RVAsec 2023

When the 2023 National Cybersecurity Strategy called for “shifting liability to promote secure development practices,” the response from the security (and legal) community often overstated the novelty of the proposal. We have already been living with (various forms of) software liability for confidentiality, integrity, and availability failures for over two decades. This talk clarifies the legal landscape of both what already exists and the likely paths for the future. Cautioning against various security dystopias including Hannah Arendt’s “cybernation,” this talk offers suggestions on buildouts to existing threat modeling frameworks to explicitly consider factors used by courts and regulators to determine liability. These buildouts can better align the security team and in-house counsel in a joint defensive enterprise. But, two scaling issues will remain: the need for a technology regulator of last resort (a “TRoLR”) and a security community-driven model of professionalism.