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The myth of "Best Practices"

TL;DR – When you see a “Best Practices” article or conference session, read or attend with caution. Its likely not to help you with your current problems.

Today I read a very informative blog post about passwords and the security that they don’t provide. The one thing that stood out in that post more than anything else was the following sentence:

“Best practice” is intended as a default policy for those who don’t have the necessary data or training to do a reasonable risk assessment.

You see, I’ve always cringed when I’ve read blog posts or seen conference sessions that claim to provide “Best Practices” for a given technology or platform. People read or attend feeling that they will leave with a profound solution to all of their problems within that sphere. In the end these sessions don’t help the attendee/reader. They lack two important things; context and backing data.

“Best practices” are an attempt to commoditize solutions to what usually are very complex problems in even more complex environments. I have seen “always use HTTPS for communication between browser and web server when authenticating onto websites” as a best practice. I’m sure you have too. But does that make any sense when the traffic between the browser and web server only exists on an internal network? Possibly, if the system needs to be hardened against attack from internal company users, but this is a pretty rare scenario. So what benefit do we get from blindly following this “Best Practice” for our internal system? We have to purchase, manage, re-new, deploy and maintain SSL certs (amongst other things). And to what benefit if the risk of attack from our internal users is deemed to be low (which is what most organizations I’ve experienced would categorize it for their internal apps)?

The “Best practice” of always using HTTPS is a broadly painted practice intended to cover more situations than necessary. Why? Well these “Best practices” are intended for organizations and people that “…don’t have the necessary data or training…” These organizations and people need solutions that err on the side of caution instead of being focused for their needs. In essence, “Best Practices” are intended for audiences that are either too lazy or too uninformed about their scenarios, tools or platforms to make decisions on their own.

I know that I’m using a security scenario and referencing a security related blog post. On top of that I used phrases like “side of caution”. Don’t mistake this as a condemnation only of “Best Practices” for security related matters. I intend to condemn all “Best Practices” using the same arguments. Regardless of if those “Best Practices” are for MVC, IIS hardening, network security, design patterns, database technologies or anything else that we deal with in software development, I opine that they are worthless. Well, they have one use; to identify organizations that have neither the interest or capability to assess their specific situations and needs.