Research

My very first Macworld op-ed: It’s hard to imagine an idea more inane than passwords. That we protect many of the most important aspects of our lives with little more than a short string of text is an extreme absurdity. These collections of–admit it–eight characters are the gateways to everything from our bank accounts and medical records to our family photos to the most sensitive thoughts we’ve ever let slip via keyboard. To say merely that I loathe passwords would be to lump them with myriad other things in this world that deserve of a good loathing–whereas passwords deserve their own very special throne of infamy. And the worst part of it all? There isn’t a single, viable alternative. This piece is oriented towards consumers but the enterprise issues are extremely similar. I really don’t see any alternatives that work at scale, especially because most employees are ‘consumers’ (what a crappy word). CAC cards for gov/DoD are the closest to an exception I can find, and that’s a pretty specific audience (admittedly a large large one). Share:

Usually at security events like the RSA Conference there isn’t much buzz about Identity and Access Management. Actually, identity is rarely thought of as a security technology; instead it is largely lumped in with general IT operational stuff. But 2013 feels different. Over the past year our not-so-friendly hacktivists (Anonymous) embarrassed dozens of companies by exposing private data, including account details and password information. Aside from this much more visible threat and consequence, the drive towards mobility and cloud computing/SaaS at best disrupts, and at worst totally breaks, traditional identity management concepts. These larger trends have forced companies to re-examine their IAM strategies. At the same time we see new technologies emerge, promising to turn IAM on its ear. We will see several new (start-up) IAM vendors at this year’s show, offering solutions to these issues. We consider this is a very positive development – the big lumbering companies largely dominating IAM over the past 5 years haven’t kept pace with these technical innovations. IDaaS = IAM 2.0 The most interesting of the shiny new objects you will see at RSAC is identity-as-a-service (IDaaS), which extend traditional in-house identity services to external cloud providers and mobile devices. These platforms propagate and/or federate identity outside your company, providing the glue to seamlessly link your internal authoritative source with different cloud providers – the latter of which generally offer a proprietary way to manage identity within their environment. Several vendors offer provisioning capabilities as well, linking internal authorization sources such as HR systems with cloud applications, helping map permissions across multiple external applications. It may look like we are bolting a new set of capabilities onto our old directory services, but it is actually the other way around. IDaaS really is IAM 2.0. It’s what IAM should have looked like if it had originally been architected for open networks, rather than the client-server model hidden behind a network firewall. But be warned: the name-brand directory services and authorization management vendors you are familiar with will be telling the same story as the new upstart IDaaS players. You know how this works. If you can’t innovate at the same pace, write a data sheet saying you do. It’s another kind of “cloud washing” – we could call it Identity Washing. They both talk about top threats to identity, directory integration, SSO, strong authentication, and the mobile identity problem. But these two camps offer very different visions and technologies to solve the problem. Each actually solves distinctly different problems. When they overlap it is because the traditional vendor is reselling or repackaging someone else’s IDaaS under the covers. Don’t be fooled by the posturing. Despite sales driod protestations about simple and easy integrations between the old world and this new stuff, there is a great deal of complexity hiding behind the scenes. You need a strong understanding of how federation, single sign-on, provisioning, and application integration are implemented to understand whether these products can work for you. The real story is how IDaaS vendors leverage standards such as SAML, OAuth, XACML, and SCIM to extend capabilities outside the enterprise, so that is what you should focus on. Unfortunately managing your internal LDAP servers will continue to suck, but IDaaS is likely the easier of the two to integrate and manage with this new generation of cloud and mobile infrastructure. Extending what you have to the cloud is likely easier than managing what you have in house today. Death to Passwords Another new theme as RSAC will be how passwords have failed us and what we should do about it. Mat Honan said we should Kill The Password. Our own Gunnar Peterson says Infosec Slowly Puts Down Its Password Crystal Meth Pipe. And I’m sure Sony and Gawker are thinking the same thing. But what does this mean, exactly? Over time it means we will pass cryptographic tokens around to assert identity. In practice you will still have a password to (at least partially) authenticate yourself to a PC or other device you use. But once you have authenticated to your device, behind the scenes an identity service that will generate tokens on your behalf when you want access to something. Passwords will not be passed, shared, or stored, except within a local system. Cryptographic tokens will supplant passwords, and will transparently be sent on your behalf to applications you use. Instead of trusting a password entered by you (or, perhaps, not by you) applications will establish trust with identity providers which generate your tokens, and then verify the token’s authenticity as needed. These tokens, based on some type of standard technology (SAML, Kerberos, or OAuth, perhaps), will include enough information to validate the user’s identity and assert the user’s right to access specific resources. Better still, tokens will only be valid for a limited time. This way even if a hacker steals and cracks a password file from an application or service provider, all its data will be stale and useless before it can be deciphered. The “Death to Passwords” movement represents a seismic shift in the way we handle identity, and seriously impacts organizations extending identity services to customers. There will be competing solutions offered at the RSA show to deal with password breaches – most notably RSA’s own password splitting capability, which is a better way to store passwords rather than a radical replacement for the existing system. Regardless, the clock is ticking. Passwords’ deficiencies and limitations have been thoroughly exposed, and there will be many discussions on the show floor as attendees try to figure out the best way to handle authentication moving forward. And don’t forget to register for the Disaster Recovery Breakfast if you’ll be at the show on Thursday morning. Where else can you kick your hangover, start a new one, and talk shop with good folks in a hype-free zone? Nowhere, so make sure you join us… Share:

The early stages of the Internet felt a bit like the free love era, in that people could pretty much do what they wanted, even if it was bad for them. I remember having many conversations with telecom carriers about the issues of consumers doing stupid things, getting their devices pwned, and then wreaking havoc on other consumers on the same network. For years the carriers stuck their heads in the sand, basically offering endpoint protection suites for free and throwing bandwidth at the problem. But that seems to be changing. I know a few large- scale ISPs who put compromised devices in the penalty box, preventing them from doing much of anything until the device is fixed. This is an expensive proposition for an ISP. You, like me, probably end up doing a decent amount of tech support for less sophisticated family members, and you know how miserable it is to actually remediate a pwned machine. But as the operating systems have gotten much better at protecting themselves, attackers increasingly target applications. And that means attacking browsers (and other high-profile apps such as Adobe Reader and Java) where they are weakest: the plug-in architecture. So kudos to Mozilla, who has started blocking plug-ins as their default setting. It will now be up to the user to enable plug-ins, such as Java, Adobe, and Silverlight, according to Mozilla director of security assurance Michael Coates, who announced the new functionality yesterday in a blog post. Mozilla’s Click to Play feature will be the tool for that: “Previously Firefox would automatically load any plugin requested by a website. Leveraging Click to Play, Firefox will only load plugins when a user takes the action of clicking to make a particular plugin play, or the user has previously configured Click To Play to always run plugins on the particular website,” he wrote. Of course users will still be able to get around it (like the new Gatekeeper feature in Mac OS X), but they will need to make a specific decision to activate the plug-in. It’s a kind of default deny approach to plug-ins, which is a start. And more importantly it’s an indication that application software makers are willing to adversely affect the user experience to reduce attack surface. Which is good news from where I sit. Share:

Today I popped off a quick tweet after yet another email from LinkedIn: Please please please… … stop endorsing me. Seriously. I barely use LinkedIn. For me it is little more than a contact manager, and otherwise lost most of its other value long ago. Perhaps thats my own bias, but there it is. As for endorsements… this is LinkedIn deliberately social engineering us. Reciprocity is one of the most common human behaviors used for social engineering, because it is one of the most fundamental behaviors in building a social society. From Wikipedia: With reciprocity, a small favor can produce a sense of obligation to a larger return favor. This feeling of obligation allows an action to be reciprocated with another action. Because there is a sense of future obligation with reciprocity it can help to develop and continue relationships with people. Reciprocity works because from a young age people are taught to return favors and to disregard this teaching will lead to the social stigma of being an ingrate. This is used very frequently in various scams. LinkedIn uses endorsements and reciprocity to draw people into logging into the service. You feel you need to return the endorsement, you log in, endorse, and then maybe endorse someone else, spreading it like Chinese malware. If LinkedIn wasn’t so obnoxious about the notification emails I wouldn’t consider this such a blatant attempt at manipulation. But the constant nags are crafted to elicit a specific return behavior. In other words, clear-cut social engineering. Share: