Bait and switch. Author starts with one sentence on safety critical systems then transitions entirely to discussing challenges with insecure, non safety-critical software such as mobile phone OSs, email services, and web browsers for important people (e.g. politicians and policy makers). Yes safety and security are intertwined, no they're not the same and it's just confusing the matter to talk about functional safety-criticality in the context of secure communications. People who need secure communication channels often do their research or have teams to recommend or build systems for them, I don't think it's necessary for Google Chrome to tell the general public what tradeoffs they are making between usability and security (nice to have somewhere in the documentation? sure. but not necessary).
The article mostly focuses on software security. "Safety critical" software standards generally focus more on <i>stability</i> than security. Security is part of it. However, "safety critical" standards are overkill if you just want to improve security.<p>Regardless, I doubt the most popular consumer-focused software will ever meet the same "safety critical" standards as medical or avionics software. I work on safety critical software and the bureaucracy that comes with it drives innovation to a snails pace. As long as the average user is willing to give up a little stability for cutting-edge features, developers who prioritize "safety critical" standards simply wont be able to compete.
The article is about security, not safety critical. A couple articles I wrote on safety critical software:<p>Safe Systems from Unreliable Parts
<a href="https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b39.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b39.html</a><p>Designing Safe Software Systems Part 2
<a href="https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b40.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b40.html</a>
This is an article written by someone who’s never actually worked on a safety critical system. Such systems have an exhaustive threat model with likelihood estimates developed and verified well before a single line of code is written.
It’s not “safety critical” unless there’s a chance of someone dying as a direct result of the system’s failure. Stop trying to mix two totally different ideas together.