What Kenton Varda thinks about cybersecurity
Engineer at Cloudflare who designed Workers, Durable Objects and Cap’n Proto; earlier the primary author of Protocol Buffers v2 at Google, and co-founder of Sandstorm.io.
Everything they publish, on ppll ↗ Who they are, on wiqqi ↗
Kenton Varda did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
5 dated positions, 2020 to 2024, in their own words. Our reading of what Kenton Varda has said — not written or endorsed by them.
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Their wordsEven if you have systems in place to deliver auth keys to services securely (like Workers Secrets), if the key is just a string, the service itself can easily leak it. For instance, a developer might carelessly insert a log statement for debugging which logs the service's configuration – including keys. Now anyone who can access your logs can discover the secret, and there's probably no practical way to tell if such a leak has occurred.
↗Why Workers environment variables contain live objectsblog.cloudflare.com
- 18 months earlier
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Their wordsFirst, we can now restrict the global fetch() function to accept only publicly-routable URLs. This makes applications totally immune to SSRF attacks! You cannot trick an application into accessing an internal service unintentionally if the code to access internal services is explicitly different.
↗Introducing workerd: the Open Source Workers runtimeblog.cloudflare.com
- 2 years earlier
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Their wordsOn one hand, V8 is an extraordinarily complicated piece of technology, creating a wider "attack surface" than virtual machines. More complexity means more opportunities for something to go wrong. On the bright side, though, an extraordinary amount of effort goes into finding and fixing V8 bugs, owing to its position as arguably the most popular sandboxing technology in the world.
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Their wordsIt is abundantly clear that many more vulnerabilities exist, but haven't yet been publicized. Who might know about those vulnerabilities? Most of the bugs being published are being found by (very smart) graduate students on a shoestring budget. Imagine, for a minute, how many more bugs a well-funded government agency, able to buy the very best talent in the world, could be uncovering.
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Their wordsPopular security culture often dwells on clever hacks and clean fixes. But for the difficult real-world problems, often there is no right answer or simple fix, only the hard work of building defenses thicker and thicker.