Eierlegende Wollmilchsau
Literally "the legendary egg-laying wooly milk sow" is a mythical farm animal that is at once a chicken, a sheep, a diary cow and a pig.
It means an all-in-one multi-function device serving an impossible range of purposes. One real world example is those wind-up radio alarm clock torches that were popular in the 1980s.
Today two Eierlegende Wollmilchsau dominate our technology:
- the web browser
- the smartphone
The concept caputures the problem of inelegant, over-reach in design, feature creep 1 and the danger of functional concentration into a single point of failure.
From a security standpoint these creations are undoubtedly bad, breakimg with good engineering principles of simplicity, functional-fit, modularity, cohesion, decoupling, legibility and easy maintenance,
Mitigation
Feature creep and related technical debt is an anti-pattern to the Unix Philosophy and good Software Quality
Stuff that has one well-defined function is more secure. It is simpler. It is testable because it has a clean, singular interface.
Good cybersecurity can mean pushing back against neophytes and reckless engineers, but also marketing people and over-zealous product designers who press at boundaries to make things too complex.