Journalists writing up the VEP plan today: most important revelation was enormous loophole permitting digital arms brokers to exempt (via routine NDAs used when proliferating bugs to >1 buyer) critical flaws in US infrastructure from disclosure no matter the cost to our security.
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I see; that's a valid point and I don't disagree with it. I'm not saying "I agree", either, because, honestly, I don't see how it can be improved. We can't know in advance which vulns will be stolen and published, and we can't realistically expect powerful vulns not to be kept.
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The most conservative solution is a strict limit on length of retention: if it's older than 90 days (some argue 180), it's time to roll over to a new vuln and patch the previous. When replacements can no longer be produced, that's not a loss; it means defense has finally matured.
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So NSA would mass exploit all of their target within 90 days and then "throw" away the vulnerability? That would encourage them to infect massively targets, which isn't a good option either. What do you think about that?
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Exploits aren't necessary for every target every 90 days, only for installing the original implant. Implant survive long after the exploit is dead. And don't forget NSA has far more than 1 exploit at any given time.
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Everybody, even the exploit broker (who get to sell more bugs), benefits from a faster turnover. When lazy RCEs becomes too hard, offense simply returns them to traditional mechanisms (social, proximity, supply chain, human compromise) that never stopped working.
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And the idea that NSA judiciously limits the scope of targets is simply not persuasive on the evidence: we had something close to 200,000 implants active on just the systems I could see. FBI routinely does 8000+ in one go:https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/53d4n8/fbi-hacked-over-8000-computers-in-120-countries-based-on-one-warrant …
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