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FireStarter: Nasty or Not, Jericho Is Irrelevant

Mike Rothman March 29, 2010 13 Comments

It seems the Jericho Forum is at it again. I’m not sure what it is, but they are hitting the PR circuit talking about their latest document, a Self-Assessment Guide. Basically this is a list of “nasty” questions end users should ask vendors to understand if their products align with the Jericho Commandments. If you go back and search on my (mostly hate) relationship with Jericho, you’ll see I’m not a fan. I thought the idea of de-perimeterization was silly when they introduced it, and almost everyone agreed with me. Obviously the perimeter was changing, but it clearly was not disappearing. Nor has it. Jericho fell from view for a while and came back in 2006 with their commandments. Most of which are patently obvious. You don’t need Jericho to tell you that the “scope and level of protection should be specific and appropriate to the asset at risk.” Do you? Thankfully Jericho is there to tell us “security mechanisms must be pervasive, simple, scalable and easy to manage.” Calling Captain Obvious. But back to this nasty questions guide, which is meant to isolate Jericho-friendly vendors. Now I get asking some technical questions of your vendors about trust models, protocol nuances, and interoperability. But shouldn’t you also ask about secure coding practices and application penetration tests? Which is a bigger risk to your environment: the lack of DRM within the system or an application that provides root to your entire virtualized datacenter? So I’ve got a couple questions for the crowd: Do you buy into this de-perimeterization stuff? Have these concepts impacted your security architecture in any way over the past ten years? What about cloud computing? I guess that is the most relevant use case for Jericho’s constructs, but they don’t mention it at all in the self-assessment guide. Would a vendor filling out the Jericho self-assessment guide sway your technology buying decision in any way? Do you even ask these kinds of questions during procurement? I guess it would be great to hear if I’m just shoveling dirt on something that is already pretty much dead. Not that I’m above that, but it’s also possible that I’m missing something. Share:

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