[HN Gopher] We installed a single turnstile to feel secure
___________________________________________________________________
We installed a single turnstile to feel secure
Author : firefoxd
Score : 245 points
Date : 2026-02-22 21:07 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (idiallo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (idiallo.com)
| CoffeeOnWrite wrote:
| Allegations of security theater should start with discussing the
| threat model. This is just somebody complaining about a crappy
| key card system.
| ableal wrote:
| To be fair, he was pointing out that the invisible "credentials
| in cookies" issue was much harder to get fixed:
|
| _The turnstiles were visible. They were expensive. They
| disrupted everyone 's day and made headlines in company-wide
| emails. Management could point to them and say that we're
| taking security seriously. Meanwhile, thousands of employees
| had their Jira credentials stored in cookies. A vulnerability
| that could expose our entire project management system. But
| that fix required documentation, vendor approval, a month of
| convincing people it mattered. A whole lot of begging._
| CoffeeOnWrite wrote:
| Again, not security theater. Signs of general dysfunction
| yes. Embarrassing. Fun to tease about for sure.
|
| Aside: the more times I re-read the article the more annoyed
| I am with the self-righteous tone. It feels like the author
| is mimicking the style of legendary Usenet posts, but the
| story just isn't that interesting and the writing not that
| witty, it falls flat.
| mcbits wrote:
| The writing is clearly AI-generated or at least AI-
| assisted, so I think it's safe to assume it's also a work
| of fiction.
| leephillips wrote:
| I'll take your word for that. I don't know how to tell.
| But I did notice that the writing was conspicuously
| terrible throughout. Entire sentences make no sense, such
| as "I'd slip in suspiciously while they contemplated the
| email that clearly said not to let anyone in with your
| own card."
| mcbits wrote:
| The last two paragraphs are mainly what stood out. I've
| spent hours trying to get LLMs to stop writing like that.
| It's hard because you can't just say things like "don't
| write lists of three items" because sometimes you want a
| list of three items. The rest of the text could be
| written by a person as it's kind of disjointed, but that
| could also be the result of trying to prompt out the AI-
| isms.
| Rapzid wrote:
| Turnstiles aren't theater and Redis doesn't make password
| storage secure so the entire thing seems a little el-el-
| emish..
|
| But what about that sentence does that not make sense?
| They are describing tailgating..
| leephillips wrote:
| It doesn't make sense as a whole. But, for example, what
| was he suspicious of?
| Rapzid wrote:
| "I'd slip in suspiciously" means the "slipping in" was
| suspicious.
| leephillips wrote:
| You sure? I wasn't.
|
| "John regarded Mary suspiciously"
|
| "Sharon suspected her husband of cheating. She looked
| through his emails suspiciously."
| tczMUFlmoNk wrote:
| It can mean either. "Suspicious behavior" doesn't mean
| that the behavior thinks that you've done something
| wrong.
|
| "She's suspicious" can mean either that I suspect her
| intentions or that she suspects someone else's
| intentions.
| summermusic wrote:
| If it isn't outright fake it's at least embellished. It
| even has the "and then everyone clapped" line!
| Apreche wrote:
| I've been to many very large office buildings with turnstile
| systems, and I have never seen any kind of line, even during the
| busiest hours. Yes, they are security theater to a large extent,
| but they do legitimately help to make the elevators run a lot
| more efficiently.
| hinkley wrote:
| I've only worked two places as big as OP described, but you
| probably see this more when your company leases a third of a
| floor on a giant office building. Or a floor and a half, or two
| half floors because it was easier to expand onto the 12th
| floor.
|
| Elevators do back up, especially when everyone has to scan for
| their floor. Not like the author suggests, but you can lose a
| good few minutes a couple times a day that way. It does start
| some people on an exercise kick of using the stairwell to leave
| the building. Not great exercise though.
|
| The one place solved this by not building parking garages. Flat
| parking that went to the horizon. By the time I got to work the
| spot I parked at was going to be over half a mile from my desk.
| I bought a grownup scooter with oversized wheels, first day I
| used it security tracked me down and said those aren't allowed
| on company property (I had half a mind to use it on the
| sidewalks around the outside of the property but didn't, since
| I'd still be carrying the stupid thing into the building). But
| I spent a lot on that scooter and had no other use for it, so I
| was mad.
|
| My coworker had convinced me that this was billable hours
| (court precedent about a factory that had a bad setup for
| employees to get to the time clock) so I started phoning into
| standup when I was on site but still eight minutes from my
| desk.
|
| When you're walking half a mile to the security doors it tends
| to stagger the arrival times. Which is a feature, if the
| dumbest one.
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| There is nothing here that really tells us the turnstile was
| security theatre? Or the various key card swipes.
|
| There are many ways to skin a cat; and there are many ways to
| ensure authenticated / trusted access. If you have site wide
| security gates, it means you know everyone on site / on a given
| floor conforms to a given minimal security or trust level, so now
| you can conduct operations in that area with more freedom. This
| makes the risk assessments for other actions so much simpler.
| e.g. Now when the apprentice IT tech leaves the SLT's laptop
| trolley in the corridor it doesn't trigger a reflash of all of
| the machines. Or when a key individual misplaces their keyfob
| (e.g. in the kitchen) it doesn't trigger a lockdown of core
| systems, because they had it on the way in and its reasonable to
| trust that nobody stole it.
|
| Obviously the implementation was botched in this case - but "feel
| secure" and "security theatre" are right as often as they are
| wrong.
| mikeryan wrote:
| It also doesn't describe any of the _why_ the additional
| security measures were put in place. It sounds arbitrary, but
| could be an insurance or regulatory requirement that the
| acquiring company needed to meet. Similar for the login issue,
| it's suboptimal but what constraints caused that solution to be
| put in place? And why wasn't it fixed?
|
| Sans context there's not a lot to complain about here.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Card readers in elevators are theater though. You would need
| separate vestibules to actually secure entry via elevator.
| That's why most buildings have those.
| XorNot wrote:
| Are they? The goal isn't to draw a hard boundary it's to
| create layered defenses which increase the difficulty and
| reduce opportunity.
|
| If instead of open access you need to tailgate on a limited
| set of employees, that increases difficulty considerably and
| makes the opportunity much less common.
|
| Real security analysis works this way: you don't assume you
| can build a wall which is never breached.
| kuhaku22 wrote:
| > Obviously the implementation was botched in this case
|
| The long wait times could easily have been fixed by staggering
| employee start times. You could even optimize it per
| building/floor. Sadly, a lot of bureaucrats lack the
| imagination to do simple stuff like this. (Anyone with a
| desperate need to have 9 am meetings would just have to suck it
| up)
| mystifyingpoi wrote:
| > staggering employee start times
|
| Immediately reminds me of Severance.
| heytakeiteasy wrote:
| Security theater, perhaps. Don't underestimate the degree to
| which those turnstiles were intended to serve the purpose of
| tracking employees' movements.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| Those turnstiles were inefficient (slowed legitimate users down),
| but not security theater (they really blocked unauthorized
| access.)
| hamdingers wrote:
| I worked at a company that had effectively no physical security
| during work hours until the _second_ time someone came in during
| lunch and stole an armload of laptops.
|
| Then we got card readers and a staffed front desk, and discovered
| our snack budget was too high because people from other companies
| on other floors were coming to ours for snacks too.
|
| I never felt the office was insecure, except in retrospect once
| it was actually secure.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| How the fuck nobody notices some randoms coming to steal snacks
| in the first place ?
| mystifyingpoi wrote:
| I work at a company of ~200 people and I already don't
| recognize everyone. Seeing an unknown face, I just assume
| they are from some distant team that I never had to interact
| with, say hi and move on.
| kjs3 wrote:
| We have nearly a 1000 people in my building. I don't track
| every rando that walks by, nor reasonably could I.
| hamdingers wrote:
| ~400 person company spread across a few floors, but only one
| kitchen. It wasn't weird for people you didn't recognize to
| come off the elevator and get snacks to take back to their
| floor.
| bombcar wrote:
| There's a huge difference between a company with its own
| building, and a company that shares a building in some way
| with other companies.
|
| Many I've seen have it setup so that if you get past the
| security guard at the lobby, you effectively had full reign
| of the entire building, including many companies that
| wouldn't lock the doors or common areas.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I worked somewhere with a few hundred employees across 3
| floors. If someone wearing business casual walked onto our
| floor I would have no idea if they worked for us or not.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| What year was that? I was at a startup from 2010 onward and I'm
| pretty sure we had physical keys until about twelve people and
| after that it was straight to badges. There was never a time
| where you could just walk in.
| hamdingers wrote:
| Late 2010s. We actually did have badges but the doors were
| only locked outside work hours, so nobody carried them.
|
| The thief had to walk past a security desk in the lobby, take
| the elevator up to our floor, walk past a front desk to the
| kitchen, then open a door to get to the office area. Probably
| sounded like enough layers for whoever was in charge of
| security at the time, but both desks were frequently
| unoccupied during lunch.
|
| I know we had cameras too, but I never got updates on the
| investigation. I suspect it was an employee at one of the
| other companies in our building.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Interesting. I feel like most places still make you badge
| into the doors during business hours, and even specifically
| encourage not permitting tailgating, sometimes tied to a
| purported safety concern around being able to know who is
| in the building in an emergency... though honestly at most
| shops I bet no one has any idea how to get a report like
| "everyone who has badged in in since 6am this morning".
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I once lived in Singapore for a while and we were all sure that
| nobody would steal anything anyway, so we just never bothered
| to lock the doors. (That was also very helpful if you wanted to
| stop for a quick coffee with a date in the middle of the
| night.) You could see the MacBooks from the street, but nothing
| ever went missing. I don't know what exactly it was, but
| Singapore felt incredibly safe and crime-free.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| >I don't know what exactly it was, but Singapore felt
| incredibly safe and crime-free.
|
| The extreme punishments for breaking the law might have
| something to do with it.
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| I don't think it explains everything.
|
| I think social norms have a lot to do with it. It's like
| the actual social costs of being the one who broke the
| social trust is so high it dissuades people.
|
| It worked for me on a lower level. Everyone cut queues and
| will grab an empty seat if it looks available at a packed
| restaurant here so I do it too but I never did that when I
| lived in Singapore because I knew that's not how things
| work there and people would genuinely be mad at me for
| doing it.
|
| It's like a self-fulfilling, self-improving environment.
| Same with Japan and cleanliness.
|
| State provided housing for most and a booming economy with
| low unemployment must help too.
| wredcoll wrote:
| > The extreme punishments for breaking the law might have
| something to do with it.
|
| Historically speaking, this is almost never true. People
| _constantly_ think the solution is crueler punishments and
| we have hundreds of years of records of what happens.
| hamdingers wrote:
| People who commit crimes generally do not think they will
| be caught and therefore the punishment is of no concern
| to them. The better way to deter crime[1] is to convince
| more the public that people who commit crimes are caught.
| Preferably by actually catching people who commit crimes.
|
| 1. aside from the obviously effective but difficult to
| implement deterrent of meeting everyone's physical needs
| stevage wrote:
| Wait, explain the quick coffee bit? You'd let yourself into a
| random person's house to make coffee?
| landgenoot wrote:
| I think it's the coffee machine at the office
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I used to accumulate a pile of change on my desk from buying
| coffees.
|
| Never got touched across about a hundred different offices
| around Australia (I'm a consultant).
|
| Except once: the pile was replaced by a $50 note and a hand
| written apology saying the guilty party needed change for the
| parking lot machine. I had less than $30 there in coins so...
| profit!
| 3rodents wrote:
| Twitch had badged entry and still managed to have a couple of
| incidents in which people walked in off the street to steal
| laptops. No snack theft though, thankfully some things are
| sacred.
| amluto wrote:
| Turnstiles have a genuine security benefit compared to door and
| elevator security: convincing people not to let their coworkers
| in the door or up the elevator is difficult because the actual
| request ("close the door behind you, this blocking the friendly
| person trying to go through, so their scan their card") is
| genuinely obnoxious. But a turnstile really does fundamentally
| let one person through, even if it's easy to bypass.
| Izkata wrote:
| And then there's full-body turnstiles. Ugly, but good luck
| bypassing that.
| TYPE_FASTER wrote:
| Put on a UPS/FedEx uniform, put somebody in a box, and drop
| them off at receiving.
| XorNot wrote:
| So they can die from dehydration while we spend 3 days
| trying to figure out who ordered the weird coffin sized box
| no ones coming to claim?
| Liftyee wrote:
| Lift (elevator) sidenote: there are fancy well designed ones
| where the turnstile communicates what floor you need to go to to
| the lift, and a "destination dispatch" system assigns/batches
| groups of passengers with similar/same destinations to the same
| lift car to improve efficiency.
| robomartin wrote:
| Interesting. I have worked in ITAR environments with serious
| security and have never experienced 30 minute lines at the door.
| In fact, I can't remember lines at all. Hard to understand what
| happened here.
|
| Was it really a single turnstile for a building with over 10
| floors? That's kind of silly, isn't it? Mass transit operations
| have this figured out. Most recently for me, taking the monorail
| in Las Vegas for the CES show. No problems for the most part. It
| would be interesting to know what this company actually
| installed.
| wildzzz wrote:
| I don't see how any of this wasn't already a problem. In the
| story, everyone shows up to the office at the same time, how
| did they use to work out the elevator issue? This story has a
| bunch of AI telltales so I doubt it's real anyway.
| TYPE_FASTER wrote:
| In the story, they implemented table (building) and row
| (floor) level permissions simultaneously. So you had to swipe
| into the building, then in the elevator to get the elevator
| to stop at your floor.
|
| I guess I could see contention possibly happening as
| described if everybody arrived almost simultaneously and both
| swiping points had very high latency. But why not keep the
| door checkpoints armed and disable the elevator swipes? That
| makes me think it's a contrived example.
| jez wrote:
| As others have mentioned, it comes down to the threat model, but
| sometimes the threat model itself is uncomfortable to talk about.
|
| It's sad to think about, but in my recollection a lot of intra-
| building badge readers went up in response to the 2018 active
| shooter situation at the YouTube HQ[1]. In cases like this, the
| threat model is "confine a hostile person to a specific part of
| the building once they've gotten in while law enforcement
| arrives," less than preventing someone from coat tailing their
| way into the building at all.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16748529
| nine_k wrote:
| If forced partition of a building were the primary goal, that
| goal could be achieved without badges. Or, at least, without
| having to badge into every door. Just have locks on every door
| that are normally disengaged, but which can be locked remotely
| and promptly.
|
| (While at it, I once worked on an access control system. It was
| aeons ago; the system ran under OS/2. We installed it on a
| factory. It worked well, until we ran it in demo mode under
| production load, that is, the stream of morning shift turnstile
| registration events. The DB melted. I solved the problem
| trivially: I noticed that the DB was installed on a FAT volume
| for unknown reasons, so I moved it to an HPFS volume, and
| increased the RAM cache for the disk to maximum. Everything
| worked without a hitch then.)
| avidiax wrote:
| This actually exposes how this type of system is just
| security theater usually.
|
| A shooter can get a badge. Most partitions aren't bulletproof
| (and probably don't have security film), and a shooter
| doesn't fear getting a cut on some tempered glass.
|
| The thing that would be effective is 24/7 security monitoring
| with a building lockdown and reinforced entrances/partitions.
| Of course, the victims whose badges were disabled during
| lockdown will sue.
|
| So instead, just install badge readers and say that
| "something was done".
| hinkley wrote:
| Shooters tend to be mentally ill people who have been
| pushed too far by a system, trying to burn that system
| down.
|
| Killing a boss with a keycard that opens everything might
| not just be possible but also preferable. Fuck you Tom, you
| made me work through memaw's funeral
| tetha wrote:
| One uncomfortable, but wise truth is: Actual security is
| bound to the number of minutes until people with big guns
| arrive. A lot of other measures just exist to bridge time
| and limit damages until that happens.
|
| We learned this during a funny situation when a customer
| sent us the wrong question set for vendors. We were asked
| to clarify our plans for example for an armed intrusion by
| an armed, hostile force to seize protected assets from us.
| After some discussion, we answered the equivalent of "Uh
| Sir. This is a software company. We would surrender and try
| to call the cops".
|
| During some laughter from the customer they told us, the
| only part missing from that answer was the durability
| rating of our safes and secure storages for assets, of
| which we had none, because they just had to last until cops
| or reinforcements arrived. That was a silly day.
| avidiax wrote:
| > Actual security is bound to the number of minutes until
| people with big guns arrive
|
| Ask the people of Uvalde, TX about that security model.
| Macha wrote:
| I doubt these card readers would prevent someone leaving the
| part of their building they're in, as that's a lesson written
| in charred corpses and was a foundational aspect of health and
| safety becoming a thing:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...
|
| In theory it might prevent access to other buildings, but
| equally often the card readers are around doors of mostly
| standard glass or near internal windows of the same.
|
| So if that's the motivation, it doesn't seem like a
| particularly effective mitigation
| mikey_p wrote:
| Or the Victoria Hall disaster (183 dead), or Cocoanut Grove
| (492 dead), or The Station Nightclub (100 dead), or The
| Beverly Hills Supper Club (165 dead), or.....
|
| Also in what world is a badge reader going to contain an
| armed gunman unless the walls, floors, doors, and windows are
| also bulletproof??
|
| (Triangle shirtwaist fire resulted in 146 dead)
| XorNot wrote:
| Theres footage online of a basic security door stopping an
| armed robber from escaping despite him trying to shoot the
| lock.
|
| Bullets aren't universal door openers, and shooting your
| way through one lock doesn't magically unlock the next one.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| And the bullets and time spent getting through the door
| are bullets and time that aren't used harming the people
| behind that door.
| yannyu wrote:
| If an active shooter is the anticipated threat, how does a
| turnstile effectively stop that? Many of these turnstiles are
| specifically meant to allow people through in emergencies, and
| aren't strong enough to withstand bullets or even a sturdy
| kick. The elevator restrictions would be a better chokepoint,
| but as the article noted they didn't turn those back on.
| hinkley wrote:
| Many turnstiles can be jumped over. In this case it's more
| about preventing theft and espionage.
|
| I knew someone years and years ago who worked as an assistant
| to lawyers. The firm had a second office in the state
| capital, turns out someone was walking in and stealing
| laptops. I think they had done it three times the last I had
| heard.
|
| Lawyer laptops going missing is a problem. I don't know how
| they ended up fixing that.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > Lawyer laptops going missing is a problem.
|
| It shouldn't be. If there was a particular profession that
| I would expect to properly secure their devices lawyers
| would be near the top of the list.
| gosub100 wrote:
| It doesn't effectively stop it, but it forces them to give up
| some element of surprise. They have to either start the
| attack or start a trespassing action that will initiate
| contact with police.
| hinkley wrote:
| No, the model there is something bad happened, we must do
| something. This is something, so we will do it.
|
| I'm not saying that to diminish the value of the actual
| solution, but what the people want is literally something to
| make them feel better about a situation that is mostly out of
| their control.
|
| Someone showed up to their workplace with a fucking gun. And
| now they have to go there every day, and hope it doesn't happen
| again. They want and need the theater.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is exactly it - most "security" isn't really built
| around actual threat models, nor is it ever verified. IT
| security is perhaps the weirdest in the world in that the
| security of your web server will be constantly probed, whilst
| your front door could go your entire lifetime and never be
| probed once.
|
| Where people actually _care_ about physical security, they
| develop things that do actually _work_ ; and often are so
| unobtrusive you never realize they're there.
|
| Security _theater_ necessitates that it be showy and in your
| face.
| XorNot wrote:
| Except a decent part of security is literally just
| deterrence.
|
| Will my front door stop someone robbing my house if they
| want to? No: I have sidelight windows you could just smash
| them and come through.
|
| But the one time a house I was in got robbed, it was
| because we left the front door open and went out.
|
| Which is odd if you think about it right? Statistically an
| open front door rather implies someone is home, not away so
| it's a terrible targeting priority - but our house was
| targeted and not say, our neighbors who also wouldn't have
| been home that day.
|
| People are quick to claim security theater, talk about
| threat models, but equally ignore them anyway.
| bombcar wrote:
| The "I don't have to run faster than the bear; just
| faster than you".
| MrJobbo wrote:
| Hand out weapons to the workers?
| bombcar wrote:
| Places that _really do_ care about security do exactly that.
| Military bases routinely prohibit on-duty soldiers from
| carrying arms - except the guards at the gate and the
| military police.
| nine_k wrote:
| This text is another reminder about the fact that as
| organizations grow, they become more and more dysfunctional. They
| function despite that, because the economies of scale are
| apparently still larger than the loss of functionality due to the
| increased size.
|
| Humans' most important achievement is the ability to create
| structures larger than the Dunbar number. But this is not
| achieved for free.
|
| (And this is another reason why I strive to work at startups more
| than at huge corporations.)
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| Many years ago I was doing due diligence on a point of sale
| hardware company, I had to head up to an acquisition they had
| done. People bitched and moaned about the level of physical
| security added, and when I asked them why they were so upset,
| they told me to go to the loading dock in the back.
|
| The loading dock was kept completely open "because it's hot and
| we don't have A/C back here!".
| chihuahua wrote:
| Amazon is pretty serious about physical access security. Even
| back in 2002, you had to scan your badge while a security guard
| watches, to check if you are the same person as the badge
| picture.
|
| The same guard also checked if your dog was registered (I think
| my dog got a badge with his picture, although I think that was
| just for fun, and not functional)
|
| And no easy ability to enter through side doors - you couldn't
| open a side door with your badge. At the time, you could still
| lurk outside a side door until someone else opens the door to
| exit. Eventually (11 years later) they locked all the side doors
| because they noticed people doing this sort of thing.
|
| More recently, I think you have to scan your badge to leave so
| they can even track how long you're in the building, and know
| when you're supposed to work on site but you were there only long
| enough to have a coffee and then went home to continue working
| from home. This last part is second-hand knowledge since I
| haven't work there in a long time.
| xvedejas wrote:
| > they locked all the side doors
|
| And this didn't get them in trouble with the fire marshal?
| malfist wrote:
| Amazon employees can just use all the ...water... bottles
| they keep around their workstation to put out the fires.
| kuhaku22 wrote:
| > Additionally, the weapon is not limited to offensive use,
| as it can be used to extinguish afterburn on oneself and
| teammates
|
| https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Jarate
| amethyst wrote:
| If it's anything like Facebook, the side entrances (which
| always had guards sitting by them anyways) were all converted
| to alarmed fire exits. So the fire marshal would still be
| happy, but it was far less convenient for employees.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| Instead of locking they could alarm when opened. Slap a big
| "Emergency exit only, alarm will sound" sticker on it & link
| it into the pull alarm system. Treat opening the door without
| an emergency the same as pulling a fire alarm without an
| emergency.
| dheera wrote:
| I won't miss the days I had to take a full day of meetings from
| my car in the Amazon parking lot because there weren't enough
| meeting rooms onsite, but the badge swipes at the main entrance
| in-between meetings were needed to not be labeled as an
| "inconsistent badger".
|
| It was laughable how much effort and money Amazon invested into
| badge tracking and enforcement instead of directing funds at
| making the office a nice place that people would want to spend
| time in and an efficient place to get work done.
| class3shock wrote:
| This is the opposite of security theater. It was an apparently an
| implementation of security with issues but restricting physical
| access, both for people and vehicles, is absolutely a real
| improvement to security.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Funny. We had a security guard that had memorized all the faces
| of the employees. If he knew you he'd buzz you through. If he
| didn't know you you'd have to be vouched for by someone that he
| did know or by showing your credentials. By day #3 he'd know you,
| and he also somehow knew when you were no longer with the
| company.
|
| There never was a line and there were 1400 people in those
| buildings.
|
| I never realized how incredibly that guy's contribution was but
| this story made it perfectly clear.
|
| Also, I don't actually buy the story as related here. It would
| seem to me that within minutes of that queue building up the
| turnstiles + card system would be disabled because something
| clearly was not working.
| hughw wrote:
| Also... three buildings with 13 storeys? With all the trouble
| builders go to to avoid 13th floors.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| I'm not really sure what the point of this article is. Yes,
| obviously, you need to implement systems that are secure and
| performant so that you don't get a backed-up line of people
| waiting an hour just to get into the office in the morning. But
| that's a notably flawed rollout; millions of employees go into
| badge-in-required offices every day without issue. And it's kind
| of hard to imagine running a large office while lacking such
| basic physical security as "keep unauthorized people out of the
| building". Having electronic badges and readers is table stakes.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Yeah, it got very strong "hello, I'm from the internet and this
| meatspace thing you are doing is _wrong_ " vibes.
| Rapzid wrote:
| I thought the point is store your passwords in Redis because
| it's WebSecure.
| mdavid626 wrote:
| I feel the same way. Once I worked with junior developer, who was
| really eager to develop stuff. He was tasked to create a
| development environment, where we can tests features. Nothing
| fancy, just some scripts and simple containers.
|
| He used copies of the production database, but forgot to set the
| admin password. The machine in ec2, public on the internet.
|
| It was fixed few weeks later. But the connection still doesn't
| use SSL, sends passwords plain text.
|
| Yeah, he doesn't really like criticism about his work...
|
| I always think about the phrase:
|
| "Security is our highest priority"
|
| Sure.
| firefoxd wrote:
| Author here. I posted this on Sunday for a light read, but I
| guess it got traction today.
|
| Based on the comments I see here, I think the focus is going on
| the turnstiles just as it did when I worked there. While the
| cookie credentials are pushed aside. I think that's the security
| theater. We are worried about supposed active shooters, different
| physical threats while a backdoor to the company is left wide
| open. The turnstiles are not useless, they give an active record
| of who is in the building, and stop unauthorized people. But they
| also give so much comfort that we neglect the other types of
| threats.
| horeszko wrote:
| Perhaps part of the problem is that an active shooter is easy
| to visualize and understand whereas unsecured credentials
| stored in cookies are an abstract and difficult to visualize
| problem for management.
|
| Furthermore, turnstiles are easy to promote and take credit
| for. Secure web authentication would have to be explained to
| and understood by the boss's boss before credit for it could be
| claimed.
|
| I suspect it's these aspects of organizational reality that
| results in security theater.
| margalabargala wrote:
| I think it has less to do with ease of visualization and more
| to do with priority of consequences.
|
| Do a poll of whether people would prefer that a mass shooting
| or a mass data breach occur at their place of work while they
| are there. I bet I know which one wins.
| kristianp wrote:
| The majority of commenters don't actually read the article, or
| at least not the whole thing.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I don't think you could take over the company with a jira
| token. Another factor for consideration with turnstiles is
| disability access and fire egress. Those are covered by
| building code but since this is a parable, it's worth noting
| that physical security has often caused tragic stampedes that
| have killed many.
| latexr wrote:
| > Based on the comments I see here, I think the focus is going
| on the turnstiles just as it did when I worked there.
|
| You titled the piece after the turnstiles and spent the
| overwhelming majority of the post talking about them (and
| surrounding physical features). The Jira ticket felt secondary,
| and when it was introduced in the middle of the post I was
| genuinely confused, thinking why the heck the card system was
| contacting Jira.
|
| People reading your writing are going to focus on whatever you
| did when you wrote it. The turnstiles read like the important
| part.
| margalabargala wrote:
| The part about Jira is important because it highlights that
| while the company _claims_ to take security seriously, they
| in fact do not take it seriously.
|
| The incompetence of the turnstiles makes it a good focus for
| the story while the juxtaposition of the turnstiles with Jira
| exposes the company's hypocrisy.
| glitchcrab wrote:
| I believe like that was the intent, but the (very few)
| mentions of Jira feel like a bit of a non sequitur; they
| don't belong.
| compass_copium wrote:
| I care a lot more about my life (or my car's catalytic
| converter, which was stolen off my car in my work parking lot
| before they inatalled a gate for the lot) than any of my work-
| related IT credentials. Health and safety threats are a much
| bigger deal to people than nebulous, difficult to exploit
| threats to IP.
| angry_octet wrote:
| Except the turnstiles and swipe cards do almost nothing
| against an active shooter situation.
|
| But missing in this discussion is a risk and consequence
| analysis. If the risk is armed attackers, do something that
| targets that. For physical theft, target that. Likewise IT
| risks. The core problem is that risks were not being
| identified (systematically or in response to expert feedback)
| and prioritised.
|
| Incidentally, the solution to car park access is ALPRs, and
| the solution to most of the physical security is solid core
| doors at the workgroup level with EACS swipe and surveillance
| cameras there, and at the front desk have face level 4k video
| surveillance. With an on duty guard to resolve issues with
| access.
| layer8 wrote:
| I was disappointed by the lack of photo of the single
| turnstile.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| You're right, but the consequences of different security
| failure are different, no?
| OutOfHere wrote:
| If you as an employer are not doing physical engineering or
| working with large or unsafe physical objects, you don't need an
| office, period. For computer work alone, you don't need an office
| at all. If you fix the "office theater", the physical security
| problems disappear.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| Whenever I see this in practice I always think a determined
| killer would clearly know not to attack the "secure" building.
| Rather, attack the densely-packed line of people waiting to swipe
| their badges.
|
| Unnervingly, this usually occurs to me when I'm waiting patiently
| in the densely packed line of fellow targets.
| mikestew wrote:
| Bad implementations do not "security theater" make. When I did
| some work for a large coffee company, they had turnstiles at
| their building entrances, and I don't remember any lines in the
| morning. The scan/auth/enter process went about as fast as if
| there was no turnstile.
|
| I remember when I started at Microsoft decades ago that there
| were still "old-timers" who were pissy about having to use card
| keys to enter the building. With that attitude, man, did that
| ever explain Microsoft application and OS security in the early
| 2000s.
| alexchamberlain wrote:
| I'm not going to comment on the security implications of either
| situation, but is there a companion piece by the facilities team
| complaining about the amount of paperwork required to install
| turnstiles only for a software engineer to come along and lock
| them out of Jira on a whim?
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| Could have been worse. Anybody remember that story where the
| keycard readers would randomly work and eventually it was
| discovered the log file had grown huge and was being appended by
| reading the whole thing into memory over the network, appending
| the line, and writing the whole thing back out again, thus
| creating what the random pattern because I guess it would
| sometimes time out?
| jp57 wrote:
| Am I the only one who finds this post weird because this is a
| solved problem? I've worked for 18 years at companies where
| everyone had to badge into every building. There have never been
| lines of people waiting to get in. Once I worked in a 12-story
| building. Of course, the badging wasn't in the elevators: the
| elevator lobbies on each floor had doors with badge readers.
|
| The feel of the piece is that the entire effort was misguided,
| when the real story seems to be, "My company was somehow unable
| to implement something that every other company does easily."
| arjie wrote:
| Electronic audit trail makes SOC2 report easier for auditors. You
| can use paper trail instead, but electronics makes it easier. Few
| things in the world are required, but some of these compliance
| things are 'viral' in that if you're a vendor to a guy who needs
| compliance you need to practice the standards as well.
|
| Besides, visibility is sufficient as a deterrent. Back in India,
| there'd be a big difference between leaving an old man in a chair
| in front of the shop and having exactly zero people in front of
| the shop. There are classes of people you deter with the former
| who will not be deterred by the latter. The old man is not
| 'security' - anyone motivated can shut him up without much
| effort. And yet his presence works.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| _"If the security is not in your face, then it's not sufficiently
| theatre!"_
|
| That's a quote I tell security people in jest when they suggest
| yet another door literally or figuratively slamming in someone's
| face to _let them know_ that there is a security procedure in
| place.
|
| Seriously though, "security" is an overloaded word used for two
| unrelated business goals:
|
| 1. Having security.
|
| 2. Appearing to have security.
|
| The latter is strongly preferred by management that just wants
| someone else or something else to blame.
|
| To reiterate: this isn't an error! It's done on purpose.
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