User:Mstone/Commentaries/Infrastructure 1

Here are some proposed requirements for a software system and procedure for communal maintenance of infrastructure and of reference documentation describing that infrastructure:

Ease of Maintenance

-- Reason: (locally) reversing entropy is hard enough as it stands.

Data integrity

It should be possible to verify the integrity of reference documentation on an independent system booted from read-only media.

-- Reason: when you're concerned about a system, you need to diagnose it against a mental model and you need to know whether any secrets it contained are still secret. It's important to be able to trust your mental model and to know what those secrets were.

Timely access

Failures of otherwise critical pieces of infrastructure should not inhibit timely read or write access to the reference documentation.

Credential rotation

When people leave the VIG, it should be easy to remove their access to secrets created after their exit.

If people ever leave the VIG non-amicably, it should be possible to quickly update important secrets throughout the communal infrastructure.

It should be easy to add give new VIG members access to current secrets.

Publishability

Secrets should be carefully separated from public knowledge (e.g. with encryption or quarantine) so that everything else can be published.

Audit trail

It should be possible to study the work of fellow administrators.

Depending on the threat model, audit logs may also be an important security status artifact.

Written threat model

Everyone deserves to be able to evaluate the risks of proposed changes against a common standard.