upvote
Security is not just a solution to availability. It is also to keep sensitive data (PII, or business secrets, or passwords, or cryptographic private keys, and so on) away from the hands of bad actors.

If I’m unable to use Amazon for 24 hours it doesn’t really matter. If a photo copy of my passport is leaked that’s worries and potential troubles for years.

reply
Security = Confidentiality + Integrity + Availability

or alternatively,

Security = (exclude unauth'd reads) + (exclude unauth'd writes) + (include auth'd reads and auth'd writes)

Gotta satisfy all parts in order to have security.

reply
If you squint at it, you can convert all three to just availability.

    Confidentiality = available to us, but nobody else.

    Integrity = available to us in a pristine condition.
It's a bit reductive, I'll admit, but it can be a useful exercise in the same way that everything in an economy can be reduce to units of either: "human time", "money" or "energy". Roughly speaking they're interchangeable.

E.g.: What's the benefit to you if your data is so confidential that you can't read it either? This is a real problem with some health information systems, where I can't access my own health records! Ditto with many government bureaucracies that keep my records safe and secure from me.

reply
That squint loses too much nuance. I don't think of a site data leak as an availiability problem.

Bad UX and bugs are in general not always an availiability problem.

If it hard to get what you want due to bad design but the site is up, the site is still up.

reply