Research

This is one of those posts I’ve been thinking about writing for a while – ever since I saw one of those dumb-ass ADT commercials with the guy with the black knit cap breaking in through the front door while some ‘helpless’ woman was in the kitchen. I’m definitely no home-alarm security expert, but being a geek I really dug into the design and technology when I purchased systems for the two homes I’ve lived in here in Phoenix. We’re in a nice area, but home break-ins are a bit more common here than in Boulder. In one home I added an aftermarket system, and in the other we had it wired as the house was built. Here are some things to keep in mind: If you purchase an aftermarket system it will almost always be wireless, unless you want to rip your walls open. These systems can be attacked via timing and jamming, but most people don’t need to worry about that. With a wireless system you have a visible box on each door and window covered. An attacker can almost always see these, so make sure you don’t skip any. Standard door and window sensors are magnetic contact closure sensors. They only trigger if the magnet and the sensor are separated, which means they won’t detect the bad guy breaking the glass if the sensor doesn’t separate. You know, like they show in all those commercials (for the record I use ADT). The same is true for wired sensors, except they aren’t as visible. Unless you pay extra, all systems use your existing phone line with a special “capture” port that overrides other calls when the alarm needs it. For (possibly a lot) more you can get a dedicated cell phone line integrated into the alarm, so the call center still gets the alarm even if the phone lines are down. You probably want to make sure they aren’t on AT&T. Most of the cheap alarm deals only give you a certain number of contact closure sensors and one “pet immune” motion sensor (placed centrally to trigger when someone walks down your major connecting hallway). Pay more to get all your first floor doors and windows covered. Get used to the ugly white boxes on everything. Most alarm systems do not cover your exterior garage doors. The standard install protocol is to put a sensor on the door from your garage to the interior of the house. The only time we’ve been robbed is when we left our garage doors open, so since then we’ve always had them added to the system. They take a special contact closure sensor since the normal ones aren’t good with the standard rattling of a garage door and will trigger with the wind. Now every night when we set our alarm in “Stay” mode it won’t enable unless the doors are closed. None of the basic systems includes a glass break detector. Most of these are noise sensors tuned to the frequency of glass breaking, rather than shatter sensors attached to each window. I highly suggest these and recommend you put them near the windows most likely to be broken into (ones hard to see from the street). Mine has only gone off once, when I dropped something down the stairs. Understand which sensors are active in the two primary alarm modes – Stay and Away. Stay is the mode you use at night when you are sleeping (or if you are a helpless female in the kitchen in an ADT commercial). It usually arms the exterior sensors but not the motion sensor. Away is when you are out and turns on everything. I suggest having glass breaks active in Stay mode, but if you have a killer stereo/surround sound system that might not work out too well for you. There are also differences in arming times and disarming windows (the time from opening a door to entering your code). When your alarm triggers it starts a call to the call center, who will call you back and then call the police. I’ve had my alarm going for a good 30 seconds without the outbound call hitting the alarm center. It isn’t like TV, and the cops won’t be showing up right away. Most basic systems don’t cover the second story in a multilevel home. While few bad guys will use a ladder, know your home and if there are areas they can climb to easily using trees, gutters, etc. – such as windows over a low roof. Make sure you alarm these. Especially if you have daughters and want some control over their dating lives. Most systems come with key fob remotes, so you don’t have to mess with the panel when you are going in and out. If you’re one of those people who parks in your driveway and leaves your garage and alarm remotes in the car, please send me your address and a list of your valuables. Extra points if you’re a Foursquare user. Most alarms don’t come with a smoke detector, which is one of the most valuable components of the system. You regular detectors aren’t wired into an alarm sensor and are just to wake you up. Since we have pets, and mostly like them, we have a smoke detector in a central location as part of our alarm so the fire department will show up even if we aren’t around. We also have a residential sprinkler system, and as a former firefighter those things are FTW (no known deaths due to fire when one is installed and operational). My alarm guys looked at me funny when I designed the system since it included extras they normally skip (garage doors, glass break, second story coverage, smoke detector). But we have a system that didn’t cost much more than the usual cheap ones, and provides much better protection. It’s also more useful, especially with the garage sensors to help make sure we don’t leave the doors open.

My original plan for this week’s summary was to geek out a bit and talk about my home automation setup. Including the time I recently discovered that even household electrical is powerful enough to arc weld your wire strippers if you aren’t too careful. Then I read some stuff. Some really bad stuff. First up was an article in USA Today that I won’t even dignify with a link. It was on the iTunes account phishing that’s been going on, and it was pretty poorly written. Here’s a hint – if you are reading an article about a security issue and all the quotes are from a particular category of vendor, and the conclusion is to buy products made by those vendors, it’s okay to be a little skeptical. This is the second time in the past couple weeks I’ve read something by that author that suffered from the same problem. Vendor folk make fine sources – I have plenty of friends and contacts in different security companies who help me out when I need it, but the job of a journalist is to filter and balance. At least it used to be. Next up are the multitude of stories on the US Department of Defense getting infected in 2008 via USB drives. Notice I didn’t say “attacked”, because despite all the stories surfacing today it seems that this may not have been a deliberate act by a foreign power. The malware involved was pretty standard stuff – there is no need to attribute it to espionage. Now look, I don’t have any insider knowledge and maybe it was one of those cute Russian spies we deported, but this isn’t the first time we’ve seen government related stories coming from sources that might – just might – be seeking increased budget or authority. I’m really tired of a lazy press that single-sources stories and fails to actually research the issues. I know the pressure is nasty in today’s newsrooms, but there has to be a line someplace. I write for a living myself, and have some close friends in the trade press I respect a heck of a lot, so I know it’s possible to hit deadlines without sacrificing quality. But then you don’t get to put “Apple” in the title of every article to increase your page count. On another note it seems my wife is supposed to have a baby today… or sometime in the next week or two. Some of you may have noticed my posting rate is down and I’ll be in paternity leave mode. On to the Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences Rich and Chris Hoff at RSA 2009. Video of their presentation on disruptive innovation and cloud computing. Rich quoted in Bloomberg on the Intel/McAfee deal. And also over at Forbes. Favorite Securosis Posts David Mortman: Backtalk Doublespeak on Encryption. Adrian Lane: Understanding and Selecting SIEM/Log Management. … of course. Granted it’s long, but if you are selecting a SIEM platform, this is a great primer to start the process. Mike Rothman: Data Encryption for PCI 101: Encryption Options. Really like this series because too many folks think encryption is the answer. This series tells you the question. Other Securosis Posts Starting the Understanding and Selecting an Enterprise Firewall Project. Incite 8/25/2010: Let Freedom Ring. Webcasts on Endpoint Security Fundamentals. Favorite Outside Posts David Mortman: Hoff’s 5 Rules Of Cloud Security…. Adrian Lane: Hoff’s 5 Rules Of Cloud Security…. I read this after I saw Rich’s link in this week’s Incite … and Chris has nailed it. How many of us have actually tried to set up a secure environment within Amazon Web Services? Great post. Mike Rothman: Why the USP for Every Technical Product Sounds the Same. If you think it’s hard to tell one product from another, it’s not you. This is why. And it’s sad, but really really true. Rich: Find Evil and Solve Crime. The Mandiant folks are some of the few that really fight the APT, and one of their folks is starting a series giving some insight into their process. Project Quant Posts NSO Quant: Manage IDS/IPS Process Revisited. NSO Quant: Manage IDS/IPS – Monitor Issues/Tune. Research Reports and Presentations White Paper: Understanding and Selecting SIEM/Log Management. White Paper: Endpoint Security Fundamentals. Understanding and Selecting a Database Encryption or Tokenization Solution. Top News and Posts Adobe Patches via Brian Krebs. Apple Mac OS X Security Patch. Visa Makes AppSec Recommendations. We’ll have more to say about this when we get a chance to finish reading the recommendations. Verizon Clears Credit Card Cloud Test. Yippee. Credit Cards in the cloud. And our profession needed a new place to hack credit cards to create a boost of excitement (just kidding, guys). Hey, watch where you stick that thing. You don’t know where it’s been! Researcher Arrested for Disclosure. This case is interesting for a couple different reasons. DEFCON Survey Results. Toolkit for DLL hijacking. Critical Updates for Windows, Flash Player. Apple Jailbreak Vuln. Wireshark review. Blog Comment of the Week Remember, for every comment selected, Securosis makes a $25 donation to Hackers for Charity. This week’s best comment goes to Jay, in response to Backtalk Doublespeak on Encryption. I don’t want to give this article too much attention, too much FUD, too few facts, but I thought this was worth a quote: “…the bad guys do not attack encrypted data directly…” which is followed up with: “When you encrypt a small field with a limited number of possible values, like the expiry date, you risk giving a determined (and sophisticated) attacker a potential route to compromising your entire cardholder database.” … by attacking the encrypted data directly? The other point I had was that there are 1 of 2 ways to create the same output given the same input (in “strong” symmetric ciphers), use ECB mode or re-use the same initialization vector (IV) over and over. I think most financial places lean towards the former because managing/transferring the

Continuing our series on PCI Encryption basics, we delve into the supporting systems that make encryption work. Key management and access controls are important building blocks, and subject to audit to ensure compliance with the Data Security Standard. Key Management Key management considerations for PCI are pretty much the same as for any secure deployment: you need to protect encryption keys from unauthorized physical and logical access. And to the extent it’s possible, prevent misuse. Those are the basics things you really need to get right so they are our focus here. As per our introduction, we will avoid talking about ISO specifications, key bit lengths, key generation, and distribution requirements, because quite frankly you should not care. More precisely you should not need to care because you pay commercial vendors to get these details right. Since PCI is what drives their sales most of their products have evolved to meet PCI requirements. What you want to consider is how the key management system fits within your organization and works with your systems. There are three basic deployment models for key management services; external software, external hardware or HSM, and embedded within the application or database. External Hardware: Commonly called Hardware Security Modules, or HSMs, these devices provide extraordinary physical security, and most are custom-designed to provide strong logical security as well. Most have undergone rigorous certifications, the details of which the vendors are happy to share with you because they take a lot of time and money to pass. HSMs offer very good performance and take care of key synchronization and distribution automatically. The downside is cost – this is by far the most expensive key management option. And for disaster recovery planning and failover, you’re not just buying one of these devices, but several. They don’t work as well with virtual environments as software. We have received a handful of customer complaints that the APIs were difficult to use when integrating with custom applications, but this concern is mitigated by the fact that many off-the-shelf applications and database vendors provide the integration glue. External Software: The most common option is software-based key management. These products are typically bundled with encryption software but there are some standalone products as well. The advantages are reduced cost, compatibility with most commercial operating systems, and good performance in virtual environments. Most offer the same functions as their HSM counterparts, and will perform and scale provided you provide the platform resources they depend on. The downside is that these services are easier to compromise, both physically and logically. They benefit from being deployed on dedicated systems, and you must ensure that their platforms are fully secured. Embedded: Some key management offerings are embedded within application platforms – try to avoid these. For years database vendors offer database encryption but left the keys in the database. That means not only the DBAs had access to the keys, so did any attacker who successfuly executed an injection attack, buffer overflow, or password guess. Some legacy applications still rely on internal keys and they may be expensive to change, but you must in order to achieve compliance. If you are using database encryption or any kind of transparent encryption, make sure the keys are externally managed. This way it is possible to enforce separation of duties, provide adequate logical security, and make it easier to detect misuse. By design all external key management servers have the capacity to provide central key services, meaning all applications go to the same place to get keys. The PCI specification calls for limiting the number of places keys are stored to reduce exposure. You will need to find a comfortable middle ground that works for you. Too few key servers cause performance bottlenecks and poor failover response. Too many cause key synchronization issues, increased cost, and increased potential for exposure. Over and above that, the key management service you select needs must provide several other features to comply with PCI: Dual Control: To provide administrative separation of duties, master keys are not known by any one person; instead two or three people each possess a fragment of the key. No single administrator has the key, so some key operations require multiple administrators to participate. This deters fraud and reduces the chance of accidental disclosure. Your vendor should offer this feature. Re-Keying: Sometimes called key substitution, this is a method for swapping keys in case a key might be compromised. In case a key is no longer trusted, all associated data should be re-encrypted, and the key management system should have this facility built in to discover, decrypt, and re-encrypt. The PCI specification recommends key rotation once a year. Key Identification: There are two considerations here. If keys are rotated, the key management system must have some method to identify which key was used. Many systems – both PCI-specific and general-purpose – employ key rotation on a regular basis, so they provide a means to identify which keys were used. Further, PCI requires that key management systems detect key substitutions. Each of these features needs to be present, and you will need to verify that they perform to your expectations during an evaluation, but these criteria are secondary. Access Control Key management protects keys, but access control determines who gets to use them. The focus here is how best to deploy access control to support key management. There are a couple points of guidance in the PCI specification concerning the use of decryption keys and access control settings that frame the relevant discussion points: First, the specification advises against using local OS user accounts for determining who can have logical access to encrypted data when using disk encryption. This recommendation is in contrast to using “file – or column-level database encryption”, meaning it’s not a requirement for those encrypting database contents. This is nonsense. In reality you should eschew local operating system access controls for both database and disk encryption. Both suffer from the same security issues including potential discrepancies in

In this report we spotlight both the grim realities and real benefits of SIEM/Log Management platforms. The vendors are certainly not going to tell you about the bad stuff in their products – they just shout out the same fantastic advantages touted in the latest quadrant report. Trust us when we say there are many pissed-off SIEM users, but plenty of happy ones as well. We focused this paper on resetting expectations and making sure you know enough to focus on success, which will save you much heartburn later. This fairly comprehensive paper delves into the use cases for the technology, the technology itself, how to deploy it, and ultimately how to select it. We assembled this paper from the Understand and Selecting a SIEM/Log Management blog series from June and July 2010. Special thanks to Nitro Security for sponsoring the research. You can download the paper (PDF) directly or visit the landing page.   Share:

I joined Securosis back in January and took on coverage of network and endpoint security. My goal this year was to lay the foundation by doing fairly in-depth research projects on the key fundamental areas in each patch. I started with Endpoint Security Fundamentals (I’m doing some webcasts next month) and continued with the Network Security Operations Quant project (which I’m now working through) to focus on the processes to manage network security devices. But clearly selecting the anchor device in the perimeter – the firewall – demands a full and detailed analysis. So next week I’ll start a series on “Understanding and Selecting an Enterprise Firewall.” As always, we’ll use the Totally Transparent Research process, which means everything will be posted to the blog and only after taking a round of feedback will we package the content as a paper. In preparation for the series I’m (as always) looking for more data points on what’s changing on the perimeter, specifically for the enterprise firewall. Are you looking at updating/re-architecting your firewall implementation? Happy with the incumbent? Looking to add more capabilities, such as UTM-like functions? Do you give a crap about all this application visibility hype? How do you manage 15-200 devices? I only need 15-20 minutes and any help is much appreciated. If you have opinions send me email: mrothman (at) securosis (dot) com and we’ll schedule some time to talk. Share:

It’s funny how different folks have totally different perceptions of the same things. Obviously the idea of freedom for someone living under an oppressive regime is different than my definition. My good fortune to be born in a certain place to a certain family is not lost on me. But my wacky idea of freedom took on an interesting meaning this past weekend. The Boss was out of town with one of the kids. So I was responsible for the other two, and that meant on Saturday I started the day helping out our friends at their son’s birthday party. After much fun on the kickball field and making sure none of the little men drowned in the pool, I took the boy, XX1 (oldest girl), and two of his friends home for a few hours. When the interlopers were retrieved by their parents a couple hours later, I had to drop XX1 off at yet another birthday party. But this one involved a sleepover, so once I dropped her off I had one less thing to worry about. Back home with the boy, about an hour of catch (the kid has a pretty good gun), some hydration and a snack, and then time to send him off to his own sleepover. So by 6:30pm, I had shed my kids and felt freedom. So what to do? The Braves were out of town, I’m not a big Maroon 5 fan (they were in town), and no movies really interested me. So I decided to do something I very rarely do on a weekend: Be a slug. I got some Chinese food (veggie fried rice FTW) and settled down in front of the Giants NFL pre-season game and then a few stand-up comedy specials streamed via Netflix. About every 10 minutes I’d pause the TV for about 30 seconds and just enjoy. the. silence. No one asking me for a snack or to play a game or to watch TV or to just be annoying. No kids to pick up from this place or that. No to-do list to weigh over my head. No honey-do projects that had to be done. Just silence. And it was good. I know I should be kind of embarrassed that for me, freedom (at least in some sense) is about no one needing me to do anything. But it is. I’m happy 99% of the time to be doing what I like to do. But every so often it’s nice to just shut it down and not feel bad about it. Like everything else, that feeling passed. About 12 hours later, when I had to retrieve the kids and get back in the hamster wheel. But I did enjoy it, however fleeting it was. – Mike. Photo credits: “Freedom is a Toilet Tissue” originally uploaded by ruSSeLL hiGGs Recent Securosis Posts We Securosis folks are big fans of beer. Especially strong beer. You know, the kind you need to get in Canada. So we decided to import some help from up north in the form of new Contributing Analysts James Arlen and Dave Lewis. Yes, you know them. Yes, they are smart guys. And yes, we do have plans for world domination. Don’t say we didn’t warn you. Backtalk Doublespeak on Encryption Webcasts on Endpoint Security Fundamentals Data Encryption for PCI 101: Encryption Options Data Encryption for PCI 101: Introduction Friday Summary: August 20, 2010 Another Take on McAfee/Intel McAfee: A (Secure) Chip on Intel’s Block Acquisition Doesn’t Mean Commoditization Various NSO Quant posts: Manage IDS/IPS – Process Change Request Manage IDS/IPS – Test and Approve Manage IDS/IPS – Deploy Manage IDS/IPS – Audit/Validate Manage IDS/IPS – Monitor Issues/Tune Manage IDS/IPS Process Revisited Incite 4 U It was only a matter of time. This week Rich finally realized that he gets no extra credit for writing more in an Incite. Though he’s right, when you point to a well-written piece, layering more commentary on top kind of defeats the purpose. Blocking and tackling on the network – Hey, you. It’s your conscience here. Dressed stealthily as an Incite to get you to remember the fundamentals. You know, little things like a properly segmented network can really improve your security. John Sawyer consults some of our pals (like JJ) to remind us that there are a bunch of devices (including embedded OSes and printers), which are vulnerable and really shouldn’t be on the same segments as our sensitive stuff. I’m sure the Great Intel will solve everything by embedding ePO within every chip out there someday. But in the meantime perhaps revisiting your network architecture, while not as fun as deploying another set of flashing lights from soon-to-be-extinct companies will have a bigger impact on your security posture. – MR How do you say B.S. in Spanish? – The big news this week is how a malware infected computer lead to the crash of Spanair flight 5022 (or the English version). If true, this would mean that malware caused deaths and serious destruction of property. And sure, the loss of airliner control conjures up Daemon-like images of destruction. The problem is the article has no details other than malware being found. Somewhere. We’ll make the bold assumption it wasn’t in the baggage turnstile software, but beyond that we don’t know. Most likely it was in one of the ground maintenance systems, where it may have masked some maintenance issue(s). That may or may not have contributed to the crash, but it’s a great story. What really happened and the extent of the malware’s impact is in question. Occam’s Razor would indicate some maintenance worker installed an infected version of Tetris on a Windows 95 PC to stave off boredom. Seriously, until there are some hard facts on this, I have to call tonterias on this steaming pile of insinuation. – AL When in doubt, blame M&A – Given the backdrop of the security acquisitions last week (INTC/MFE and HP/Fortify) we once again get to suffer from

*Updated:** 8/25/2010 Storefront-Backtalk magazine had an interesting post on Too Much Encrypt = Cyberthief Gift. And when I say ‘interesting’, I mean the topics are interesting, but the author (Walter Conway) seems to have gotten most of the facts wrong in an attempt to hype the story. The basic scenario the author describes is correct: when you encrypt a very small range of numbers/values, it is possible to pre-compute (encrypt) all of those values, then match them against the encrypted values you see in the wild. The data may be encrypted, but you know the contents because the encrypted values match. The point the author is making is that if you encrypt the expiration date of a credit card, an attacker can easily guess the value. OK, but what’s the problem? The guys over at Voltage hit the basic point on the head: it does not compromise the system. The important point is that you cannot derive the key from this form of attack. Sure, you can you confirm the contents of the enciphered text. This is not really an attack on the encryption algorithm, nor the key, but poorly deployed cryptography. It’s one of the interesting aspects of encryption or hashing functions; if you make the smallest of changes to the input, you get a radically different output. If you add randomness (Updated: per Jay’s comments below, this was not clear; Initialization Vector or feedback modes for encryption) or even somewhat random “salting” (for hashing) we have an effective defense against rainbow tables, dictionary attacks, and pattern matching. In an ideal world we would do this. It’s possible some places don’t … in commodity hardware, for example. It did dawn on me that this sort of weakness lingers on in many Point of Sale terminals that sell on speed and price, not security. These (relatively) cheap appliances don’t usually implement the best security: they use the fastest rather than the strongest cryptography, they keep key lengths short, they don’t do a great job at gathering randomness, and generally skimp on the mechanical aspects of cryptography. They also are designed for speed, low cost, and generic deployments: salting or concatenation of PAN with the expiration date is not always an option, or significant adjustments to the outbound data stream would raise costs. But much of the article talks about data storage, or the back end, and not the POS system. The premise of “Encrypting all your data may actually make you more vulnerable to a data breach” is BS. It’s not an issue of encrypting too much, it’s in those rare cases where you encrypt in very small digestible fields. “Encrypting all cardholder data that not only causes additional work but may actually make you more vulnerable to a data breach” is total nonsense. If you encrypt all of the data, especially if you concatenate the data, the resulting ciphertext does not suffer from the described attack. Further, I don’t believe that “Most retailers and processors encrypt their entire cardholder database”, making them vulnerable. If they encrypt the entire database, they use transparent encryption, so the data blocks are encrypted as whole elements. The block contents are random so each has some degree of natural randomness going on because the database structure and pointers are present. And if they are using application layer or field level encryption, they usually salt alter the initialization vector. Or concatenate the entire record. And that’s not subject to a simple dictionary attack, and in no way produces a “Cyberthief Gift”. Share:

Starting in early September, I’ll be doing a series of webcasts digging into the Endpoint Security Fundamentals paper we published over the summer. Since there is a lot of ground to cover, we’ll be doing three separate webcasts, each focused on a different aspect. The webcasts will be very little talking-head stuff (you can read the paper for that). We’ll spend most of the time doing Q&A. So check out the paper, bring your questions, and have a good time. As with the paper, Lumension Security is sponsoring the webcasts. You can sign up for a specific webcast (or all 3) by clicking here. Here is the description: Endpoint Security Fundamentals In today’s mobile, always on business environment, information is moving further away from the corporate boundaries to the endpoints. Cyber criminals have more opportunities than ever to gain unauthorized access to valuable data. Endpoints now store the crown jewels; including financial records, medical records, trade secrets, customer lists, classified information, etc. Such valuable data fuels the on-demand business environment, but also creates a dilemma for security professionals to determine the best way to protect it. This three part webcast series on Endpoint Security Fundamentals examines how to build a real-world, defense-in-depth security program – one that is sustainable and does not impede business productivity. Experts who will lead the discussion are Mike Rothman, Analyst and President of Securosis, and Jeff Hughes, Director of Solution Marketing with Lumension. Part 1 – Finding and Fixing the Leaky Buckets September 8, 2010 11 AM ET (Register Here) Part 1 of this webcast series will discuss the first steps to understanding your IT risk and creating the necessary visibility to set up a healthy endpoint security program. We will examine: The fundamental steps you should take before implementing security enforcement solutions How to effectively prioritize your IT risks so that you are focusing on what matters most How to act on the information that you gather through your assessment and prioritization efforts How to get some “quick wins” and effectively communicate security challenges with your senior management Part 2 – Leveraging the Right Enforcement Controls September 22, 2010 11 AM ET (Register Here) Part 2 of this webcast series examines key enforcement controls including: How to automate the update and patch management process across applications and operating systems to ensure all software is current How to define and enforce standardized and secure endpoint configurations How to effectively layer your defense and the evolving role that application whitelisting plays How to implement USB device control and encryption technologies to protect data Part 3 – Building the Endpoint Security Program October 6, 2010 11 AM ET (Register Here) In this final webcast of our series, we take the steps and enforcement controls discussed from webcasts 1 and 2 and discuss how to meld them into a true program, including: How to manage expectations and define success How to effectively train your users about policies and how to ensure two-way communication to evolve policies as needed How to effectively respond to incidents when they occur to minimize potential damage How to document and report on your overall security and IT risk posture Hope to see you for all three events. Share:

It’s time that the security industry stopped trying to play paramilitary games and started trying to do a good job (aka “best practices”.) It would be a very pleasant change. Currently, the three major information security religions – ISACA, ISC2, and SANS – offer a total of roughly 75 different certifications. This laundry list of certifications leads to a set of fairly serious problems: Security professionals need fold-out business cards Organizations need an equivalency look-up table for resume filtering These problems are entertaining to describe this way, but also present a real problem – how can you objectively determine whether or not a given candidate has the skills necessary to do the job that they’re being asked to do? Recently, The Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency released a fairly damning report entitled “A Human Capital Crisis in Cybersecurity: Technical Proficiency Matters” available as a PDF which essentially calls out the old-line security certification bodies for producing really good compliance rubber-stampers but not functional security practitioners. A real gap that needs to be managed – outside of the scope of the pre-existing commercial security certifications. Then things get interesting, this requirement was speedily turned into the ‘National Board of Information Security Examiners’ and if you just glance under the covers, you’ll discover something very interesting. Report authors: Franklin S. Reeder, Karen Evans, James Lewis NBISE Leadership: Franklin S. Reeder, Karen Evans, James Lewis It’s almost like they were ready to go with all of the answers to the problems they created… I guess they had some insight into what the report was going to say. If you look around a little bit, you’ll likely reach the same conclusion that I did: SANS is a little miffed at EC-Council being named in the most recent DoD 8570 directive and someone specifically wanted to carve out a little bit of a government-regulated monopoly on security certifications – a permanent revenue stream. I don’t think that this response is any more useful or valid than the position of the traditional security certifications. It’s yet another organization which exists for the service of it’s self – not it’s members and certainly not the ultimate end-users of it’s membership. If you are a member of ISACA, ISC2 or SANS, I would encourage you to ask yourself what they’ve done for you lately, what they’ve done to make the information security profession more respectable, and most importantly how many hours has it been since they suggested to you that you need to help them get more members. After all, making a scarce resource less scarce is the best way to increase quality and make sure your value stays high. Share:

In the introductory post of the Data Encryption for PCI series, there were a lot of good comments on the value of hashing functions. I wanted to thank the readers for participating and raising several good points. Yes, hashing is a good way to match a credit card number you currently have determine if it matches one you have already been provided – without huge amounts of overhead. You might even call it a token. For the purpose of this series, as we have already covered tokenization, I will remain focused on use cases where I need to keep the original credit card data. When it comes to secure data storage, encryption is the most effective tool at our disposal. It safeguards data at rest and improves our control over access. The PCI Data Security Standrad specifies you need to render the Primary Account Number (what the card associations call credit card numbers) unreadable anywhere it is stored. Yes, we can hash, or we can truncate, or we can tokenize, or employ other forms of non-reversible obfuscation. But we need to keep the original data, and occasionally access it, so the real question is how? There are at least a dozen different variations on file encryption, database encryption and encryption at the application layer. The following is a description of the available encryption methods at your disposal, and a discussion of the pros & cons of each. We’ll wrap the series by applying these methods to the common use cases and make recommendations, but for now we are just presenting options. What You Need to Know About Strong Ciphers In layman’s terms, a strong cipher is one you can’t break. That means if you try to reverse the encryption process by guessing the decryption key – even if you used every computer you could get your hands on to help guess – you would not guess correctly during your life time. Or many lifetimes. The sun may implode before you guess correctly, which is why we are not so picky when choosing one cipher over another. There are lots that are considered ‘strong’ by PCI standards organization, and they provide a list for you in the PCI DSS Glossary of Terms. Tripe-DES, AES, Blowfish, Twofish, ElGamal and RSA are all acceptable options. Secret key ciphers (e.g. AES) use a minimum key length of 128 bits, and public key algorithms (those then encrypt with a public key and decrypt with a private key) require a minimum of 1024 bit. All of the commercial encryption vendors offer these, at a minimum, plus longer key lengths as an option. You can choose longer keys if you wish, but in practical terms they don’t add much more security, and in rare cases they offer less. Yet another reason to not fuss over the cipher or key length too much. When you boil it down, the cipher and key length is far less important than the deployment model. How you use encryption in your environment is the dominant factor for security, cost and performance, and that’s what we’ll focus on for the remainder of this section. Encryption Deployment Options Merchant credit card processing systems can be as simple as a website site plug-in, or they may be a geographically disperse set data processing systems with hundreds of machines performing dozens of business functions. Regardless of size and complexity, these systems store credit card information in files or databases. It’s one or the other. And the data can be encrypted before it is stored (application layer), or when it is stored (file, database). Database Encryption: The most common storage repository for credit card numbers. All relational databases offer encryption, usually as an add-on package. Most databases offer both very granular encryption methods (e.g. only on a specific row or column) as well as an entire schema/database. The encryption functions can be invoked programmatically through a procedural interface, requiring changes to the database query that instruct the database to encrypt/decrypt. The database automatically alters the table structure to store the binary output of the cipher. More commonly we see databases configured for Transparent encryption – where encryption is applied automatically to data before it is stored. In this model all encryption and key management happens behind the scenes without the users knowledge. Because databases stores redundant copies of information in recovery and audit logs, full database encryption is a popular choice for PCI to keep PAN data from accidentally being revealed. File/Folder Encryption: Some applications, such as desktop productivity applications and some web applications, store credit card data within flat files. Encryption is applied transparently by the operating system as files or folders are written to disk. This type of encryption is offered as a 3rd party add-on, or comes embedded within the operating system. File/Folder encryption can be applied to database files and directories, so that the database contents are encrypted without any changes to the application or database. It’s up to the local administrator to properly apply encryption to the right file/folder otherwise PAN data may be exposed. Application Layer Encryption: Applications that process credit cards can encrypt data prior to storage. Be it file or relational database storage, the application encrypts data before it is saved, and decrypts before data is displayed. Supporting cryptographic libraries can be linked into the application, or provided by a 3rd party package. The programmer has great flexibility in how to apply encryption, and more importantly, can choose to decrypt on application context, not just user credentials. While all these operations are transparent to the application user, it’s not Transparent encryption because the application – and usually the supporting database – must be modified. Use of format-preserving encryption (FPE) variations of AES are available, which removes the need to alter database or file structure to store cipher-text, but does not perform as well as normal AES cipher. All of these options protect stored information in the event of lost or stolen media. All of these options need to use