Building systems with integrity
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The document discusses the importance of integrity and accuracy of information in the digital world. It notes that while confidentiality and availability of data have received more attention, in the future we may see more attacks aimed at manipulating information to compromise its integrity. This could impair decision making for officials, executives and others if they cannot trust the information they are receiving. The document emphasizes that integrity, or the reliability of information, is critical.
Building systems with integrity
- 1. Paul Downey Technical Architect Government Digital Service @psd
- 3. Integrity of Information Most of the public discussion regarding cyber threats has focused on the confidentiality and availability of information; cyber espionage undermines confidentiality, whereas denial-of-service operations and data deletion attacks undermine availability. In the future, however, we might also see more cyber operations that will change or manipulate electronic information in order to compromise its integrity (i.e. accuracy and reliability) instead of deleting it or disrupting access to it. Decision making by senior government officials (civilian and military), corporate executives, investors, or others will be impaired if they cannot trust the information they are receiving. — Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community, Senate Armed Services Committee, February 26, 2015
- 6. GDS@psd Molly Dishman & Martin Fowler on agile architecture:
- 7. GDS@psd “Architecture is about things which are hard to change”
- 9. GDS@psd “remove things from the system which are hard to change”
- 10. It’s quite difficult to unboil an egg
- 11. GDS@psd Integrity: things you want to be difficult to change break
- 12. GDS@psd We need to talk about rotting …
- 13. memorandum mori
- 14. GDS@psd Big data Open data Linked data Raw data
- 19. GDS@psd Software ≈ stuff you can easily change that does stuff to stuff
- 21. GDS@psd 1. Start with needs 2. Do less 3. Design with data 4. Do the hard work to make it simple 5. Iterate. Then iterate again. 6. This is for everyone 7. Understand context 8. Build things people can build on 9. Be consistent, not uniform 10. Make things open: it makes things better Design Principles
- 22. Start with needs* * user needs, not government needs
- 36. 36
- 39. GDS@psd Government has a lot of registers:
- 40. GDS@psd companies, charities, trade unions, courts, schools, universities, hospitals, zoos, circuses, inspections, licences, certificates, births, marriages, deaths, electoral roll, insolvencies, bankruptcies, passports, animal passports, drivers, vehicles, land parcels, land ownership, land use, legal boundaries, awards, tax rates, benefits, livestock movements, flood risk, river levels, companies, fish caught, patents, trademarks, designs, non-native invasive plants, bank holidays, clock changes …
- 41. GDS@psd things people need to be able to trust
- 42. GDS@psd and government is the canonical official source
- 45. GDS@psd “An alternative to scurrilous gossip & rumour”
- 46. GDS@psd Integrity: being honest and having strong principles
- 47. GDS@psd The systems we build should reflect our values
- 48. GDS@psd “As Chief Registrar of Foo, I need to know the Foo system of record hasn’t been tampered with”
- 49. GDS@psd IOW: Should be tamper proof
- 53. Design with Data
- 55. Psychic paper
- 56. GDS@psd “As someone with an interest in Foo I need to know a Foo record came from the Foo Registry and it hasn’t been tampered with”
- 58. A digital signature is … I am me I agree!&
- 65. GDS@psd The main thing is you must be able to change your mind
- 69. GDS@psd The Web is links
- 70. GDS@psd Link rot
- 71. GDS@psd Url shorteners Abuse Transnational law Blocking Advertising Privacy and security Additional layer of complexity
- 72. GDS@psd Purl — Persistent uniform resource locator
- 73. GDS@psd http://
- 80. It must be gov, yeah, yeah!
- 81. No link left behind!
- 82. Do less
- 86. Use the HTTP:
- 89. Writing law demands a certain level of commitment from goats, calves and sheep
- 93. GDS@psd Backups!
- 95. My precious!
- 98. GDS@psd Bitrot
- 102. BBC Doomsday project
- 104. GDS@psd Rotten data
- 107. GDS@psd Cruft?
- 111. “People stuff up, but if you really want to stuff up you need a computer” – Anon GDS@psd
- 112. “If you really want to stuff things up, add more people” – (paraphrasing Fred Brooks) GDS@psd
- 113. P.E.B.C.A.K GDS@psd
- 114. GDS@psd Can you turn it on and off again?
- 117. GDS@psd Learn from your* mistakes * collective noun
- 118. GDS@psd “Anyone who’s worked with technology at any scale is familiar with failure. Failure cares not about the architecture designs you slave over, the code you write and review, or the alerts and metrics you meticulously pore through.” — John Allspaw, Blameless Post Mortems and a Just Culture
- 119. GDS@psd Do things that scare you, often
- 124. ISE Shrine – Clay Shirky, Here comes everybody
- 126. GDS@psd Architecture
- 127. Do the hard work to make it simple
- 130. Knocking down the Towers of SIAM
- 131. Register appliance
- 133. Merkle tree magic
- 134. redecentralize.org
- 135. Build in the context of your domain, organisation The Web
- 136. Paul Downey Technical Architect Government Digital Service @psd