The Joy of Unplugging Cables: Kelly Shortridge on Security Resilience

About this episode

Kelly Shortridge discusses the importance of designing security for failure rather than prevention.

Kelly Shortridge, author of "Security Chaos Engineering: Sustaining Resilience in Software and Systems" and CPO at Fastly, joins Scott for an ACM ByteCast joint episode about why security should be designed for failure rather than prevention. From airplane coffee makers causing critical failures to squirrels being the real "advanced persistent threat" to power grids, Kelly makes the case that no system is perfectly secure — and the teams that feel most in control are often the least prepared. The conversation covers metrics theater, the cost-resilience tradeoff, why software has unique advantages for simulation that we're not leveraging, and where LLMs fit (and don't fit) in security workflows.

People in this episode

Host: Scott Hanselman

Guest: Kelly Shortridge

Topics covered

• security resilience
• failure design
• software systems
• metrics theater
• cost-resilience tradeoff
• simulation advantages
• LLMs in security

Keywords

• security
• resilience
• software
• failure
• metrics
• simulation
• LLMs

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Fastly

Books & works: Security Chaos Engineering: Sustaining Resilience in Software and Systems

Places: ACM

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