The engineering team at Coinbase writes about security, infrastructure, outage post-mortems and open source for its cryptocurrency exchange.
HN commenters use it to see how Coinbase stores bitcoin in the cloud, to discuss its outage post-mortems, and for its Expect-CT post.
AWS might be partly to blame, for not warning them, actively or passively, in my opinion. It might just be infrastructure as a service, but it seems that major cloud providers like AWS act as an IaaS provider when convenient, and a PaaS when convenient. They censor content all the time. I don't think it would be too much to ask to send an email when a big security change is made (the emails
and audit log GitHub provides for its users are great). Plus their interfaces (UI and command line) are clunky. They should have a non-clunky dashboard of some sort where people can get a broad level overview of their security choices.
I'm not talking legal blame for the past mistake, just that at some point in the near future their IAM interface should be fixed. For one thing it should be easy to give permissions to view the permissions without giving keys to the kingdom. For another thing, there's a mental overhead to working with multiple AWS accounts [1]. I get the impression that Google Cloud Platform is ahead right now (while lots of other Google properties are not, heh).
Edit: the spyware company is absolutely to blame, but the complexity of AWS permissions including permission to view the permissions seems like a footgun to me. However, leaving open the admin site is something I wouldn't expect AWS to help with.
https://engineering.coinbase.com/you-need-more-than-one-aws-account-aws-bastions-and-assume-role-23946c6dfde3
Coinbase | San Francisco, New York, London UK | Full-time | https://www.coinbase.com/careers
Coinbase is a platform that facilitates the easy use of digital currency for consumers and merchants. This includes buying and selling of digital currency, secure storage in the cloud, and a suite of merchant tools. Moving and transacting financial assets safely is core to executing on our vision and building our brand of trust.
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Coinbase started as Rails app and is powered by many open source projects. We’re happy to contribute back to the community via the Coinbase Open Source Fund: https://engineering.coinbase.com/introducing-coinbase-open-source-fund-116617a1f6ec
Please check our careers page for more details on the teams, requirements and apply for what excites you: https://www.coinbase.com/careers
This is (imo) the most correct response to this query. The idea behind the CT lists is that browsers will flip into a "if it's no publicly identifiable, it's not valid" mode.
The Coinbase Engineering blog actually just put out an article on this very topic today - https://engineering.coinbase.com/moving-to-expect-ct-d0d26a07046d.
There is an older post [1] describing how they do this, curious how much it changed since then.
[1] https://engineering.coinbase.com/how-coinbase-builds-secure-infrastructure-to-store-bitcoin-in-the-cloud-30a6504e40ba
Build a financial exchange with Ruby on Rails, MongoDB, and Redis. What could go wrong?
https://engineering.coinbase.com/november-29th-december-1st-post-mortem-69a1810f9910
Most of the answers will be found here
https://engineering.coinbase.com/how-coinbase-builds-secure-infrastructure-to-store-bitcoin-in-the-cloud-30a6504e40ba