I feel that it's not such a clear distinction between whackamole bug fixing and systematic security engineering. For instance, he uses an example of recurring security vulnerabilities in Chromium: a DCHECK violation again and again and again.
However, DCHECK is a Chromium assertion used to defensively check invariants. In other words, it's an example of the invariant-based security engineering, which he contrasts with the whackamole approach.
Just to be clear, I think he has a point and I enjoyed reading it---but the problems we're saddled with won't disappear in a flash of enlightenment.
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I feel that it's not such a clear distinction between whackamole bug fixing and systematic security engineering. For instance, he uses an example of recurring security vulnerabilities in Chromium: a DCHECK violation again and again and again. However, DCHECK is a Chromium assertion used to defensively check invariants. In other words, it's an example of the invariant-based security engineering, which he contrasts with the whackamole approach. Just to be clear, I think he has a point and I enjoyed reading it---but the problems we're saddled with won't disappear in a flash of enlightenment.