Re: Heroku early upgrade is raising serious questions

>
> I agree it's better to forego open source doctrine in the interest of
> preventing a larger evil.  If we had not given Heroku early acces and they
> got hacked then the discussion would revolve around how said hack could have
> been prevented instead.  The is decidedly a worse discussion then making
> them a special class of user.
>

I see this argument coming in various forms but still I don't understand
why Heroku is so different from other large-scale users.

Sure Heroku was quite exposed to this vulnerability because :

a- they allow port access to their database servers from untrusted
networks (see [1])

b- they don't have tools to deploy a security fix quickly. (see [2])

But these are technical choices.

I'm not judging them and I'm not saying these two problems are easy to
solve for a large-scale company. But Heroku could have done things
different and they choose not to filter the access to their servers and
they didn't build the machinery for fast security fix deployment.
Moreover they're talking about it in public so I guess these are choices
they've made and they know the consequences behind them...

--

Let's take an example and imagine an hosting company called pgCloud,
with thousand of PostgreSQL servers in their public could. pgCloud is in
competition with Heroku.

pgCloud implemented a sophisticated IP filtering system to protect their
network and they built serious security scripts to update all their
servers in less than an hour. pgCloud did this because they what to
offer the best possible level of security to their customers. Even if a
nasty zero-day exploit is released someday (God forbid!)

Building these tools and procedures did cost a lot of time and money.
But that's fine because when a PostgreSQL vulnerability is discovered,
they can keep calm and wait for the security release.

But now pgCloud has a problem : Heroku was allowed to deploy the
security fix before it went public, while they had to wait for the
security release like everyone else....

So their question is : what shoud we do ? Should we spend time and money
to build/maintain a secure postgres cloud or should we "gain trust" from
the PostgreSQL community in order to be allowed to deploy earlier ?

And what would customer choose between the two ? pgCloud has a secured
network but Heroku has early access to the fix...

--

This example is simplistic of course but I think it shows clearly why we
should stay as "neutral" as possible (I didn't say "fair") and avoid any
special treatment that would disrupt a market. Otherwise we're just
opening a big shiny pandora box.


And yes I am aware that a company can have both : a secure network AND
trust from the community. But if I were sarcastic, I'd say that right
now the best security strategy for a large scale cloud provider is to
set unrestricted access to all their servers, don't bother with update
scripts and ask the community for early access because they're so exposed.



[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5493353
[2]
https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2013/4/4/heroku_postgres_databases_patched