Research

In the the last twelve months we’ve witnessed the highest rates of data theft disclosures since the record setting year of 2008 (including, for the first time in public, Rich’s credit card). So predictably there will be plenty of FUD balloons flying at this year’s conference. From Anonymous to the never-ending Wikileaks fallout and cloud fears, there is no shortage of chatter about data security (or “data governance” for people who prefer to write about protecting stuff instead of actually protecting it). Guess Mr. Market is deciding what’s really important, and it usually aligns with the headlines of the week. But you know us, we still think Data Security is pretty critial and all this attention is actually starting to drive things in a positive direction, as opposed to the days of thinking data security meant SSL + email filtering. Here are five areas of interest at the show for data security: Da Cloud and Virtual Private Storage The top two issues we hear most organizations cite when they are concerned about moving to cloud computing, especially public cloud, are data security and compliance. While we aren’t lawyers or auditors, we have a good idea how data security is playing out. The question shouldn’t be to move or not to move, but should be how to adopt cloud computing securely. The good news is you can often use your existing encryption and key management infrastructure to encrypt data and then store it in a public cloud. Novel, eh? We call it Virtual Private Storage, just as VPNs use encryption to protect communications over a public resource. Many enterprises want to take advantage of cheap (maybe) public cloud computing resources, but compliance and security fears still hold them back. Some firms choose instead to build a private cloud using their own gear or request a private cloud from a public cloud provider (even Amazon will sell you dedicated racks… for a price). But the virtual private storage movement seems to be a hit with early adopters, with companies able to enjoy elastic cloud storage goodness, leveraging cloud storage cost economies instead of growing (and throwing money into) their SAN/NAS investment, and avoiding many of the security concerns inherent to multi-tenant environments. Amazon AWS quietly productized a solution for this a few months back, making it even easier to get your data into their cloud, securely. Plus most encryption and key management vendors have basic IaaS support in current products for private and hybrid clouds, with some better public cloud coverage on the way. Big is the New Big The machine is hungry – must feed the machine! Smart phones sending app data and geolocation data, discreet marketing spyware and web site tracking tools are generating a mass of consumer data increasingly stored in big data and NoSQL databases for analysis, never mind all the enterprises linking together previously-disparate data for analysis. There will be lots of noise about about Big Data and security at RSAC, but most of it is hype. Many security vendors don’t even realize Big Data refers to a specific set of technologies and not any large storage repository. Plus, a lot of the people collecting and using Big Data have no real interest in securing that data; only getting more data and pumping into more sophisticated analysis models. And most of the off-the-shelf security technologies won’t work in a Big Data environment or the endpoints where the data is collected. And let’s also not confuse Big Data from the user standpoint, which as described above, as massive analysis of sensitive business information, with Big Security Data. You’ll also hear a lot about more effectively analyzing the scads of security data collected, but that’s different. We discussed that a bit in our Key Themes section. Masking It’s a simple technology that scrambles data. It’s been around for many years and has been used widely to create safe test data from production databases. But the growth in this market over the last two years leads us to believe that masking vendors will have a bigger presence at the RSA show. No, not as big as firewalls, but these are definitely folks you should be looking at. Fueling the growth is the ability to effectively protect large complex data sets in a way that encryption and masking technologies have not. For example, encrypting a Hadoop cluster is usually neither feasible nor desirable. Second, the development of dynamic masking and ‘in place’ masking variants are easier to use than many ETL solutions. Expect to hear about masking from both big and small vendors during the show. We touched on this in the Compliance section as well. Big Brother and iOS Data Loss Prevention will still have a big presence this year both in terms of the dedicated tools and the DLP-Lite features being added to everything from your firewall to the Moscone beverage stations. But there are also new technologies keeping an eye on how users work with data- from Database Activity Monitoring (which we now call Database Security Platforms, and Gartner calls Database Audit and Protection), to File Activity Monitoring, to new endpoint and cloud-oriented tools. Also expect a lot of talk about protecting data from those evil iPhones and iPads. Breaking down the trend what we will see are more tools offering more monitoring in more places. Some of these will be content aware, while others will merely watch access patterns and activities. A key differentiator will be how well their analytics work, and how well they tie to directory servers to identify the real users behind what’s going on. This is more evolution than revolution, and be cautious with products that claim new data protection features but really haven’t added content analysis or other information-centric technology. As for iOS, Apple’s App Store restrictions are forcing the vendors to get creative. you’ll see a mix of folks doing little more than mobile device management, while others are focusing on really supporting mobility with well-designed portals and sandboxes that still allow the users to work on their devices. To

It’s a presidential election year here in the US, and that means the master spin meisters, manipulators, and liars politicians are out in full force. Normally I just tune out, wait for the primary season to end, and then figure out who I want to vote for. But I know better than to discuss either religion or politics with people I like. And that means you. So I’m not going to go there. But this election cycle is different for me, and it will be strange. I suspect I won’t be able to stay blissfully unaware until late summer because XX1 is old enough to understand what is going on. She watches some TV and will inevitably be exposed to political attack ads. It’s already happened. She’s very inquisitive, so I was a bit surprised when she asked if the President is a bad man. I made the connection right away and had to have a discussion about negative political ads, spin, and trying to find the truth somewhere in the middle. Your truth may be different than my truth. Fundamentally, totally different. But suffice it to say the venom that will be polluting our airwaves over the next 6 months is not close to anyone’s truth. It’s overt negativity (thanks, Karl Rove) and I have no doubt that once the Republican candidate is identified, the Democratic hounds will be unleashed against him. Notice I was male gender specific, but that’s another story for another day. I guess it must be idealistic Tuesday. Can’t the candidates have an honest, fact-based dialog about the issues? And let citizens make informed decisions instead of manipulating them with fear, uncertainty, and doubt? Funded by billionaires looking to make their next billions. Yeah, no shot of that. You see, I’m no pollyanna. I know that anyone actually trying to undertake a civil discourse would get crushed by the 24/7 media cycle and privately funded attack ads which twist their words anyway. We elect the most effective poop flinger here in the US, and it’s pretty sad. Lord knows, once they get elected they face 4 or 8 years of gridlock and then a lifetime of Secret Service protection. It’s one of those be careful what you wish for situations. But hey, everyone wants to be the most powerful person on the world for a while, right? Again, normally I ignore this stuff and stay focused on the only thing I can really control: my work ethic. But with impressionable young kids in the house we will need to discuss a lot of this crap, debunk obvious falsehoods, and try to educate the kids on the issues. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not easy either. Or I could enforce a media blackout until November 7. Now, that’s the ticket. -Mike Note: Next week is the RSA Conference, and that doesn’t leave a lot of time to do much Inciting. So we’ll skip the Incite next week and perhaps provide a jumbo edition on March 7. Or maybe not… Photo credits: “Poop Here” originally uploaded by kraskland Heavy Research No holiday for us. We hammered you on the blog Monday, which many of you may have ignored. So here’s a list of the things we’ve posted to the Heavy Feed over the past week. Malware Analysis Quant Metrics – Define Rules and Search Queries Metrics – The Malware Profile Metrics – Dynamic Analysis Metrics – Static Analysis Metrics – Build Testbed Metrics – Confirm Infection Malware Analysis Quant: Take the Survey (and win fancy prizes!) We need your help to understand what you do (and what you don’t) in terms of malware analysis. And you can win some nice gift cards from Amazon for your trouble. RSA Conference 2012 Guide Security Management and Compliance Email & Web Security Endpoint Security Application Security Here’s the other stuff we’ve been up to: Understanding and Selecting DSP: Core Components. Featuring the Jack and the DSPeanstalk image. Check it out. Implementing DLP: Deploying Storage and Endpoint Remember you can get our Heavy Feed via RSS, where you can access all our content in its unabridged glory. So check them out and (as always) please let us know what you think via comments. Incite 4 U It’s not about patching, it’s about web-scale architecture: It seems Rafal Los got his panties in a bunch when Mort threw out a thought balloon about shortening patch windows with smaller and more frequent patching. Though I think the term ‘patch’ here is what’s muddying the issue. Everyone realizes that most SaaS apps ‘patch’ whenever they need to with little downtime. At least if they are architected correctly. And that’s the point – I Mort as saying we need to really rethink application and deployment architectures to be more resilient and less dependent on huge patches/upgrades that can cause more problems than they fix. As LonerVamp points out, downtime is a hassle and more frequent patches are a pain in the backside. And for the way we currently do things, he’s right. But if we rethink architecture (which does take years), why wouldn’t we choose to fix things when they break, instead of when there are a bunch of other things to fix? – MR Political Deniability: I learned long ago to ignore all the cyberchatter coming out of Congress until they actually pass a bill and fund an enforcement body, and someone gets nailed with fines or jail time. How long have we been hearing about that national breach disclosure law that every vendor puts in their PowerPoint decks, despite, you know, not actually being a law? Si we can’t put too much stock in the latest National Cybersecurity Bill, but this one seems to have a chance, if the distinguished senior senator from my home state of Arizona doesn’t screw it up because he wasn’t consulted enough. Come on, man, grow up! The key element of this bill that I think could make a difference is that it’s the first attempt I’m aware of to waive liability for organizations so they can share cybersecurity information (breach data). That’s a common reason

As we continue with our tour through the RSA Conference, we’re in the home stretch. Today we’ll hit both security management and compliance, since the two are intrinsically linked. Security Management Security Management has been a dynamic and quickly evolving space that received a lot of attention at conference like RSA. Yet, we will probably see a little bit less visibility on the part of what we typically call security management (basically SIEM/Log Management) this year, because there will be fewer folks beating the drum for this technology. Why? That brings us to our first observation… I can haz your start-up Amazingly enough, the two highest profile SIEM/Log Management vendors were acquired on the same day last October. Q1Labs by IBM and Nitro Security by McAfee, which we wrote about in this post. This followed Big IT investing in the space over the previous few years (HP bought ArcSight in 2010 and RSA bought Network Intelligence in 2006 and Netwitness in earlier in 2011). So basically at the RSA show, you’ll see these security management platforms positioned clearly as the centerpiece of the security strategies of the Big security vendors. Cool, huh? The technology has moved from being an engine to generate compliance reports to a strategic part of the big security stack. What will you see from these big vendors? Mostly a vision about how buying into their big security stacks you’d be able to enforce a single policy across all of your security domains and gain tremendous operational leverage. I say vision because the reality is these deals have all closed within the last two years and true integration remains way down the line. So make sure to poke hard on the plans for true integration, as opposed to what the booth graphics say. And then add a year or two to their estimates. But there is one area of integration where you can get immediate value which is integration on the purchase order, which we don’t want to minimize. Being able to dramatically expand a security management implementation with money already committed to a 7 or 8-figure enterprise purchase agreement is a good thing. What about the Independents? You know, the handful that remain. These folks have no choice but to focus on the fact they aren’t a big company, but as we mentioned in the IBM/Q1 and MFE/Nitro deal analysis post, security management is a big company game now. But do check out these vendors to see them thinking somewhat out of the box relative to what’s next. Clearly you aren’t going to see a lot of forward thinking innovation out of the big vendors, as they need to focus more in integration. But the smaller vendors should be able to push the ball forward, and then see their innovations co-opted by the big guys. Yup, it’s a brutal world out there, but that’s how things work. Don’t forget about those pesky logs. As mentioned, a lot of focus will be on how SIEM becomes the centerpiece of the big IT companies security stacks. But let’s make the point that Log Management isn’t dead. You’ll see some companies looking to replicate the success of Splunk in focusing on not only security-oriented use cases for log data. That means things like the use cases discussed in our Monitoring Up the Stack research, and things like click stream analysis, transaction fraud detection, and pinpointing IT operations issues. Also expect to hear a bunch about log management in the cloud. For those smaller organizations, this kind of deployment model can make a lot of sense. But there are some multi-tenancy complications to storing your logs in someone else’s cloud. So be sure to ask very detailed and granular questions about how they segment and protect the log data you send to them. Platform hyperbole Finally let’s point out the place where you’ll need to cut through the vendor boasts and hyperbole with a machete. That’s these so-called platforms, described above. We’ve been talking for a long time about the need to go beyond logs for a more functional security management capability, and you’ll hear that at the show as well. But the question will remain, where does the platform begin? And where does it end? There is no clear answer. But let’s be very clear, we believe the security management platform of the future will be able to digest and analyze network full packet capture traffic. As we discussed in our Advanced Network Security Analysis research, to truly confirm a breach and understand the attacks used against you, it requires more granular information that exists in the logs. The question is to what degree the security management vendors acknowledge that. The vendors that have it either via acquisition (RSA) or partnership (everyone else), won’t shy away from this realization. The real question gets back to you. To what degree can your existing personnel and processes make effective use of packet capture data? if you don’t have the sophistication to do malware analysis or do a detailed forensic investigation in house, then logs are good for the time being. But if you are interested in full packet capture, then really hit the vendors on integration with their existing SIEM platform. Firing alerts in two separate consoles doesn’t help you do things faster, nor is clicking on a log record to isolate the packet capture data in another system going to be a long term solution. You’ll also still hear a bit about GRC, but the wind is out of those sails, and justifiably so. Not that IT-GRC platforms can’t add value, but most companies have a hard enough time getting their SIEM to correlate anything, so the idea of a big stack IT-GRC and the associate integration is challenging. Compliance We get the sense that most of the vendors are tired of talking about compliance as they have switched their focus to APT and ‘The Insider Threat’. You know, that sexy security stuff, while compliance continues to be the biggest driver of security spend. Though you know trade shows, the

Those of you familiar with DAM already know that over the last four years DAM solutions have been bundled with assessment and auditing capabilities. Over the last two years we have seen near universal inclusion of discovery and rights management capabilities. DAM is the centerpiece of a database security strategy, but as a technology it is just one of a growing number of important database security tools. We have already defined Database Security Platform, so now let’s spend a moment looking at the key components, how we got here, and where the technology and market are headed. We feel this will fully illustrate the need for the name change. Database Security Platform Origins The situation is a bit complicated, so we include a diagram that maps out the evolution. Database Activity Monitoring originated from leveraging core database auditing features, but quickly evolved to include supporting event collection capabilities: Database Auditing using native audit capabilities. Database Activity Monitoring using network sniffing to capture activity. Database Activity Monitoring with server agents to capture activity. So you either used native auditing, a network sniffer, or a local agent to track database activity. Native auditing had significant limitations – particularly performance – so we considered the DAM market distinct from native capabilities. Due to customer needs, most products combined network monitoring and agents into single products – perhaps with additional collection capabilities, such as memory scanning. The majority of deployments were to satisfy compliance or audit requirements, followed by security. There were also a range of distinct database security tools, generally sold standalone: Data Masking to generate test data from protection data, and to protect sensitive information while retaining important data size and structural characteristics. Database Assessment (sometimes called Database Vulnerability Assessment) to assess database configurations for security vulnerabilities and general configuration policy compliance. User Rights Management to evaluate user and group entitlements, identify conflicts and policy violations, and otherwise help manage user rights. File Activity Monitoring to monitor (and sometimes filter) non-database file activity. Other technologies have started appearing as additional features in some DAM products: Content Discovery and Filtering to identify sensitive data within databases and even filter query results. Database Firewalls which are essentially DAM products placed inline and set to filter attack traffic, not merely monitor activity. The following graph shows where we are today: As the diagram shows, many of these products and features have converged onto single platforms. There are now products on the market which contain all these features, plus additional capabilities. Clearly the term “Database Activity Monitoring” only covers a subset of what these tools offer. So we needed a new name to better reflect the capabilities of these technologies. As we looked deeper we realized how unusual standalone DAM products were (and still are). It gradually became clear that we were watching the creation of a platform, rather than the development of a single-purpose product. We believe the majority of database security capabilities will be delivered either as a feature of a database management system, or in these security products. We have decided to call them Database Security Platforms, as that best reflects the current state of the market and how we see it evolving. Some of these products include non-database features designed for data center security – particularly File Activity Monitoring and combined DAM/Web Application Firewalls. We wouldn’t be surprised to see this evolve into a more generic data center security play, but it’s far too early to see that as a market of its own. Market and Product Evolution We already see products differentiating based on user requirements. Even when feature parity is almost complete between products, we sometimes see vendors shifting them between different market sectors. We see primary use cases, and we expect products to differentiate along these lines over time: Application and Database Security: These products focus more on integrating with Web Application Firewalls and other application security tools. They place a higher priority on vulnerability and exploit detection and blocking; and sell more directly to security, application, and database teams. Data and Data Center Security: These products take a more data-centric view of security. Their capabilities will expand more into File Activity Monitoring, and they will focus more on detecting and blocking security incidents. They sell to security, database, and data center teams. Audit and Compliance: Products that focus more on meeting audit requirements – and so emphasize monitoring capabilities, user rights management, and data masking. While there is considerable feature overlap today, we expect differentiation to increase as vendors pursue these different market segments and buying centers. Even today we see some products evolving primarily in one of these directions, which is often reflected in their sales teams and strategies. This should give you a good idea of how we got here from the humble days of DAM, and why this is more than just a rebranding exercise. We don’t know of any DAM-only tools left on the market, so that name clearly no longer fits. As a user and/or buyer we also think it’s important to know which combination of features to look at, and how they can indicate the future of your product. Without revisiting the lessons learned from other security platforms, suffice it to say that you will want a sense of which paths the vendor is heading down before locking yourself into a product that might not meet your needs in 3-5 years. Share:

Just a quick announcement that this Wednesday I will be doing a webcast on how to reduce PCI-DSS scope and audit costs with tokenization. This will cover the meaty part of our Tokenization Guidance paper from last year. In the past I have talked about issues with the PCI Council’s Tokenization supplement; now I will dig into how tokenization affects credit card processing systems, and how supplementary systems can fall out of scope. The webcast will start at 11am PST and run for an hour. You can sign up at the sponsor’s web site. Share:

Just a little President’s Day update on the Malware Analysis Quant project. At the end of last month we packaged up all the process descriptions into a spiffy paper, which you can download and check out. We have been cranking away at the second phase of the research, and the first step of that is the survey. Here is a direct survey link, and we would love your input. Even if you don’t do in-depth malware analysis every day, that’s instructive, as we try to figure out how many folks actually do this work, and how many rely on their vendors to take care of it. Finally, we have also started to document the metrics that will comprise the cost model which is the heart of every Quant project. Here are links to the metrics posts we include both in the Heavy feed and on the Project Quant blog. Metrics – Confirm Infection Metrics – Build Testbed Metrics – Static Analysis Metrics – Dynamic Analysis Metrics – The Malware Profile One last note: as with all of projects, our research methodology is dynamic. That means posting something on our blog is just the beginning. So if you read something you don’t agree with let us know, and work with us to refine the research. Leave a comment on the blog, or if for some reason you can’t do that drop us an email. Share:

For a little bonus on a Sunday afternoon, let’s dig into the next section of the RSA Guide, Email and Web Security which remains a pretty hot area. This shouldn’t be surprising since these devices tend to be one of the only defenses against your typical attacks like phishing and drive-by downloads. We’ve decided to no longer call this market ‘content security’; that was a terrible name. Email and Web Security speaks to both the threat models as well as the deployment architectures of what started as the ‘email security gateway’ market. These devices screen email and web traffic moving in and out of your company at the application layer. The goal is to prevent unwanted garbage like malware from coming into your network, as well as detection of unwanted activity like employees clogging up the network with HiDef downloads of ‘Game of Thrones’. These gateways have evolved to include all sorts of network and content analysis tools for a variety of traffic types (not just restricted to web traffic). Some of the vendors are starting to resemble UTM gateways, placing 50 features all on the same box, and letting the user decide what they want from the security feature buffet. Most vendors offer a hybrid model of SaaS and in-house appliances for flexible deployments while keeping costs down. This is a fully mature and saturated market, with the leading vendors on a very even footing. There are several quality products out there, each having a specific strength in their technology, deployment or pricing model. There are quite a few areas of interest at the show for web gateway security: VPN Security and the Cloud Remember how VPN support was a major requirement for every email security appliance? Yeah, well, it’s back. And it’s new and cloudified! Most companies provide their workforce with secure VPN connections to work from home or on the road. And most companies find themselves supporting more remote users more often than ever, which we touched on in the Endpoint Security section. As demand grows so too does the need for better, faster VPN services. Leveraging cloud services these gateways route users through a cloud portal, where user identification and content screening occur, then passing user requests into your network. The advantages are you get scalable cloud bandwidth, better connectivity, and security screening before stuff hits your network. More (poor man’s) DLP Yes, these secure web offerings provide Data Loss Prevention ‘lite’. In most cases, it’s just the subset of DLP needed to detect data exfiltration. And regular expression checking for outbound documents and web requests is good enough to address the majority of content leakage problems, so this works well enough for most customers, which makes it one of the core features every vendor must have. While it’s difficult for any one vendor to differentiate their offering by having DLP-lite, but they’ll have trouble competing in the marketplace without it. It’s an effective tool for select data security problems. Global Threat Intelligence Global threat intelligence involves a security vendor collecting attack data from all their customers, isolating new attacks that impact a handful, and automatically applying security responses to their other client installations. When implemented correctly, it’s effective at slowing down the propagation of threats across many sites. The idea has been around for a couple years, originating in the anti-spam business, but has begun to show genuine value for some firewall, web content and DAST (dynamic application security testing) products. Alas, like many features, some are little more than marketing ‘check the box’ functionality here while others actually collect data from all their clients and promptly distribute anonymized intelligence back to the rest of their customers to ensure they don’t get hammered. It’s difficult to discern one from the other, so you’ll need to dig into the product capabilities. Though it should be fun on the show floor to force an SE or other sales hack to try to explain exactly how the intelligence network works. Anti-malware Malware is the new ‘bad actor’. It’s the 2012 version of the Trojan Horse; something of a catch-all for viruses, botnets, targeted phishing attacks, keystroke loggers and marketing spyware. It infects servers and endpoints by any and all avenues available. And just as the term malware covers a lot of different threats, vendor solutions are equally vague. Do they detect botnet command and control, do they provide your firewall with updated ‘global intelligence’, or do they detect phishing email? Whatever the term really means, you’re going to hear a lot about anti-malware and why you must stop it. Though we do see innovation on network-based malware detection, which we covered in the Network Security section. New Anti-Spam. Same as the old Anti-Spam We thought we were long past the anti-spam discussion, isn’t that problem solved already? Apparently not. Spam still exists, that’s for sure, but any given vendor’s efficiency varies from 98% to 99.9% effective on any given week. Just ask them. Being firm believers in Mr. Market, clearly there is enough of an opportunity to displace incumbents, as we’ve seen a couple new vendors emerge to provide new solutions, and established vendors to blend their detection techniques to improve effectiveness. There is a lot of money spent specifically for spam protection, and it’s a visceral issue that remains high profile when it breaks, thus it’s easy to get budget for. Couple that with some public breaches from targeted phishing attacks or malware infections through email (see above), and anti-spam takes on a new focus. Again. We don’t think this is going to alter anyone’s buying decisions, but we wanted to make sure you knew what the fuss was about, and not to be surprised when you think you stepped into RSA 2005 seeing folks spouting about new anti-spam solutions. Share:

Ah, the endpoint. Do you remember the good old days when endpoint devices were laptops? That made things pretty simple, but alas, times have changed and the endpoint devices you are tasked to protect have changed as well. That means it’s not just PC-type devices you have to worry about – it’s all varieties of smartphones and in some industries other devices including point of sale terminals, kiosks, control systems, etc. Basically anything with an operating system can be hacked, so you need to worry about it. Good times. BYOD everywhere You’ll hear a lot about “consumerization” at RSAC 2012. Most of the vendors will focus on smartphones, as they are the clear and present danger. These devices aren’t going away, so everybody will be talking about mobile device management. But as in other early markets, there is a plenty of talk but little reality to back it up. You should use the venue to figure out what you really need to worry about, and for this technology that’s really the deployment model. It comes down to a few questions: Can you use the enterprise console from your smartphone vendor? Amazingly enough, the smartphone vendors have decent controls to manage their devices. And if you live in a homogenous world this is a logical choice. But if you live in a heterogenous world (or can’t kill all those BlackBerries in one fell swoop), a vendor console won’t cut it. Does your IT management vendor have an offering? Some of the big stack IT security/management folks have figured out that MDM is kind of important, so they offer solutions that plug into the stuff you already use. Then you can tackle the best of breed vs. big stack discussion, but this is increasingly a reasonable alternative. What about those other tools? If you struck out with the first two questions you should look at one of the start-up vendors who make a trade on heterogenous environment. But don’t just look for MDM – focus on what else those folks are working on. Maybe it’s better malware checking. Perhaps it’s integration with network controls (to restrict devices to certain network segments). If you find a standalone product, it is likely to be acquired during your depreciation cycle, so be sure there is enough added value to warrant the tool standing alone for a while. Another topic to grill vendors on is how they work with the “walled garden” of iOS (Apple mobile devices). Vendors have limited access into iOS, so look for innovation above and beyond what you can get with Apple’s console. Finally, check out our research on Bridging the Mobile Security Gap (Staring Down Network Anarchy, The Need for Context, and Operational Consistency), as that research deals with many of these consumerization & BYOD issues, especially around integrating with the network. The Biggest AV Loser Last year’s annual drops of the latest and greatest in endpoint protection suites were all about sucking less. And taking up less real estate and compute power on the endpoint devices. Given the compliance regimes many of you live under, getting rid of endpoint protection isn’t an option, so less suckage means less heartburn for you. At least you can look at the bright side, right? In terms of technology evolution there won’t be much spoken about at the RSA Conference. You’ll see vendors still worshipping the Cloud Messiah, as they try to leverage their libraries of a billion AV signatures in the cloud. That isn’t very interesting but check into how they leverage file ‘reputation’ to track which files look like malware, and your options to block them. The AV vendors actually have been hard at work bolstering this file analysis capability, so have them run you through their cloud architectures to learn more. It’s still early in terms of effectiveness but the technology is promising. You will also see adjunct endpoint malware detection technologies positioned to address the shortcomings of current endpoint protection. You know, basically everything. The technology (such as Sourcefire’s FireAMP) is positioned as the cloud file analysis technology discussed above so the big vendors will say they do this, but be wary of them selling futures. There are differences, though – particularly in terms of tracking proliferation and getting better visibility into what the malware is doing. You can learn a lot more about this malware analysis process by checking out our Quant research, which goes into gory detail on the process and provides some context for how the tools fit into the process. Share:

Building security in? Bolting it on? If you develop in-house applications, it’s likely both. Application security will be a key theme of the show. But the preponderance of application security tools will block, scan, mask, shield, ‘reperimeterize’, reconfigure, or reset connections from the outside. Bolt-on is the dominant application security model for the foreseeable future. The good news is that you may not be the one managing it, as there is a whole bunch of new cloud security services and technologies available. Security as a service, anyone? Here’s what we expect to see at this year’s RSA Conference. SECaaS Security as a Service, or ‘SECaaS’; basically using ‘the cloud’ to deliver security services. No, it’s not a new concept, but a new label to capture the new variations on this theme. What’s new is that some of the new services are not just SaaS, but delivered for PaaS or IaaS protection as well. And the technologies have progressed well beyond anti-spam and web-site scanning. During the show you will see a lot of ‘cloudwashing’ – where the vendor replaces ‘network’ with ‘cloud’ in their marketing collateral, and suddenly they are a cloud provider – which makes it tough to know who’s legit. Fortunately at the show you will see several vendors who genuinely redesigned products to be delivered as a service from the cloud and/or into cloud environments. Offerings like web application firewalls available from IaaS vendors, code scanning in the cloud, DNS redirectors for web app request and content scanning, and threat intelligence based signature generation, just to name a few. The new cloud service models offers greater simplicity as well as cost reduction, so we are betting these new services will be popular with customers. They’ll certainly be a hit on the show floor. Securing Applications at Scale Large enterprises and governments trying to secure thousands of off-the-shelf and homegrown applications live with this problem every day. Limited resources are the key issue – it’s a bit like weathering a poop storm with a paper hat. Not enough protection and the limited resources you have are not suitable for the job. It’s hard to be sympathetic as most of these organizations created their own headaches – remember when you thought it was a good idea to put a web interface on those legacy applications? Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. Now you have billions of lines of code, designed to be buried deep within your private token ring, providing content to people outside your company. Part of the reason application security moves at a snail’s pace is because of the sheer scope of the problem. It’s not that companies don’t know their applications – especially web applications – are not secure, but the time and money required to address all the problems are overwhelming. A continuing theme we are seeing is how to deal with application security at scale. It’s both an admission that we’re not fixing everything, and an examination of how to best utilize resources to secure applications. Risk analysis, identifying cross-domain threats, encapsulation, reperimetrization, and multi-dimensional prioritization of bug fixes are all strategies. There’s no embodying product that you’ll see at the show, but we suggest this as a topic of discussion when you chat with folks. Many vendors will be talking about the problem and how their product fits within a specific strategic approach for addressing the issue. Code Analysis? Meh. DAST? Yeah. The merits of ‘building security in’ are widely touted but adoption remains sporadic. Awareness, the scale of the issue, and cultural impediments all keep tools that help build secure code a small portion of the overall application security market. Regardless, we expect to hear lots of talk about code analysis and white box testing. These products offer genuine value and several major firms made significant investments in the technology last year. While the hype will be in favor of white box code analysis, the development community remains divided. No one is arguing the value of white box testing, but adoption is slower than we expected. Very large software development firms with lots of money implement a little of each secure code development technique in their arsenal, including white box as a core element, basically because they can. The rest of the market? Not so much. Small firms focus on one or two areas during the design, development, or testing phase. Maybe. And that usually means fuzzing and Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST). Whether it’s developer culture, or mindset, or how security integrates with development tools, or this is just the way customers want to solve security issues – the preference is for semi-black-box web scanning products. Big Data, Little App Security You’re going to hear a lot about big data and big data security issues at the conference. Big Data definitely needs to be on the buzzword bingo card. And 99 out of 100 vendors who tell you they have a big data security solution are lying. The market is still determining what the realistic threats are and how to combat them. But we know application security will be a bolt-on affair for a long period, because: Big data application development has huge support and is growing rapidly A vanishingly low percentage of developer resources are going into designing secure applications for big data. SQL injection, command injection, and XSS are commonly found on most of the front-end platforms that support NoSQL development. Some of them did not even have legitimate access controls until recently! Yes, jump into your time machine and set the clock for 10 years ago. Make no mistake – firms are pumping huge amounts of data into production non-relational databases without much more than firewalls and SSL protecting them. So if you have some architects playing around with these technologies (and you do), work on identifying some alternatives to secure them at the show. Share:

As you can tell from my TidBITS review of Gatekeeper, I think this is an important advancement in consumer security. There are a lot of in-depth technical aspects that didn’t fit in that article, so here’s an additional Q&A for those of you with a security background who care about these sorts of things. I’m skipping the content from the TidBITS article, so you might want to read that first. Will Gatekeeper really make a difference? I think so. Right now the majority of the small population of malware we see for Macs is downloaded trojans and tools like Mac Defender that download through the browser. While there are plenty of ways to circumvent Gatekeeper, most of them are the sorts of things that will raise even uneducated users’ hackles. Gatekeeper attacks the economics of widespread malware. It conveys herd immunity. If most users use it (and as the default, that’s extremely likely) it will hammers on the profitability of phishing-based trojans. To attackers going after individual users, Gatekeeper is barely a speed bump. But in terms of the entire malware ecosystem, it’s much more effective – more like tire-slashing spikes. How does Gatekeeper work? Gatekeeper is an extension of the quarantine features first implemented in Mac OS X 10.5. When you download files using certain applications a “quarantine bit” is set (more on that in a second). In OS X 10.5-10.7 when you open a file Launch Services looks for that attribute. If it’s set, it informs the user that the program was downloaded from the Internet and asks if they still want to run it. Users click through everything, so that doesn’t accomplish much. In 10.6 and 10.7 it also checks the file for any malware before running, using a short list that Apple now updates daily (as needed). If malware is detected it won’t let you open the file. If the application was code signed, the file’s digital certificate is also checked and used to validate integrity. This prevents tampered applications from running. In Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion), Gatekeeper runs all those checks and validates the source of the download. I believe this is done using digital certificates, rather than another extended attribute. If the file is from an approved source (the Mac App Store or a recognized Developer ID) then it’s allowed to run. Gatekeeper also checks developer certificates against a blacklist. So here is the list of checks: Is the quarantine attribute set? Is the file from an approved source (per the user’s settings)? Is the digital certificate on the blacklist? Has the signed application been tampered with? Does the application contain a known malware signature? If it passes those checks, it can run. What is the quarantine bit? The quarantine bit is an extended file attribute set by certain applications on downloaded files. Launch Services checks it when running an application. When you approve an application (first launch) the attribute is removed, so you are never bothered again for that version. This is why some application updates trigger quarantine and others don’t… the bit is set by the downloading application, not the operating system. What applications set the quarantine bit? Most Apple applications, like Safari, Firefox, Mail.app, and a really big list in /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/Exceptions.plist. Plus any applications where developers implement it as part of their download features. In other words, most things a consumer will use to download files off the Internet. But the clearly they won’t catch everything, so there are still applications that can download and avoid Gatekeeper. System utilities like curl, aren’t protected. What apps aren’t protected? Anything already on your system is grandfathered in. Files transferred or installed using fixed media like DVDs, USB drives, and other portable media. Files downloaded by applications that don’t set the quarantine bit. Scripts and other code that isn’t executable. So will this protect me from Flash and Java malware? Nope. Although they are somewhat sandboxed in browsers (which varies widely by browser), applets and other code run just fine in their container, and aren’t affected or protected. Now we just need Adobe to sandbox Flash like they did on Windows. What is the Developer ID? This is a new digital certificate issued by Apple for code signing. It is integrated into XCode. Any developer in the Mac App Developer Program can obtain one for free. Apple does not review apps signed with a Developer ID, but if they find a developer doing things they shouldn’t they can revoke that certificate. These are signed by an Apple subroot that is separate from the Mac App Store subroot. How are Developer ID certificates revoked? Mountain Lion includes a blacklist that Apple updates every 24 hours. If a malicious application is found and Apple revokes the certificate, will it still run? Yes, if it has already run once and had the quarantine bit cleared. Apple does not remove the app from your system, although they said they can use Software Update to clean any widespread malware as they did with Mac Defender. What about a malicious application in the Mac App Store? Apple will remove the application from the app store. This does not remove it from your system, and it would also need to be cleaned with a software update. If we start seeing a lot of this kind of problems, I expect this mechanism to change. Does this mean all Mac applications require code signing? No, but code signing is required for all App Store and Developer ID applications. Starting in Lion, Apple includes extensive support for code signing and sandboxing. Developers can break out and sign different components of their applications and implement pretty robust sandboxing. While I expect most developers to stick with basic signing, the tools are there for building some pretty robust applications (as they are on Windows – Microsoft is pretty solid here as well, although few developers take advantage of it). What role does sandboxing play? All Mac App Store applications must implement sandboxing by March 1st, long before Mountain Lion is released. Sandbox entitlements are