Research

All of us Securosis folks will be at the RSA Conference this week, so we figured we’d pre-load some old stuff to get a feel for how our research positions turned out. Mine is really old, digging back into the archives from when I had just started Security Incite. Each year I put together a set of Incites that reflected what I expected to happen that year. I basically copied the idea (and format) from my META Group days, where each year we obsessed over our 12 META Trends. The idea was to come up with a paragraph for each of our main coverage areas and provide some guidance. No percentages or anything like that. The innovation that I introduced was to actually go back later in the year and assess how well the projection worked out. We never did that at META. But I figured it would be a hoot to look back at what I thought was going to be big in 2006, so here are the Incites and some more tactical predictions. Some stuff was good. Some stuff was, um, not so good. At least it should provide some laughs. And if you want to check out the grades I gave myself on each Incite a year later, check out my 2006 report card. I can tell you my predictions stunk very badly. You can also check out the 2007 report card while you’re at it, which will ensure you never ask me to prognosticate about anything… 2006 Incites and Predictions (These originally appeared on the Security Incite blog, Jan 9, 2006.) What are the Security Incites? Annually, Security Incite will publish a list of the key “trends” and expectations in the security business for the next year. Called “Security Incites” and written from the perspective of the end user (or security consumer), Incites provide direction on what to expect, assisting the decision making process as budgets and technology adoption plans are finalized for the upcoming year. Each Incite provides a clear position and distills the impact on buying dynamics and architectural constructs. Incites also set the stage for Security Incite’s upcoming research agenda. What’s the difference between a “Security Incite” and a “Prediction?” Predictions are things we expect to happen within the next 12 months, and tend to be more event-oriented. The Security Incites provide a broader perspective across the security domains and can take a longer than 12 months view. 1. No Mas Box (Less Boxes, More Functionality) Users will increasingly revolt about adding yet another narrowly focused security appliance into their network and actively examine new “simplification” architectures. New Unified Threat Management (UTM) products, using blade servers and virtualization technologies, appear in 2006 putting vendors that license key intellectual property at a disadvantage. Management of the integrated UTM environment will remain difficult through 2007. 2. Get the NAC! The increasing number of ingress points into corporate networks (mobile, contractors, VPN) forces users to migrate to a virtual network infrastructure with a secure net and an unsecured net. Network Admission Control (NAC) architectures gain traction in 2006 to facilitate this architectural construct, but do require homogeneity of equipment pushing the pendulum away from best of breed providers. 3. Who are you? Identity Management (IDM) breaks out in 2006, as ROI-driven password management and single sign-on (SSO) initiatives are deployed en masse. Smart users increasingly figure out that strong and centralized IDM provides “good enough” authentication and authorization for compliance purposes, accelerating market growth in 2H 2006. Yet, identity federation continues to lag in a cloud of useless vendor bickering and standards immaturity until mid-2007. Token-based authentication finally hits the wall, as passwords remain good enough and no compelling alternative appears. 4. Stay Out of Jail Compliance continues to generate tremendous hype, but largely remains a red herring throughout 2006. Smart users will use the compliance word to get funding for critical imperatives (perimeter redesign, identity management) and sufficiently document their processes to keep regulators happy. Those not so smart users figure encryption is a panacea and buy some; ultimately realizing making encryption work on a large scale basis hasn’t gotten any easier. 5. Losing The Religion Everyone finally realizes in 2006 that regardless of technical approach (IDS vs. IPS vs. firewalls vs. anomaly detection) it’s all about detecting and blocking malware quickly and effectively. Users expect to see multiple techniques implemented, spurring another wave of consolidation as vendors look to bring complete enterprise-class UTM solutions to market. 6. Endpoint Hostile Takeover Driven by the prevalence of unwanted applications, internal zombies outbreaks, and documented information leaks enabled by key loggers and spyware, users will increasingly lock down endpoint devices, despite pushback from the business users. Limitations of the Windows XP security model makes lockdown difficult in 2006, but much easier when Microsoft’s Vista operating system is ready for deployment beginning in 2007. 7. Bad Content is Bad Content Given “innovation” by spammers and fraudsters, keeping content filtering algorithms accurate and timely is proving very difficult for content-focused security vendors. In 2006, heuristics-based detection cocktails fall out of favor, pushing the pendulum back towards signatures that favor entrenched AV vendors. Users increasingly embrace “in the cloud” content filtering for e-mail, IM, and web traffic because it allows them to get rid of another box in the perimeter and stop worrying about exponentially increasing message volumes. 8. Security Management (oxy)Moron Stand-alone security information management (SIM) plateaus in 2006, as consolidation continues and the need for large-scale system integration makes acceptable “time to value” out of reach for all but the largest enterprises. Closed correlation systems increasingly take root as users swing towards homogeneity and ratchet back expectations on which devices really need to be integrated into the management system, while leveraging the reporting infrastructure for compliance purposes. 9. Services Managed Security Services provide increasing value in terms of both operational capabilities and content filtering. Users realize that removing threats “in the cloud” provides better bang for the buck for mature technologies (firewalls, IPS, anti-spam, gateway AV, web filtering). The biggest challenge in 2006 will

This post doesn’t hold up that well, but it goes back to 2006 and the first couple weeks the site was up. And I think it is interesting to reflect on how my thinking has evolved, as well as the landscape around the analysis.   In 2006 the debate was all about full vs. responsible disclosure. While that still comes up from time to time, the debate has clearly shifted. Many bugs aren’t disclosed at all, now that there is a high-stakes market where researchers can support entire companies just discovering and selling bugs to governments and other bidders. The legal landscape and prosecutorial abuse of laws have pushed some researchers to keep things to themselves. The adoption of cloud services also changes things, requiring completely different risk assessment around bug discovery. Some of what I wrote below is still relevant, and perhaps I should have picked something different for my first flashback, but I like digging into the archives and reflecting on something I wrote back when I was still with Gartner, wasn’t even thinking about Securosis as more than a blog, and was in a very different place in my life (i.e., no kids). Also, this is a heck of an excuse to include a screenshot of what the site looked like back then. The 3 Dirty Little Secrets of Disclosure No One Wants to Talk About As a child one of the first signs of my budding geekness was a strange interest in professional “lingo”. Maybe it was an odd side effect of learning to walk at a volunteer ambulance headquarters in Jersey. Who knows what debilitating effects I suffered due to extended childhood exposure to radon, the air imbued with the random chemicals endemic to Jersey, and the staccato language of the early Emergency Medical Technicians whose ranks I would feel compelled to join later in life. But this interest wasn’t limited to the realm of lights and sirens; it extended to professional subcultures ranging from emergency services, to astronauts, to the military, to professional photographers. As I aged and even joined some of these groups I continued to relish the mechanical patois reserved for those earning expertise in a domain. Lingo is often a compression of language; a tool for condensing vast knowledge or concepts into a sound byte easily communicated to a trained recipient, slicing through the restrictive ambiguity of generic language. But lingo is also used as a tool of exclusion or to mask complexity. The world of technology in general, and information security in particular, is as guilty of lingo abuse as any doctor, lawyer, or sanitation specialist. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our discussions of “Disclosure”. A simple term evoking religious fervor among hackers, dread among vendors, and misunderstanding among normal citizens and the media who wonder if it’s just a euphemism for online dating (now with photos!). Disclosure is a complex issue worthy of full treatment; but today I’m going to focus on just 3 dirty little secrets. I’ll cut through the lingo to focus on the three problems of disclosure that I believe create most of the complexity. After the jump that is… “Disclosure” is a bizarre process nearly unique to the world of information technology. For those of you not in the industry, “disclosure” is the term we use to describe the process of releasing information about vulnerabilities (flaws in software and hardware that attackers use to hack your systems). These flaws aren’t always discovered by the vendors making the products. In fact, after a product is released they are usually discovered by outsiders who either accidentally or purposely find the vulnerabilities. Keeping with our theme of “lingo” they’re often described as “white hats”, “black hats”, and “agnostic transgender grey hats”. You can think of disclosure as a big-ass product recall where the vendor tells you “mistakes were made” and you need to fix your car with an updated part (except they don’t recall the product, you can only get the part if you have the right support contract and enough bandwidth, you have to pay all the costs of the mechanic (unless you do it yourself), you bear all responsibility for fixing your car the right way, if you don’t fix it or fix it wrong you’re responsible for any children killed, and the car manufacturer is in no way actually responsible for the car working before the fix, after the fix, or in any related dimensions where they may sell said product). It’s really all your fault you know. Conceptually “disclosure” is the process of releasing information about the flaw. The theory is consumers of the product have a right to know there’s a security problem, and with the right level of details can protect themselves. With “full disclosure” all information is released, sometimes before there’s a patch, sometimes after; sometimes the discoverer works with the vendor (not always), but always with intense technical detail. “Responsible disclosure” means the researcher has notified the vendor, provided them with details so they can build a fix, and doesn’t release any information to anyone until a patch is released or they find someone exploiting the flaw in the wild. Of course to some vendors use the concept of responsible disclosure as a tool to “manage” researchers looking at their products. “Graphic disclosure” refers to either full disclosure with extreme prejudice, or online dating (now with photos!). There’s a lot of confusion, even within the industry, as to what we really mean by disclosure and it it’s good or bad to make this information public. Unlike many other industries we seem to feel it’s wrong for a vendor to fix a flaw without making it public. Some vendors even buy flaws in other vendors products; just look at the controversy around yesterday’s announcement from TippingPoint. There was a great panel with all sides represented at the recent Black Hat conference. So what are the dirty little secrets? Full disclosure helps the bad guys It’s about ego, control, and competition We need the threat of full disclosure or vendors