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Make things better by making better things.
Guardrails are an important part of our system we’ve built.
Consumers use the guardrails as a signal to know that what they are about to engage with is safe. (Think of the pop you hear when you open a new jar of pickles.)
They’re also important to help regulate private entities.
I don’t think anyone wants to buy a cardiac defibrillator out of someone’s garage. And we don’t want the FDA to stop inspecting them anytime soon either.
Yet, even with guardrails, designs can still be flawed.
Case in point, defibrillators use an unencrypted wireless protocol that could allow an attacker to change the settings of this lifesaving device.
That’s a problem.
It’s a problem because it only takes one bad actor to misbehave and throw the whole system out of sync.
It’s worth examining the systems we have built at home.
What are the guardrails you have in place?
Who can come in and take advantage of that system by circumnavigating the guardrails?
Because despite our best efforts, despite the guardrails we put in place, there might be a bug in the system that can’t be detected.
Worth being vigilant with.