Research

Dark Reading just posted my column for this month, entitled, “11 Truths We Hate To Admit”. Due to a miscommunication with my editor it reads as if I still live in Boulder, Colorado. I’m really down in Phoenix, but spent most of my adult life in Boulder. DR is a fun publication to write for- they want us to poke the industry with a stick and get people thinking. Nothing I wrote is any big surprise, but they aren’t the kinds of things we tend to publish. If it doesn’t piss at least a few people off I didn’t do a good job writing the article, although so far the reviews are mostly positive. Damn. Here’s a snippet: 1. Signature based desktop antivirus is an addiction, not effective security. AV is often the single biggest security expense in an organization, yet it’s one of the least effective. Gateway AV is still a reasonable investment to filter out known garbage, but desktop AV needs to seriously improve its heuristics and other non-signature techniques if it is to protect us. Independent reports indicate current AV products are full of gaping holes, and many organizations experience extensive downtime from bad signatures and poor performance. At least today’s malware doesn’t grind your computer to a halt at noon every Wednesday. 2. The bad guys beat us because they’re agnostic and we’re religious. The bad guys are always innovating for competitive advantage, but innovation isn’t something large organizations or industries do well. We get wrapped up in our own little religious battles over PKI, IDS, standards, AV, whoever we work for at the time, and what’s worked for us before. We become too personally tied to pet projects we’re experienced with — and can’t let go of. 3. Antitrust concerns force Microsoft to weaken security. Host security companies take out full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal and threaten to go to court when Microsoft adds security features that might tread on their turf. Thanks to some poor past behavior by Microsoft, these tactics work. But if it weren’t for the antitrust problems of the past, we’d all have free anti-spyware and AV in Windows, forcing those other companies to compete on merit. < p style=”text-align:right;font-size:10px;”>Technorati Tags: Dark Reading, Security Industry Share:

While I was traveling home, Martin posted the latest episode of the Network Security Podcast. Our guests this week are Marcin and Andre from http://www.tssci-security.com/. We spend most of the episode talking about web application security issues. At least, I think we do. Due to technical difficulties related to my travel I got booted half-way through the podcast just as Andre was getting into the good stuff. Sorry for the problems guys, and thanks again for being on the show. And for getting me drunk and talking me into inviting you on the show. And having me pay the tab. Um. I think I’m doing this wrong… < p style=”text-align:right;font-size:10px;”>Technorati Tags: Application security, Podcast Share:

Once upon a time, an evil virus struck the land. But the people were prepared, and they stopped the virus before too many became sick… or so they thought. The virus really learned to hide, finding a home among wayward travelers outside the gates of the city. Weeks later these travelers returned home and unknowingly infected the cities. And weeks after that the next wave of travelers came to the cities, and more were infected. And then some scientists said, “Enough! No more will we let our cities become infected by these travelers. Now is the time to protect ourselves from the threats within!” The scientists created a new defense, called NAC, which would check the health of anyone before entering the city, and all was good. But NAC was new, and the first versions didn’t work as well as everyone would have liked. Then, two famous alchemists decided that they should control NAC. Rather than providing it to the people to use, they decided to tell everyone they would provide it. Eventually. And maybe it wouldn’t work quite as expected, but it would be good because it would be big. And then other alchemists decided that the people wanted NAC, but didn’t know what NAC was, so they removed the old labels from their elixirs and put on new NAC labels. And the people were confused. And they waited. (Apologies for starting so many sentences with ‘and’, but you’ll get over it.) I was listening to Alan and Mitchell’s StillSecure podcast the other day and, as usual, the subject of NAC came up. For those of you who don’t know, NAC stands for Network Admission Control or Network Access Control, depending on who you talk with. The technology was originally developed to provide pre-connect health checks when guests or mobile employees plugged into the office network. Alan was ranting on the dilution of the term, and as much as it pains me I have to agree with him. When the SQL Slammer virus hit, most companies were well defended by blocking the port on their firewalls. Those companies then found themselves infected over the following weeks in waves, as mobile employees and contractors started coming back and plugging into the wall, behind the firewall. The concept of NAC was to prevent internal infections from systems physically connecting behind perimeter defenses. A computer would plug in and would then be scanned, or checked using an agent, before it was given an IP address or other network access. If the system wasn’t up to snuff, it could be quarantined off on a network segment outside the firewall (perhaps to download the missing security software), or simply denied access. It’s a great idea, but like all great ideas a combination of big fish and bottom feeders wanted in. “NAC” kept getting expanded and integrated with everything from 802.1x for port-based authentication (only letting a computer get a usable IP address after a user is approved- a pretty good idea) to all sorts of real-time monitoring, quarantining, VLAN weirdness, and kitchen sinks. It’s a market that Cisco and Microsoft decided they want to control, and early on they started making waves without providing much in terms of functional product. It was a way for Cisco to get their endpoint agents onto desktops and to push clients to upgrade their networking hardware, since parts of their NAC don’t work if they aren’t built into the switch. I like NAC, and if I had more than 6 computers on my network it’s the kind of thing I’d look at more closely. But I’d keep myself focused on the basics- protecting my network from malicious guest and mobile systems. I’d want a mix of agent and agentless (for managed and unmanged systems) and keep focused on pre- and post- connection health checks. I wouldn’t wait for the big vendors, knowing that in the long term they’ll own it all anyway, even if they have to buy it. Yes, Cisco has stuff now, but I hear it’s pretty complex to deploy. NAC, like much of network security, will eventually be built into the network fabric. At best, we’ll have a separate security control plane for separation of duties. This is a hell of a long way out and not something that should affect your buying decisions today. I’ll be the first to admit I have a lot more depth in data and application security than netsec, but I’ve watched for years as a great idea (NAC) has been pummeled by the market. I even did an interview on it over at SearchSecurity. It reminds me a lot of Data Loss Prevention/Content Monitoring and Protection (DLP/CMP). A good technology that provides immediate value, which quickly becomes far more confusing than needed as all sorts of people want in on the action. If you want to protect yourself from potentially malicious systems plugging into your network (including remote access) take a look at NAC. If you want all the other bells and whistles you see running around out there you can look at them too, just don’t call them NAC. < p style=”text-align:right;font-size:10px;”>Technorati Tags: NAC, Network Security Share:

If any of you are involved with the Open Group, I’ll be giving a presentation at the Forum tomorrow in San Francisco. The topic ias: The Future of Security: How Disruption and Innovation are Putting the “Information” Back In Information Security Unlike other areas of information technology, security is always battling with external forces. From external attackers to our own business initiatives, disruptions are our way of life. We are in the midst of a major shift as “information-centric” security evolves into the dominant security model, while we still need to maintain our investments of yesterday. The session will discuss these disruptive forces and assess how and where some of the established security technologies (firewalls and e-mail security), and emerging security technologies (data leak prevention, endpoint security, network access control, enterprise rights management, and on and on) will fit into our information-centric security architectures in the future. At least that’s what I think I’m talking about- the description on the conference site doesn’t seem to match. Oh well, I’ll figure it ou when I get there. Note that this is my half of an upcoming joint presentation with Chris Hoff. More details on that later… Share:

Tomorrow I’ll be giving a webcast over at ZDNet (sponsored by Oracle) on the Top 5 Database Security Resolutions for 2008. The resolutions have changed a bit since I first posted about them over here, and I decided to swap in data masking for the last one. I almost pulled it back out after I found out my sponsor (Oracle) just released a data masking product (I try to avoid being too promotional in my webinars), but it’s something I’ve been talking about for a while and it’s too important to pull just because a few people might think I was being biased. We’re up to nearly 600 people registered for the event, making it one of the largest webcasts I’ve done. But enough self-promotion; it’s time to talk about data masking. Data masking started popping up as an issue about 3 years ago. At the time I was covering database security, but client calls were bouncing around between me on the security team and someone over in application development. It’s one of these annoying security issues that crosses organizational boundaries and ends up the responsibility of those will little security experience. It’s an issue that grew organically- first popping up in some audits related to GLBA (a financial services regulation), and now something we see required for PCI and a few other regulations. Data masking is really a bad term for what we’re talking about. We can technically mask data anywhere, but when we use the term data masking we usually mean “test data generation” or “analytical data generation”. It’s the conversion of production data into either test and development data or data for a data warehouse (OLAP). For this post we’ll focus on test data generation, but the same techniques can be used for an OLAP where you want data that represents production data, but still protects the sensitive stuff. And that’s our goal- to take sensitive data from a production system and convert it into non-sensitive data suitable for testing or analysis. We can do this through substitution, transposition, obfuscation, de-coupling, scrambling, hashing, or even encryption. I’m going to quickly eliminate hashing and encryption from the discussion- those techniques are very effective at protecting data, but the result breaks the second rule of data masking- that the data is still representative of the source, without being sensitive. Organizations are increasingly finding that data masking is mandated for regulatory compliance. It’s also an extremely effective way to reduce enterprise risk. Development and test environments are rarely as secure as production, and there’s little reason developers should have access to sensitive data. Analytical systems are often accessed by a wide variety of users, most of whom shouldn’t see sensitive data, with only a fraction of the access and other security controls in transactional systems. With that, and since I get way more hits if I have the “x laws” in the title, here are the Five Laws of Data Masking: Masking must not be reversible. However you mask your data, it should never be possible to use it to retrieve the original sensitive data. The results must be representative of the source data. The reason to mask data instead of just generating random data is that masking allows you to protect sensitive information that still resembles production data for development and testing purposes. This could include geographic distributions, credit card distributions (e.g., leaving the first 4 numbers unchanged, but scrambling the rest), or maintaining human readability of (fake) names and addresses. Referential integrity must be maintained. Your masking solution should maintain referential integrity- if a credit card number is a primary key, and scrambled as part of masking, then all instances of that number linked through key pairs must be scrambled identically. Only mask non-sensitive data if it can be used to recreate sensitive data. It isn’t necessary to mask everything in your database, just those parts that you deem sensitive. But remember, some non-sensitive data can be used to either recreate or tie back to sensitive data. For example, if you scramble a medical ID but the treatment codes for a record could only map back to the original record, you also need to scramble those codes. This is called inference analysis, and your masking should protect against it. Masking must be a repeatable process. One-off masking is not only nearly impossible to maintain, but it’s fairly ineffective. Development/test data needs to represent constantly changing production data as closely as possible. Analytical data may need to be generated daily, or even hourly. If masking isn’t an automated process it’s inefficient, expensive, and ineffective. I know of some organizations that centralize masking and offer it as an internal service to the enterprise. These “laws” are just to start the discussion on masking. In future posts I’ll discuss my recommended data masking process and what features to look for in tools. And if you absolutely can’t wait until I get around to a follow-on post, join me for the webinar on Friday where I’ll dig in a little deeper. Share:

Over on BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow is doing his best to raise awareness of data breaches in a post entitled, “Database leaks are as immortal and toxic as nuclear spills – let’s start acting like it”. If we are going to contain every heap of data plutonium for 200 years, that means that every single person who will ever be in a position to see, copy, handle, store, or manipulate that data will have to be vetted and trained every bit as carefully as the folks in the rubber suits down at the local fast-breeder reactor. Every gram – sorry, byte – of personal information these feckless data-packrats collect on us should be as carefully accounted for as our weapons-grade radioisotopes, because once the seals have cracked, there is no going back. Once the local sandwich shop’s CCTV has been violated, once the HMRC has dumped another 25 million records, once London Underground has hiccoughed up a month’s worth of travelcard data, there will be no containing it. And what’s worse is that we, as a society, are asked to shoulder the cost of the long-term care of business and government’s personal data stockpiles. When a database melts down, we absorb the crime, the personal misery, the chaos and terror. On the off chance Cory makes it over to this humble site, I’d like to propose some more creative thinking to solve the problem. The truth is we can never completely protect the data for many of the same reasons consumer DRM fails- it only has to leak once for it to appear everywhere. Assets in physical crime are self limiting; there are only so many ways for a horse thief to chop up a horse. Digital assets are nearly infinitely renewable and reusable. We need to keep defending our data, but accept the bad guys will get it. Thus we need to limit the impact of those leaks. I see two options (one focused on a specific issue in the US, the other more generalized), and I’m sure there are more: Release all Social Security Numbers. Then they can no longer be used as a “secret” identifier for financial transactions. This will stop most forms of identity theft in the US, forcing bad guys to shift to more focused account-level fraud. This post explains the difference. Create systems for multi-factor transaction security. Fraud monitoring on credit card accounts is a basic example of this, but there’s a lot more we can do. Placing a fraud alert on your credit report so the monitoring company has to call you before creating a new account is another example. Having your bank verify major account transfers through back channels is another. I call this “Dynamic Authorization” (part of Dynamic Trust) and it leverages the power of real-time technology to change how we perform transactions and authenticate individuals. There are so many creative and effective layers we can add here I get pretty excited just thinking about it. We accept that data will leak, then build security controls to minimize the damage. We’ve barely scratched the surface. Consider this anti-exploitation for financial transactions: we can’t eliminate the vulnerability, but we can reduce the exploitability. There are exceptions. Health care data is one example where the private market won’t solve the problem; we’ll probably need government regulation to reduce the financial value of that data (e.g., forcing insurance companies to provide coverage despite prior conditions). Protecting consumer privacy, such as limiting data collection on buying habits, is another tough area. But right now the biggest problems are financial in nature, and that’s one area where we can make a big dent with some creative approaches. There will always be criminals, but we can sure make their lives harder. Simply storing data in nuclear bunkers and hoping it doesn’t leak isn’t the answer. < p style=”text-align:right;font-size:10px;”>Technorati Tags: Cory Doctorow, Cybercrime, Data Breach, Dynamic Authorization, Vulnerabilities Share:

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems are the technology connection between control systems and the switches, pumps, and motors that run our automated physical world. SCADA is the basis of everything from power plants to train systems. It’s also one heck of a security risk. I’ve talked about SCADA before in a few posts, including this, this, and this. In general, it seems obvious that running these things on standard IT technology, then connecting them to the Internet (no matter how many firewalls you have) isn’t the smartest idea in the world. This is highly contested by SCADA traditionalists who constantly assure us that the odds of a successful attack resulting in physical impacts are extremely low. Methinks those traditionalists might need to pull their heads out of either the sand or a rather unattractive orifice, since there are more than enough examples these days to prove them wrong. The latest, courtesy of Hoff and Stiennon, is that the CIA released a report that hackers have caused unspecified power outages on multiple occasions (overseas is my guess): CIA: Hackers to Blame for Power Outages By TED BRIDIS — 3 hours ago WASHINGTON (AP) – Hackers literally turned out the lights in multiple cities after breaking into electrical utilities and demanding extortion payments before disrupting the power, a senior CIA analyst told utility engineers at a trade conference. All the break-ins occurred outside the United States, said senior CIA analyst Tom Donahue. The U.S. government believes some of the hackers had inside knowledge to cause the outages. Donahue did not specify what countries were affected, when the outages occurred or how long the outages lasted. He said they happened in “several regions outside the United States.” “In at least one case, the disruption caused a power outage affecting multiple cities,” Donahue said in a statement. “We do not know who executed these attacks or why, but all involved intrusions through the Internet.” Both Hoff and Stiennon predicted SCADA attacks this year (and I made fun of them for it, but that’s another story). Now before you SCADA defenders get your panties in a bunch, over my career as an analyst and consultant I was privy to more than one successful and physically dangerous SCADA attack communicated to me by clients. I’ll never talk details, but they really happened, putting lives at stake. I’ll still talk SCADA, but there’s enough evidence now of real problems that I don’t see the need to waste time trying to prove how important it is. If you don’t get it by now, you never will, and I hope you don’t have anything to do with my corner of the power grid. Okay, just a quick primer on the major risks of connecting a process control network with the business network: Loss of communications due to a non-SCADA failure or attack disrupting network communications. Inability to monitor and control remotely. Exploitable vulnerabilities on SCADA systems running on standard platforms, e.g. Windows. You often can’t patch a running SCADA system or install antivirus, HIPS, or other defenses. Vulnerable to mass exploits that have nothing to do with SCADA. Direct attack on SCADA software/systems. Exploitation of a control workstation which is then used to access/control the SCADA system. Has the added advantage that the attacker can remotely monitor normal activity to determine how to commit malicious actions on a proprietary system they don’t have prior knowledge of. < p style=”text-align:right;font-size:10px;”>Technorati Tags: Cybercrime, puppy Share:

Just a quick note- Yesterday, Apple released a QuickTime patch to cover a couple of vulnerabilities, but this does not patch the new RTSP flaw revealed last week. Mac and Windows are both vulnerable, and you should still be very careful using QuickTime streaming over the Internet. Share:

Remember the good old days when vulnerabilities would just affect one platform? Back when there was NO WAY my Commodore 64 could be infected by your TRS-80? It looks like there is a targeted attack going on (where a virus is created and only sent to specific targets so the antivirus companies don’t notice it). It takes advantage of a flaw in older versions of Microsoft Excel. Microsoft’s advisory is here. It’s not the kind of thing most of you will have to worry about unless you become the target, but I’m always interested in 0day attacks and cross-platform vulnerabilities. More from Brian Krebs and the Microsoft Advisory: According to Microsoft’s security advisory, this vulnerability affects Microsoft Excel 2003 Service Pack 2, Microsoft Office Excel Viewer 2003, Microsoft Office Excel 2002, Microsoft Office Excel 2000, and Microsoft Excel 2004 for Mac. People who are using Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Microsoft Excel 2008 for Mac or have installed Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Service Pack 3 are not affected. < p style=”text-align:right;font-size:10px;”>Technorati Tags: 0day, Apple, Excel, Microsoft, Vulnerability, Targeted attack Share:

Security professionals seem to have a strained relationship with Apple these days. Any trip to a security conference shows that more and more security professionals are using Macs on a regular basis. A not-insignificant percentage of the high-end industry types I know shows they all use Macs and iPhones; at home if not at work, often against corporate policy. Yet Apple’s view on security is very… 2001. They do not follow a security development lifecycle. Marketing seems to play too strong a role in security decisions, especially when dealing with researchers. They never finished most of the security features of Leopard, and some products (especially QuickTime) are running at very high vulnerability rates. The first thing we need to get out of the way is that Macs are currently safer to use than Windows XP, even if they aren’t as secure. There just aren’t as many exploits out there in the wild. Vista is more secure, but I find it unusable. This can, and will, change over time as Macs continue to rise in popularity and become a bigger target. Thus, as a security professional I have mixed feelings about Apple. I feel somewhat hypocritical about supporting a company that doesn’t prioritize my bread and butter, but I’m not overly pleased with Window’s UI failings or Linux’s peculiarities. I’ve made the decision to pick the OS that best fits my work and productivity needs, then do what I can to improve the security of the platform. Which gives me three options: Work for Apple. They haven’t called and I’m not waiting. Discover and report vulnerabilities, hoping they’ll get patched. I suck at this, so not the best option. Criticize and constantly pressure them in public, hoping to embarrass them into change. They’ll call me a raving loon, then ignore and marginalize me. Actively engage with the Apple community, give Apple credit for what they get right, and point out where they get things wrong while educating Mac users. This hopefully gains me enough credibility that they can’t simply dismiss me as anti-Apple and I can help the Mac community pressure Apple for needed change. Apple is far from perfect and their security needs a ton of work, but I’m taking a reasoned approach and hoping that by engaging and educating their customers (and thus Apple, indirectly), we can spur change. On that note, I’m off to the Macworld Expo show floor to meet with various vendors (including security vendors) and to play with my new iPhone (yes, I’m weak). < p style=”text-align:right;font-size:10px;”>Technorati Tags: Apple Share: