In Defense of Hacking

Whether hacking is ethical or non-ethical, it is not the whole story with security. Of course we need clever people thinking about how to break into systems. But the focus on security today is skewed far too much toward this "black hat" part of the spectrum. Instead, we need to rebalance our priorities, getting more people to think about how to build systems securely in the first place. As an analogy: One does not build sound bridges by continuously building a shoddy ones, knocking them down, and then pointing to the fact that they didn't stand up. We need to understand the root defects that make systems vulnerable and then figure out how to build systems that don't have those defects. Hackers tend not to close this loop, but instead turn to the next hack.

As example UMD efforts that try to find the right balance, check out the Build-it, Break-it, Fix-it programming contest (https://builditbreakit.org) and the IEEE Cybersecurity Development conference (http://secdev.ieee.org). I also gave a talk on this topic as part of my DST lecture, http://www.pl-enthusiast.net/2015/09/30/penetrate-and-patch-to-building-security-in/

Good thoughts of Timothy C Summers are really commendable.You are a true inspiration for the society to choose ethical hacking rather than to be motivated by fiend hackers.