Box Chief Information Security Officer’s Perspective on Apple and the FBI

Joel de la Garza:

I’ve been working to help secure computer systems for the entirety of my professional career. It is incredibly difficult to build computer systems that are not vulnerable to attack. As we’ve seen, a number of companies and governments have had great difficulty protecting the front door of their computer systems. I’ve dedicated my career to making sure our systems are designed, built, and operated to the most secure standards. And even with that tremendous investment, bugs still happen. Due to the many layers of security controls built into our systems software bugs are usually not damaging or catastrophic in nature. But peeling away those layers of control to create a backdoor means that even the most basic security bug could potentially have a catastrophic effect. This reality is missing from our current debate about the FBI’s order to Apple in the San Bernardino tragedy.

★ Thursday, 3 March 2016