I work in computer security, and that is how this post came about, but it’s not really WHAT it’s about.

I’ve been thinking about the things we do to try to secure computer systems, and realised that what we’re doing is setting up minefields. It’s not a solid, impenetrable barrier to keep people out. Our access lists, file permissions, and selinux policies are more like a set of booby-traps and land-mines that we hope malicious people will bump into, so that they either cripple their attempts, or at least trigger an alert so that we know that they’re there.

But if someone is careful, clever, or lucky enough, they can still get through. And even if our tripwires trigger, if we don’t have our response prepared and ready to go, it wont help.

The only reasonable way to safeguard a system is to lock it in a safe and let no-one near it. And that makes it pretty useless. So all we can really do is to keep deploying our mines and hope they’ll catch someone.

And I think that our lives are sort of the same. No matter how organised and prepared we think we are, there are always things that can happen that we don’t expect and haven’t planned for. There is no 100% guaranteed way to make sure that things will always go the way that we want them to. We can try to be as prepared as we can, but in the end the best that we can do is to expect the unexpected, and be prepared to roll with the punches.