy controls to meet the needs of any use case. »

There's been no launch. It's a prototype.

There is a separate concern around denied data environments in the software realm but that is not on many people's radar. Most software devs would not know where to even start to protect systems from this.

A tension with access controls is that if you implement it to the level of granularity the most demanding parts of DoD say they want, it never actually gets used because it is too complicated for users to reason about and manage. Or worse, they make mistakes and leak data because it is complicated. A simpler model is always implemented on top of it. At the same time, fine-grained and scalable access controls impose a high operational cost in the software even if they are not being used and some parts of DoD care a lot about software performance. Many parts of DoD are realistic enough to not want to pay for access controls they'll never actually use.

On top of this, security architecture is designed to be somewhat pluggable because different users will have mutually exclusive design requirements for the security architecture. It would be nice if this wasn't the case but it is what it is.

Um, yeah, they would be communicating that it's a bad idea to put sensitive data into it. You have to make that stuff explicit, or somebody will misuse it.

I'm looking for the scandal here. Did the contractors misrepresent the prototype systems as being secure in ways they're not? Is the project behind schedule, and proper authorization controls were supposed to be implemented by now? Is the prototype system being improperly used to share sensitive data? Any of those would be concerning, but the article doesn't make any of those claims.

All I see is, a prototype version of software doesn't have all the capability that it will need when it's finished.

The impulse may be stronger in some and weaker in others, and the incentive structure at their outlet may be stronger or weaker, but all of them know, even subconsciously, what type of stories are likelier to capture attention, make $ for the outlet and hopefully return a portion of that to them. Outrage is high the list of qualities that guarantee attention.

Since learning about social media algorithms, I've come to think of all news media, even old timey newspapers, in the same light. IMO The only difference between TikTok's For You page and newspaper headlines from 200 years ago was the precision of the engagement feedback and the latency.

The reporters are extra aggressive when it involves companies with right of center founders or VCs involved. Both of these companies fit that profile.

Journos wouldn’t have to get clicks, if you people (yes, you people) would pay for journalism but no lets continue to post archive links on HN.

I’m throughly disappointed by the pampered, know-it-all tech class who continually complain about the world but refuses to make investments or engage in collective bargaining to force the tech billionaire class.

Apparently all it takes to sell one’s soul is the feeling of superiority, $150k+ wages and stock options.

The operations chosen for that purpose are selected for their limited risk if something goes wrong. DoD wants capability evaluations to be as realistic as possible even if that means taking some risks. They understand the risk/reward tradeoff.

What are they making that would intimidate China, that China doesn’t already?

Palantíri are the seeing stones.

I think this article has a good summary of Tolkien's experiences in the war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_and_Middle-earth

Example - Saruman clear cutting a good portion of Fangorn forest in order to strip mine it and produce weapons.

Paywalled article in the Atlantic on this subject

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/fall-...

Brief exerpt:

'So it makes sense, then, that the chief exponents of technology in The Lord of the Rings are a demonic figure bent on world domination (Sauron) and a wizard (Saruman). Treebeard, the Ent or tree-shepherd, says of Saruman, "He is plotting to become a Power. He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment." '