When You Break Something, It Is Good To Fix It
Preface: In my work, I have moved to the point of telling people to stop telling me that something is broken or doesn’t work, to a point where, when someone poses a problem, I just ask them to go and find a solution, and propose the solution to me. There are perhaps more people in this world who can find fault in things, than those who can actually fix them. In my world, I want to work with fixers (and those who can find faults in things) rather than those who just break. So let’s look at some research, where the breakers also become the fixers (or, at least, propose a solution). For a Pen Tester or a Crypto Analyst, or, in-fact, any engineer, the ability to not only break, but also to fix, is a great skill that we need in this complex and dynamically changing world.
In Cybersecurity, there can be two types of people: someone who breaks things and then fixes them (or proposes a fix), and someone who break things and never fixes them (or even proposes a solution). For the latter, the breaks something, and leaves it for others to fix. But for the one, we look for people to break/crack things, and then show others how to actually fix the break. For academic research, you thus get researchers continually pushing methods to their boundaries and finding new vulnerabilities. But when they break things, they should, at least, try to fix them, too. One of my favouriate…
