It's 2015. Why do we still write insecure software?
I've read a lot of programming blogs, and if you're reading this, you probably have too. So let me tell you up-front this is not your usual security rant that boils down to "just try harder!" Let's talk about smart, experienced programmers who are trying to write secure code, even if they are not security "experts" per se. This is an important set of people, because there is more security-related software in the world to write than can be written by security experts.
In a perfect world, setting that as the target audience would conclude this essay. As your browser's scrollbar shows in the full view, this essay continues on for quite a while. Alas, decades of experience and a trained reasonably high intelligence are not sufficient to write secure software in the current coding environment.
That's also the highest amount of qualifications that can be feasibly brought to bear at any reasonable scale, so in practice that's equivalent to saying it's impossible to write secure software in the current coding environment.
Let's talk about why it's so hard. My thesis is simple:
We write insecure software because our coding environment makes it easier to write insecure software than secure software.
But exploring what it fully means can lead some surprising places. Please join me on a journey as I try to show you why that is not trivially true, but in fact, profoundly true. We do not occasionally pick up insecure tools, like a broken encryption routine or misusing a web framework; we are fish swimming in an ocean of insecurity, oblivious to how steeped in it we are.