Research

This is the second part in a two-part series (later paper) on managing increased use and reliance on SaaS for traditional back-office applications. See Part 1. This will also be included in a webcast with Box on March 6, and you can register here. Where to Start Moving back office applications to the cloud is a classic frog-in-a-frying-pan scenario. Sure, a few organizations plan everything out ahead of time, but for most of the companies and agencies we work with, things tend to be far less controlled. Multiple business units run into the cloud on their own – especially since all you need for SaaS is a web browser and a credit card – and next thing you know, your cloud footprint is much bigger than you expected. This is a challenge for security teams, who are often tasked with fixing one cloud at a time as requests come in, without time or support to take a step back and build out a program to support the transition. We don’t recommend putting the brakes on and pissing everyone off, but we do recommend a first step of building a program, instead of just blocking and tackling. Here’s how to pull that off when things are already in motion. Build an “Embrace and Extend” Program The first step isn’t so much a “do this”, as it is “adopt this way of thinking”. It’s also probably our most important piece of advice for you. There are two ways to approach the problem of enforcing your security needs on an external platform. Either wedge in a standard stack of security controls across the board, or evaluate the cloud provider, embrace their security capabilities, extend them where you can, and wedge in controls where you can’t. The first option looks best on the surface because you gain the appearance of consistency, but the practical reality is that the only way to pull it off is to break some cloud functionality, and the advantages are mostly illusory anyway due to major underlying technical differences. We recommend a dual-path approach. Where possible build security controls and management you can extend to the cloud, while embracing your cloud platform’s security capabilities, but also have a wedge stack (usually a CASB in man-in-the-middle/proxy mode) available for providers which don’t offer effective security capabilities. SaaS is the Wild West of the cloud – it offers a mixture of amazing best-of-breed security, alongside providers whose negligence will set your hair on fire. Start by Updating Your Risk Assessment Process The next step is to use some rigor to choose which cloud providers you can support. Your objective is to select a supported SaaS platform for each major back office application category, minimizing the likelihood of employees trying to use unsanctioned and insecure providers. There is no need to rip apart your existing risk assessment process for new tools and technologies, but you do need to tune it with a few specifics to handle SaaS: Build a registry of sanctioned applications in major categories, such as file storage and collaboration, CRM, ERP, HR, communications, etc. Assessing applications can be tough, but usually involves: See if it supports our recommended Critical Security Capabilities for Cloud Providers. This list is a good starting point for components you need to integrate a cloud provider into your security program. Know your compliance requirements and check each provider’s compliance certifications. You might only approve some providers for specific types of data. Obtain the cloud provider’s security and compliance documentation. Many now post this information in the Cloud Security Alliance’s STAR Registry and use the standardized CSA Common Assessment Initiative Questionnaire (CAIQ), so you can compare apples to apples. Review the provider’s security documentation and validate features and capabilities. If you use a CASB (Cloud Access and Security Broker), it may include internal risk ratings you can use to help with selection. Once you pick a provider, document which kinds of data it is approved for in your registry. Ideally you want only one major provider per application category, and new requests can be steered to your preferences. But be open to diverging business unit needs which might require a second provider in a category. Include fast and slow assessment paths, with the fast path for providers which won’t access any sensitive data (e.g., marketing without PII). You don’t want to slow the business down if you can avoid it, or you just might learn the limits of your control and popularity. Build a Federated Identity Management Program Few things push you toward full federated identity and single sign-on than the cloud. It’s pretty much the only way to operate. Although you can handle things with direct federation to your directory servers, we have seen that a commercial tool can be a big help here. We recommend building around a federated identity broker, and including three key pieces in your plan: For every cloud provider, have a non-federated administrative account. That way when your federated identity broker has an issue you can still get into the cloud. Don’t hide your entire back office behind a single appliance. Use a high-availability service (and push hard for real uptime numbers) or multiple on-premise appliances. You do not want to be the one answering the help desk when the entire organization loses access to every back-office, application because your broker borked an update. Require MFA at least for all administrative users, and ideally all users. When possible further enforce MFA by requiring it as an attribute for authentication to the cloud platform (the cloud can require an MFA attribute from the identity broker – this isn’t separate MFA). Create a SaaS Security Program Notice that we only get into the security meat in our third step. That’s because your security program will be crippled without starting from a good process for selecting providers and solid identity management to handle users. Technologies and options change constantly, and vary widely between SaaS providers and security toolsets, but we can build a program

Over a year ago we first published our series on Tidal Forces: The Trends Tearing Apart Security As We Know It. We called out three megatrends in technology with deep and lasting impact on security practice: Endpoints are different, often more secure, and frequently less open. If we look at the hardening of operating systems, exemplified by the less-open-but-more-secure model of Apple’s iOS, the cost of exploiting endpoints is trending much higher. At least it was before Meltdown and Spectre, but fortunately those are (admittedly major) blips, not a permanent direction. Software as a Service (SaaS) is the new back office. Organizations continue to push more and more of their supporting applications into SaaS – especially capabilities such as document management, CRM, and ERP which aren’t core to their mission. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the new data center. The growth of public IaaS has exceeded even our aggressive expectations. It’s the home of most new applications, and a large number of organizations are shifting existing application stacks to IaaS – even when it doesn’t make sense. The fundamental precept of the “Tidal Forces” concept is that these trends act like gravity wells. We are all pulled inexorably towards them, at a rate that increases as we get closer – until we are ripped apart because some parts of the organization move more quickly while others are left behind, but teams like infrastructure and security are must attempt to support both ends of the spectrum simultaneously. Since publication, nothing has dissuaded us from believing these trends will only continue to accelerate and increase internal pressures. This migration of the back office into an ever-growing menagerie of remote services has many practical security implications. It’s more than just losing physical control – different services have different capabilities, and they all demand new security management models, tools, and techniques. The more you try to force the lessons of the past into the future, the more painful the transition. It isn’t that we throw all our knowledge and skills away, but we need to translate them before we can provide security in the new environment. This short paper will highlight some of the top ways security operations are being affected, then offer recommendations for managing the problem over time. How the SaaS Transition Impacts Security Moving your most sensitive data to an outside provider quickly shatters the illusion that physical control matters any more. But the shift doesn’t absolve you of overall security accountability. The transition creates both advantages and challenges, with a wide range of variability depending on how you manage it. The biggest challenge with Software as a Service is the sheer range of capabilities across even similar-seeming providers. Some top-notch SaaS providers understand that major security incidents are existential threats to their business, so they invest heavily in security capabilities and features. Other companies are fast-moving startups which care more about customer acquisition than customer safety – but eventually they will learn, painfully. Aside from their inherent security, these services are all effectively remote applications, each with its own internal security models and capabilities which need to be managed. Risk assessment and platform knowledge are high priorities for security teams managing SaaS. It doesn’t help that these platforms are all inherently Internet accessible. Which mean your data can be too, if you fail to configure them properly. Nearly all the services default to secure options, but the news is filled with examples of… exceptions. Existing tools and techniques rarely apply directly or cleanly to the cloud. You don’t manage a firewall – instead you need to federate for identity management – and just about every traditional monitoring tool breaks. For example consider log management for monitoring and incident response. You generally only have access to the logs provided by your cloud platform, if any, and they are most likely in a custom format and are only accessible via API calls within the cloud provider’s user interface, or as data dumps. Planning on just sniffing ‘your’ traffic? Aside from having almost no context for it, ongoing adoption of TLS 1.3 forces you to drop to less secure encryption options (if they are even available) to capture traffic. Or you can engage in a man-in-the-middle attack against your own users, reducing security to improve monitoring. Last, and for some of you most important, is compliance. You are fully reliant on your SaaS provider’s compliance, and then need to ensure you configure and use everything correctly. With IaaS we can get around some of these restrictions, but with SaaS that usually isn’t an option. When a provider offers baseline compliance with a regulation or standard we call that compliance inheritance, but that only means their baseline is compliant – if you decide to make all your PII records publicly shareable… good luck with the auditors. Every new technology comes with tradeoffs. In the end our job as security practitioners is to decide whether any decision produces a net improvement or loss in risk, and how to best mitigate that risk to the level our organization desires. The cloud comes with tremendous potential security benefits – particularly outsourcing our applications and data to providers with far stronger incentive to keep it secure – but we need to select the right provider, determine the right configuration, and use the right security processes and tools to manage it all. Share:

I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays… just in time to return to work, catch up on email, and watch the entire Internet burn down thanks to a cluster of hardware vulnerabilities built into pretty much every computing platform available. I won’t go into details or background on Meltdown and Spectre (note: if I ever discover a vulnerability, I want it named “CutYourF-ingHeartOutWithSpoon”). Instead I want to talk about them in the context of the cloud, short-term and long-term implications, and some response strategies. These are incredibly serious vulnerabilities – not only due to their immediate implications, but also because they will draw increased scrutiny to a set of hardware weaknesses, which in turn are likely to require a generational fix (a computer generation – not your kids). Meltdown Briefly, Meltdown increases the risk of a multi-tenancy break. This has impacts on three levels: It potentially enables any instance or guest on a system to read all the memory on that system. This is the piece which cloud providers have almost completely patched. On a single system, it could also allow code in a container to read the memory of the entire server. This is likely also patched by cloud providers (AWS/Google/Microsoft). Because Function as a Service (‘serverless’) offerings are really implemented as code in containers, the same issues apply to these products. Meltdown is a privilege escalation vulnerability and requires a malicious process to be run on the system – you cannot use it to gain an initial foothold or exploitation, but to do things like steal secrets from memory once you have presence. Meltdown in its current form on major cloud providers is likely not an immediate security risk. But just to be safe I recommend immediately applying Meltdown patches at the operating system level to any instances you have running. This would have been far worse if there hadn’t been a coordinated disclosure between researchers, hardware and operating system vendors, and cloud providers. You may see some performance degradation, but anything that uses autoscaling shouldn’t really notice. Spectre Spectre is a different group of vulnerabilities which relies on a different set of hardware-related issues. Right now Spectre only allows access to memory the application already has access to. This is still a privilege escalation issue because it’s useful for things like allowing hostile JavaScript code in a browser access to data outside its sandbox. This also seems like it could be an issue for anything which runs multiple processes in a sandbox (such as containers), and might allow reading data from other guests or containers on the same host. Exploitation is difficult, the cloud providers are on it, and there is nothing to be done right now – other than to pay attention. So for both attacks, your short-term action is to patch instances and keep an eye on upcoming patches. Oh – and if you run a private cloud, you really need to patch everything yesterday and be prepared to replace all your hardware within the next few years. All your hardware. Oops. Long-term implications and recommendations These are complex vulnerabilities related to deeply embedded hardware functionality. Spectre itself is more an entire vulnerability/exploit class than a single patchable vulnerability. Right now we seem to have the protections we need available, and the performance implications appear manageable (although the performance impact will be costly for some customers). The bigger concern is that we don’t know what other variants of both vulnerability classes may appear (or be discovered by malicious actors who don’t make them public). The consensus among my researcher friends is that this is a new area of study; while it’s not completely novel, it’s definitely drawing highly intelligent and experienced eyeballs. I will be very surprised if we don’t see more variants and implications over the next few years. Hardware manufacturers need to update chip designs, which is a slow process, and even then they are likely to leave holes which researchers will eventually discover. Let’s not mince words – this is a very big deal for cloud computing. The immediate risk is very manageable but we need to be prepared for the long-term implications. As this evolves, here is what I recommend: Obviously, immediately patch all your operating systems on all your instances to the best of your ability. Hopefully cloud provider mitigations at the hypervisor level are already protecting you, but it’s still better to be safe. Start with a focus on instances where memory leaks are the worst threat. For highly sensitive workloads (e.g., encryption) immediately consider moving to dedicated tenancy and don’t run any less-privileged workloads on the same hardware. Dedicated tenancy means you rent a whole box from your cloud provider, and only your workloads run on it. This eliminates much of the concern of guest to host breaks. Migrate to dedicated PaaS where possible, especially for things like encryption operations. For example if you move to an AWS Elastic Load Balancer and perform discrete application data encryption in KMS, your crypto operations and keys are never exposed in the memory of any general-purpose system. This is the critical piece: the hardware underpinning these services isn’t used for anything other than the assigned service. So another tenant cannot run a malicious process to read the box’s physical memory. If you can’t run malicious code as a tenant, then even if you break multi-tenancy you still need to compromise the entire system – which cloud providers are damn good at preventing. Removing customers’ ability to run arbitrary processes is a massive roadblock to exploitation of these kinds of vulnerabilities. Continue to migrate workloads to Function as a Service (also called ‘serverless’ and ‘Lambda’), but recognize there still are risks. Moving to servlerless pushes more responsibility for mitigating future vulnerabilities in these (and any other) classes onto your cloud provider, but since tenants can run nearly arbitrary code there is always a chance of future issues. Right now my feeling is that the risk is low, and far lower than running things

The gang almost makes it through half the episode before dropping some inappropriate language as they summarize 2017. Rather than focusing on the big news, we spend time reflecting on the big trends and how little has changed, other than the pace of change. How the biggest breaches of the year stemmed from the oldest of old issues, to the newest of new. And last we want to thank all of you for all your amazing support over the years. Securosis has been running as a company for a decade now, which likely scares all of you even more than us. We couldn’t have done it without you… seriously. Share:

This week Mike and Rich address the recent spate of operational fails leading to massive security breaches. This isn’t yet another blame the victim rant, but a frank discussion of why these issues are so persistent and so difficult to actually manage. We also discuss the rising role of automation and its potential to reduce these all-too-human errors. Watch or listen: Share:

Every year, as I travel the security conference circuit, hallway conversations always turn to, “See anything interesting?”. To be honest, I can’t remember the last time I was excited about an honestly cool security technology (which I didn’t create myself, but let’s not go there today). I see plenty of cloud innovation, and plenty of security evolution, but not a lot of revolution. A week ago I picked up my iPhone X. Although I received a background brief on Face ID a couple weeks earlier, I hadn’t gotten my hands on it until then. And, really, didn’t get to play with it until the next day after spending 5 hours restoring my data (all 200 GB of it). Face ID is the most compelling security advance I have seen in a very long time. It’s game-changing not merely due to technology, but also thanks to design and implementation. Apple has created a new authentication modality. First things first: Face ID nails nearly every criteria I came up with to evaluate it. The false positive rate, within certain genetic constraints, is 1 in a million compared, to 1 in 50,000. The inherent security architecture doesn’t look quite as tied to hardware as Touch ID (because the phone needs the sensor package for other capabilities), but does appear to be either as strong (including the software implementation) or close enough in practical circumstances. Watch enough videos of journalists buying masks of their own faces, and it’s clear Face ID is more expensive to circumvent than Touch ID. We haven’t actually seen a public crack yet, but I always assume it will happen eventually. Because history. Apple sometimes has a weak spot underestimating adversaries in their threat models, but they did a good job on this one. In my pre-release article I wrote: Face ID doesn’t need to be the same as Touch ID – it just needs to work reasonably equivalently in real-world use. In my personal experience, and with every user I’ve talked with and in every article I’ve read, Face ID’s core usability is equal to or greater than Touch ID’s. For example, it doesn’t work as well at many angles you could touch your phone from, but it works better in the kitchen and after a shower/workout. I’ve tested it in all sorts of lighting conditions and haven’t found one that trips it up yet. The only downside is I can’t register my wife’s face, and we were become accustomed to using Touch ID on each other’s devices. I do believe it’s slower at actual recognition, but it’s nearly impossible to notice due to the implementation. Face ID is tightly bound to activity, which masks its latency. For example, the time to swipe your fingers is long enough to unlock, where with Touch ID recognition and unlocking were the same action, which made the latency more visible. But I think it’s time to justify that hyperbolic headline. Apple didn’t just throw a facial recognition sensor into the iPhone and replace a fingerprint sensor – they enabled a new security modality. I call this “continuous authentication”. When you use an iPhone you look at the iPhone (some calls and music listening excepted). Instead of unlocking your iPhone once and opening up everything, or requiring you to put your finger on the sensor when an app or feature wants to re-authenticate, the phone can quickly scan your face on demand. And the iPhone does this constantly. Here are the examples I’ve discovered so far: It’s already been widely reported that notification, by default, don’t show details on the lock screen until you look at the iPhone. This is my favorite new feature because it improves security with effectively zero usability impact. I always disabled Control Center on the lock screen for security reasons, but like notifications, just looking at my phone unlocks it. It’s just too bad my thumb can’t reach that upper right corner. Safari now (optionally) uses Face ID before filling in passwords on web sites. Previously, even with Touch ID, they filled in automatically when the phone was unlocked. Apple Pay and the App Store now authenticate with your face without separate authentication actions. Apps can authenticate as you open them. This is where I notice that Face ID is a likely bit slower, but because I don’t need to take another action it feels faster. The lock screen and Safari passwords are, to my knowledge, legitimately new modalities. The others are evolutions of previous use cases. Face ID allows your iPhone to authenticate you under nearly every circumstance you would use your phone and need to authenticate, but without requiring any user action. I think we are just scratching the surface of what’s possible here. Yes, we’ve used tools like Yubikeys plugged into devices to keep sessions open, but I think it’s clear how this is different. This is just the first generation of Face ID. Imagine the use cases once it evolves and can, for example, register multiple users. My Xbox Kinect (may it rest in peace) already does this pretty well, so we know it’s possible (Kinect’s implementation is as secure, and it’s a lot bigger). One of the biggest problems in healthcare security is quickly authenticating to shared workstations in clinical environments… I could see a future version of Face ID significantly addressing that problem. I previously said that Touch ID enables you to use a strong password with the convenience of no password at all. Face ID not only exceeds that mark, it may be the ultimate expression of it, by deeply integrating effortless authentication throughout the user experience without requiring new behaviors. That, my friends, is the power of security design, not just security engineering. Share:

About a year ago I first heard the dreaded acronym “MVC”. It was during a call about a potential project, and this contact kept namedropping it like Kanye or something – not that I knew what it meant at the time. I kept wondering how Model/View/Controller was so important to their deployment. Eventually I learned it stands for “Minimum Viable Cloud”. I want to take whichever consultant came up with that concept, dip them in chocolate, and toss them into a bear preserve. In the spring. Say around March or April. I’ve been hearing it more frequently since then, and here’s what it means, why I think it is a stupendously terrible idea, and a better alternative. Note that I don’t assume MVC is universally defined or understood – it seems to be more of a catchall term designed to assuage cloud fears while driving big consulting projects. The general consensus seems to be that you predefine and build your cloud environment, then shovel all your projects into it. Typically this is a single account (bye bye blasts radius management), with 1-3 virtual networks (dev/prod/???), and the full architecture built out like a single data center. All the security groups, subnets, and other major structures are predefined. These deployments are more likely to have a bunch of virtual appliance versions of the same tools used on-premise. There is a lot of complex work to set up and isolate subnets and such, some minimal cloud-level IAM and alerting, and a lot of baggage carried over from existing operations. It doesn’t work. Not for long. MVC fundamentally breaks agility and reinforces bad old habits. Even if you try to design a ‘friendlier’ MVC deployemnt, it doesn’t scale and doesn’t offer the security benefits of a cloud-native approach. With MVC everything you deploy has to fit an established pattern. Instead of fitting security to the project you are forced to fit the project to the security. Don’t interpret that statement as me saying security is a lower priority – it is an equal priority. The best security is when the parts are designed to cooperate and reinforce each other. You can’t do that with MVC. It is an anti-pattern. MVC also typically results in many assets of differing security contexts sharing the same virtual network and cloud account/subscription/project. It is often selected because, at the start it looks easier to manage, but in the long term it becomes harder, as you struggle to deal with all those conflicting contexts and isolate everything out in an environment not designed for that type of isolation. Instead follow the cloud-native pattern… which works for lift and shift as well as new builds. In this approach the application and security architecture teams work together and design in parallel (ideally – you could add in security later, just not too late). You fit the security to the application. At the start there is a lot of learning new things, but over time you learn and build a library of relatively standard design patterns. You deploy into a clean account/subscription/project each time if you can. This enables you to minimize the number of privileged users who need access to the cloud account and simplifies, overall, the configuration of the accounts. This approach helps you close in on immutable and indempotent deployments (for production – development environments are still more free-form). You now have an isolated environment working within very defined constraints/definitions. This reduces complexity and is a bit of a security dream. It does increase another kind of complexity: managing all these different environments. There are organizations managing thousands of cloud accounts today. Management shifts to automation, deployment pipelines, and maintaining security guardrails across accounts. The alternative is complexity within an account, often leading to conflicting and difficult-to-enforce security boundaries. And that’s the key. I don’t claim managing cloud-native deployments is necessarily easier, but it shifts management in a direction that improves inherent security. You gain stronger security boundaries and tighten control, but in exchange you need to adopt automation and new management techniques and tooling. MVC always fails over the long term. Always – you inevitably reach a point where too many things, across too many conflicting security contexts, are sharing a single implementation. It seems easier up front (and probably is, especially if you are new to the cloud), but sooner than you think you will need to make security compromises. It additionally inhibits your ability to properly design security for any individual project, because the applications are restricted to a pre-configured set of rules. MVC usage correlates highly with ‘monoclouds’: stuffing everything into a single account with a small number of virtual networks. We also see some MVC deployments where they create a standard template and then deploy it into multiple accounts. Those aren’t quite as bad, but you still cannot fit security to the application and deployment. This is a period of massive transition. Greater than corporate adoption of the Internet itself, because the cloud requires deeper reengineering of underlying architectures. This is an incredible opportunity to break out of constraints of the past which have inhibited security – especially backward-looking MVC and monoclouds. Focus on education, automation, and tooling. Instead of building an MVC take a cloud project (ideally a new one) and “right fit” its security. Then take those lessons and move onto the next project. You will trade off getting all your sh** into the cloud as quickly as possible, but gain security and be able to move even more quickly over the long term. Share:

The team is back from the dead, and so are some really crappy cloud ideas. Watch or listen: Share:

As I was flying home from a meeting today I read two security stories that highlighted the differences between bad and less bad ways to report on security issues. Before I go into them, here is how I evaluate articles related to either stunt hacking or super-popular technology: Is there a real vulnerability? Is it exploitable, and to what degree? What are the actual, known, demonstrable consequences of exploitation? Would other controls or the real-world ecosystem limit either exploitation or impact? Who is writing the article or giving the presentation, who are their sources, and why are they talking about it? How did the vendor/target/whoever respond to the situation, and how is this reflected in the article? These are actually the same criteria I apply to original research reports and conference presentations. Now on to the articles: First, a contact at Apple pointed me to this article by Lily Hay Newman in Wired on “privacy risks” with CoreML. (Let’s be honest: I am known to have a real sore spot for this kind of article – the pointer wasn’t accidental. I’ll save you some time by summing it up: CoreML enables machine learning in apps. These apps can have access to your photos (with permission). Machine learning is hard, so bad actors can sneak in code to do things like find nudies or which products you have in the background of photos. This is against the App Store guidelines, but no one really knows whether Apple would detect it. There’s one small quote at the end from an actual security researcher admitting that such an app could just upload every photo to the cloud if it had this permission anyway. Here is how I’ve been summarizing these kinds of pieces, since basically the start of Securosis: There is a new technology getting some decent attention. Hypothetically someone might be able to do bad stuff with it. Let’s put “iPhone” or “critical infrastructure” in the headline so we get lots of clicks. (This list is growing, though – today I would add cars, airplanes, home automation, electronic toys, and robots/drones). Let’s barely mention that multiple other vendors or product categories have the same capability and often worse security controls. Because iPhones! I want to contrast Wired’s piece with a different piece at BleepingComputer on a backdoor in a satellite Internet system heavily used in shipping. The reason this article is a good contrast is because it starts with a similar premise – a researcher finding an issue and taking it to the press (in this case clearly to get some media coverage). I’m not convinced this basis for articles is usually a good thing because a lot of companies push their researchers for “big” findings like this to get attention. But some are legitimately important issues which do need coverage that vendors or whoever would otherwise try to cover up. In this case: Most ships use a popular satellite Internet system. There is a backdoor (literally named backdoor) in the system, plus another vulnerability. The system is at end-of-life, still in wide use, and will not be patched. The system is for Internet traffic only, not ship control, and the networks are separated. Exploiting this is hard but possible. Although you can’t get into control systems, it could be used for tracking or economic malfeasance. It is at least partially patched, and the vendor warned everyone. The key differences: This was a real exploitable vulnerability, not purely hypothetical. The article clearly defined the scope of potential exploitation. The piece was quickly updated with a statement from the product vendor that indicates the issue may not be even as bad as reported by the security vendor. Or an issue at all any more (but the update should be called out at the top, because it totally undermines the rest of the piece). Now, is this article great? No – the headline and section titles are more hyperbolic than the actual text – editors often do this after a writer submits an article. Also I think the refining statement should be at the top. According to Inmarsat’s statement (after release) the exploit requires physical access and remote exploitation is blocked on shoreside firewalls. The positives of the article are that it mostly balances the risk, highlights a really stupid mistake (the backdoor was insanely easy to exploit) and was based… on reality. Do you want to see a similar situation that involved a real exploit, real risks, a horrible vendor response, and resulting widespread action? Check out this article on a pacemaker recall due to exploitable vulnerabilities. It even highlights issues with how it was handled by both researchers and ÷vendors. Share:

Transport Layer Security (TLS) is fundamental to the security of the Internet. Proposed changes to the protocol are generating extensive controversy within and outside the security industry. Rather than getting into cryptographic specifics, this post focuses on the root of the controversy, and why we believe TLS 1.3 should proceed with the full support of technical professionals. What is TLS 1.3? – Transport Layer Security (TLS) is the primary protocol for securely sending information over the Internet. It is the successor to SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and built into every web browser and web server, as well as many other applications. Nearly every website in the world uses TLS to one degree or another to protect communications – including signing into a site with a password, banking, and reading email. TLS is also embedded into many other applications and the guts of the Internet. You use it every day. If you are reading this on our website you used TLS to see this page. If you checked your email today, TLS is what prevented someone on the Internet from reading it. If you are completely non-technical, think of it as a security envelope for your data. But TLS does much more. TLS 1.3 is a proposed draft to update the current version (TLS 1.2 – surprise!) and improve security and performance. As with any software, TLS is never ‘perfect’, and needs updating from time to time. For example one change cuts the window to initiate a secure connection in half. 1.3 also simplifies the kinds of encryption it supports to eliminate known security vulnerabilities. TLS 1.3 is already supported in some web browsers, even though the standard isn’t final. Why is TLS 1.3 controversial? – Version 1.3 eliminates a security weakness of TLS 1.2, but that exact weakness is used by many organizations to monitor their networks. Some organizations and security vendors want to retain it so they can continue to use existing technique to monitor traffic. We need to choose between better inherent Internet security and supporting a widely used monitoring technique. Monitoring itself is not inherently bad. Common tools like Data Loss Prevention rely on peering into encrypted connections on corporate networks to identify sensitive data being accidentally or maliciously exposed. Other tools sniff connections to recognize attacker activity, and then either block or alert. It’s a form of wiretapping, but one widely used as part of security programs rather than for spying – although it can obviously be used for both. Security is always a balancing act, so we often face these difficult decisions. Fortunately in this case there are alternative techniques to achieve the same security goals, so our position is that we should not keep a vulnerability in a core Internet protocol just to support existing security tools. The controversy is about security vs. cost. Existing monitoring approaches can support 1.3, so a possibly higher implementation cost should not excuse a security reduction. What exactly is the security weakness TLS 1.3 eliminates? – Version 1.3 eliminates support for an older way of setting up encrypted connections using a master key. It could enable someone with a copy of the master key to sniff all encrypted traffic. They could also decrypt any previously recorded traffic protected with that key. The proposed updates to TLS use a different key for every connection, so there is no master key which could allow unrestricted monitoring. We call this Perfect Forward Secrecy, if you want to look it up. This is a pretty big weakness, which has been used in attacks. Unfortunately it’s also used by legitimate security tools for more efficient monitoring. Does TLS 1.3 reduce enterprise and government security? – No. It changes how you need to implement some security. It will cost money to update to new kinds of systems to perform the same kinds of monitoring. It will require rethinking how we do some things today. But it does not eliminate the ability to achieve security objectives. Organizations that need to monitor traffic can do so with four techniques: Active interception (man in the middle) techniques. Using software to capture traffic on endpoint systems, instead of on the network. Capturing data on Internet servers. For example, some cloud services allow you to track all employee data and activity. For servers you control, you can still use TLS 1.2. It will likely be supported for many years. Do we really need to remove passive monitoring from TLS 1.2? – Yes. We face a simple choice: we can make network sniffing attacks harder, or easier. We can improve security, or leave a known vulnerability. Our position is that we should always choose stronger security. The Internet is littered with the consequences of choosing weaker options, especially for encryption. Support for passive monitoring of encrypted connections may help some aspects of an organization’s security program, but only at the expense of long-term security. Attackers, criminal and otherwise, can leverage this to spy on organizations, individuals, and governments. They can potentially record traffic on networks and then decrypt it later… even weeks, months, or years later. We have seen this exploited in criminal and government attacks – it is not a theoretical vulnerability. What is the impact if TLS 1.3 is adopted? – There won’t be any immediate impact in most cases. TLS 1.2 is still completely supported and will be for a long time. As online services start adopting TLS 1.3, organizations which rely on passive sniffing of encrypted connections may start losing visibility into those connections. Organizations which want to maintain this visibility will need to update their tools and techniques. But the entire Internet won’t shift to TLS 1.3 overnight, so there is time to make the transition. Transport Layer Security 1.3 brings important security improvements to one of the most foundational technologies used to protect Internet communications. It eliminates a form of passive sniffing that, although used for legitimate security purposes, also weakens Internet communications. We would rather have an inherently secure Internet than keep a