It is starting to feel like summer. Both because the weather is getting warmer and because most of the Securosis team has been taking family time this week. I will keep the summary short – we have not been doing much writing and research this week.
We talk a lot about security and compliance for cloud services. It has become a theme here that, while enterprises are comfortable with SaaS (such as Salesforce), they are less comfortable with PaaS (Dropbox & Evernote, etc.), and often refuse to touch IaaS (largely Amazon AWS) … for security and compliance reasons. Wider enterprise adoption has been stuck in the mud – largely because of compliance. Enterprises simply can’t get the controls and transparency they need to meet regulations, and they worry that service provider employees might steal their $#!%. The recent Bloomberg terminal spying scandal is a soft-core version of their nightmare scenario.
As I was browsing through my feeds this week, it became clear that Amazon understands the compliance and security hurdles it needs to address, and that they are methodically removing them, one by one. The news of an HSM service a few weeks ago was very odd at first glance – it seems like the opposite of a cloud service: non-elastic, non-commodity, and not self-service. But it makes perfect sense for potential customers whose sticking point is a compliance requirement for HSM for key storage and/or generation.
A couple weeks ago Amazon announced SOC compliance, adding transparency to their security and operational practices. They followed up with a post discussing Redshift’s new transparent encryption for compute nodes, so stolen disks and snapshots would be unreadable. Last week they announced FedRAMP certification, opening the door for many government organization to leverage Amazon cloud services – probably mostly community cloud. And taking a page from the Oracle playbook, Amazon now offers training and certification to help traditional IT folks close their cloud skills gap. Amazon is doing a superlative job of listening to (potential) customer impediments and working through them.
By obtaining these certifications Amazon has made it much easier for customers to investigate what they are doing, and then negotiate a the complicated path to contract with Amazon while satisfying corporate requirements for security controls, logging, and reporting. Training raises IT’s comfort level with cloud services, and in many cases will shift detractors (IT personnel) into advocates.
But I still have reservations about security. It’s great that Amazon is addressing critical problems for AWS customers and building these critical security and compliance technologies in-house. But this makes it very difficult for customers to select non-Amazon tools for key management, encryption, logging. Amazon is on their home turf, offering real useful services optimized for their offering, with good bundled pricing. But these solutions are not necessarily designed to make you ‘secure’. They may not even address your most pressing threats because they are focused on common federal and enterprise compliance concerns. These security capabilities are clearly targeted at compliance hurdles that have been slowing AWS adoption. Bundled security capabilities are not always the best ones to choose, and compliance capabilities have an unfortunate tendency to be just good enough to tick the box.
That said, the AWS product managers are clearly on top of their game!
On to the Summary:
Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences
Adrian presenting next week on Tokenization vs. Encryption.
Adrian’s Security Implications of Big Data.
Favorite Securosis Posts
Evernote Business Edition Doubles up on Authentication.
Quick Wins with Website Protection Services: Deployment and Ongoing Management.
Favorite Outside Posts
Mike Rothman: Mandiant’s APT1: Revisited. Is the industry better off because Mandiant published the APT1 report? Nick Selby thinks so, and here are his reasons. I agree.
Adrian Lane: Walmart Asked CA Shoppers For Zip Codes. Now It’s Ordered To Send Them Apology Giftcards. It’s a sleazy practice – cashiers act like the law requires shoppers to provide the zip codes, and are trained to stall if they don’t get it. The zip codes enable precise data analytics to identify shoppers. It’s good to see some merchant actually got penalized for this scam.
Research Reports and Presentations
Email-based Threat Intelligence: To Catch a Phish.
Network-based Threat Intelligence: Searching for the Smoking Gun.
Understanding and Selecting a Key Management Solution.
Building an Early Warning System.
Implementing and Managing Patch and Configuration Management.
Defending Against Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks.
Securing Big Data: Security Recommendations for Hadoop and NoSQL Environments.
Tokenization vs. Encryption: Options for Compliance.
Pragmatic Key Management for Data Encryption.
The Endpoint Security Management Buyer’s Guide.
Top News and Posts
Paypal Site vulnerable to XSS. Via Threatpost. Two words: Dedicated. Browser.
Sky hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army.
Postgres Database security patch. Couple weeks old – we missed it – but a remote takeover issue.
Anonymous Hacktivist Jeremy Hammond Pleads Guilty to Stratfor Attack.
U.S. Government Seizes LibertyReserve.com.
Why We Lie.
Elcomsoft says Apple’s 2FA has holes.
Blog Comment of the Week
This week’s best comment goes to LonerVamp, in response to last week’s Friday Summary.
As long as Google isn’t looking at biometrics, or other ways to uniquely identify me as a product of their advertising revenues, I’m interested in what they come up with. But just like their Google+ Real Names fiasco, I distrust anything they want to do to further identify me and make me valuable for further targeted advertising.
Plus the grey market of sharing backend information with other (paying) parties. For instance, there are regulations to protect user privacy, but often the expectation of privacy is relaxed when it “appears” the a third party already knows you. For instance, if I have a set of data that includes mobile phone numbers (aka accounts) plus full real name of the owners, there can be some shady inferred trust that I am already intimate with you, and thus selling/sharing additional phone/device data with me is ok, as long as its done behind closed doors and neither of us talk about it.
Tactics like that are how these advertisers dance around regulations. Or they just plain do it until they get caught and their bottom line gets hit.
At some point I’ll just say fuck it and give up. 🙂
BTW, that motorist vs bicyclist article? Thanks! People suck… 🙁 This is one reason I could argue for more full-time surveillance, since people like that will either be deterred or caught and punished as needed. Just don’t be dicks…it’s not that hard of a concept.
Comments