Research

Hoff (and some others) have been talking a lot about hope and the future. Chris has dedicated most of his recent posts to making us think differently about security. To drop our archaic models of the past and look towards solutions for the future. It’s a noble goal, one I support completely. Dr. Eugene Spafford, a seminal figure in information security, is also dedicating effort to the cause. I’m firmly in their camp and believe that while we don’t need an entirely new model for security, we definitely need to evolve. Information Security has been little more than basic network security and antivirus ever since Code Red and Melissa hit. But that’s not important right now. The essential questions are, “will we win?” And “do we make a difference?” These questions are non-trivial and endemic to the human condition. Anyone, in any occupation, who is invested in what they do will frequently use these questions to position themselves in the world. For some an occupation is merely a way to pass the hours and pay the bills; these automatons contribute to the status quo, but don’t help society evolve. For the rest of us our occupation is an essential component of our identity. We define ourselves by our occupation, and define our occupation as we want to define ourselves. I’ve worked in public safety my entire adult life, and spent most of my childhood, purposefully or not, preparing for my strange career. Over the years as I worked in different positions throughout public safety, from physical security, to emergency medicine, to information security, I was challenged by difficult questions of conscience. When I started in emergency medicine, I had to reconcile the thrill of the job with the fact that I achieved professional satisfaction only through the pain and suffering of others. As much as I wanted to try that new procedure, or be on that big call, I had to accept that for me to exercise my skills, someone needed to suffer injury or illness. I reconciled such a potentially twisted mentality by realizing that it wasn’t that I wanted someone else to suffer, but I wanted to do my job and do it well. People will get hurt, sick, and die with or without my involvement; I was a professional and wanted to do the job I was highly trained for. If something was going to happen, I wanted to be the one to be there. As my experience and confidence grew, I also began to believe that the better I was at my job, the less that victim (or the family) would suffer. Physical security was similar, but involved some slightly more complex mental gymnastics, which every cop and (I expect) soldier experiences. While as a medic you relieve pain and suffering, in physical security you often inflict it. We all loved the rush of breaking up a fight or catching a bad guy. There is an undeniable thrill in being authorized to use physical force on another human being- not a thrill of sadism, but the same emotions evoked by the sports we use to sublimate physical combat. In those cases my goals became to use as little force as possible and de-escalate situations verbally. Violence was not the objective; it was the last tool available to protect others. I’d like to call it altruism, but the truth is there are visceral thrills and deep satisfaction in managing the challenges of emergency medicine, rescue, and physical security. I learned to accept this motivation without guilt, since the goals of safety and security called for such commitment. When safety and security become excuses to do bad things, that’s when a very bad line is crossed. But back to security. In information security we may not be faced by the prospects of blood and guts, but those of us “in the industry” need to accept that we make our money off the pain of others. There’s nothing wrong with this so long as we don’t take advantage of our clients. I’m not just talking about vendors; we in internal security also provide a service to a client. My personal philosophy around this is that I won’t lie or try to frighten just to enhance my own income, but I’ll tell the truth and charge what I think is fair value for my services. I also still perform some volunteer work for those who need the help but can’t afford it. Security professionals earn our daily bread from fear and pain (sometimes very abstract pain, but pain nonetheless). There’s nothing wrong with that, but it does convey a responsibility not seen in other occupations. The big question I haven’t addressed, one that underlies pretty much any occupation, is, “Do I make a difference?” Psychologically I believe all humans fundamentally need to make a difference. It’s hard wired into our brains. If we’re not making a difference, we have only one of a few possible reactions. We can disengage from that activity and find fulfillment in other parts of our lives, or disengage from life completely. As sad as that sounds, we all know people who don’t see the meaning of their life and instead turn to a never-ending trail of distractions. We can also deceive ourselves and create illusions that we matter; I suspect many mountains of bureaucracy have been built on such falsehoods. We can also seek satisfaction elsewhere; actively finding a new job or career. We can also do the absolute best job possible, fight the good fight, and try to rise above any limiting circumstances. As a paramedic I may have been the one who saved a few lives and reduced a little suffering, but the reality is that if I hadn’t been there, someone else would have been. In mountain rescue we operate as a team and it’s a group of 40 or so people, not some lone hero, that makes the save. But although I personally wasn’t essential, and the rescue would have happened

This is such a straightforward problem to solve it’s annoying that it still makes the headlines. Laptop and tape encryption are the low hanging fruit of data security. Not that they are click-box easy, but it’s pretty straightforward for most organizations to protect this stuff. Home Depot lost a “password protected” laptop when it was stolen from a car, and 10,000 employee records with it. Iron Mountain lost a case of backup tapes with a decade’s worth of Social Security Numbers from college applicants in Louisiana. Their proactive strategy to protect their customers? “We certainly don’t want to create any panic. But people should be aware and take the necessary steps,” Amrhein told the AP. “This is backup data off of a mainframe that contains sensitive personal information.” Darn, it’s my fault for applying to college and not being aware. Silly me. I do take umbrage at some of the misguided advice at the end of the article: “If you buy encryption you need to work with the company’s legal department and top executives on a process where you can prove data on a stolen device can’t be tampered with,” he said. “A cradle-to-gave transaction record on the server is one way to provide an inventory on the current state of all your drives. Another, more difficult approach is to write everything down.” He said it helps if a company can show it is using a reputable vendor to put a barrier around stored data, and mentioned Seagate Technology as an example. The Scotts Valley, Calif.-based hard drive maker said this week it will roll out enterprise-class drives with full disk encryption in 2008 and will push to make hard-drive encryption standards a reality to reduce complexities that could hinder adoption. Like a cradle to grave transaction record and an inventory of all you hard drives is realistic. Also, while encrypted drives will play a role in data security they are far from a panacea! First of all, the software solutions today, especially for whole drive, are effective without requiring you to install new drives. Second, the encryption on those drives is managed by software, so now you’ll have to buy both the encrypted drive and the software to manage it. More often than not, non-laptop encrypted drives are totally unnecessary and don’t improve security. I like how Seagate designed their drives, but it’s not like they’re the right choice in all cases, nor will they put us (or software encryption) out of business. Remember the Three Laws people. Use your encryption well. Share:

Apple has finally released the full list of updates in the next version of the Mac operating system, including a section detailing all the security updates. A couple of features look pretty interesting. The biggest is the inclusion of “Library Randomization”, or what we call layout randomization (ASLR) in Vista. System functions are randomized in memory to make exploitation more difficult. I don’t have a Leopard seed to check it out, and I suspect some of the researchers out there will dig in and let us know how good (or bad) the implementation is. Mac OS X already supports Data Execution Prevention, one of the other key Windows XP, Server, and Vista anti-exploitation technologies. Another good feature is tagging of downloaded applications. Any downloaded executable is tagged by the OS and requires the user to approve it on first launch (it doesn’t mention if it’s a password prompt or just clicking an OK box). It appears to list the app name, what tool downloaded it, and (if possible) the URL it came from. Regular users probably won’t pay attention, but this will be nice for those of us who do. Apple also (finally) improved the Mac OS X firewall to include some level of application control. The description makes it look like it only controls inbound connections, which would be too bad. I think the user interface for this one will be pretty important, and maybe outbound control is hidden in the capabilities somewhere. Anyone up to date on ipfw that can let us know if Apple is sticking with that? There’s a new sandboxing feature for some default applications, including Bonjour, Spotlight, and Quick Look. I highly suspect this is a way of limiting the potential exploitation via file and network fuzzing, considering the applications they picked. Most of the rest of the updates are fairly straightforward and good to see. Application signing, 256 bit AES for file encryption, better VPN support, SMB packet signing for Windows compatibility, multiple user certificates, and some updates to access control lists for file sharing (I think, although they don’t say, driven by Windows compatibility issues). There’s increased smart card support designed to meet the needs of the feds, but I might give it a shot (for fun) if the readers are added to default Macs (unlikely). And let’s not forget the biggest security feature in Leopard that didn’t make the list- Time Machine. Getting users to do differential backups will do more to assure the availability of their data than any other security feature. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this all holds up once the security researchers get their hands on it. On paper it looks great, maybe even getting Mac OS X up to the level of Vista (for security- usability on Vista still sucks). But I don’t believe anything until people smarter than me start banging on it and seeing where the cracks are. Share:

Over at BoingBoing they have a couple of articles describing how Irish government employees are abusing their access to government systems for personal gain. Everything from idle curiosity about a neighbor, to aiding and abetting burglary. I normally scoff at vendor press releases that jump on the latest media exploitations stories, but in this case I’m going to do it for them. This is, flat out, the poster child for database activity monitoring. As I described in my introduction to the technology, one of the use cases is to create separation of duties by allowing someone to do their job while looking for unusual activity. If nothing else, you could create audit reports that allow managers (or security administrators) to see all the records a particular employee accessed in a given day/week. Perfect? No. Effective? Yep. You’ll need a Database Activity Monitoring tool, and not something that just collects access logs, since you want to see the actual SQL transactions. If the application uses connection pooling to connect to the database, you’ll either need one of the tools that monitors application activity and correlates it with the database, or some sort of identifier in queries to trace which user is submitting the query (something I’ll talk more about in a later post). I’m more than happy to give the Irish government discounted rates if they’d like me to fly over and help fix this problem. My email is posted on the blog. Share:

Welcome to the second to last post in my series on DLP. You can find the other parts here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5. In this post we’ll be covering the major features of the central management server. Our final post will cover recommendations for evaluating and selecting the best tool for your environment. As we’ve discussed throughout this series, all current DLP solutions include a central management server for administering enforcement and detection points, creating and administering policies, incident workflow, and reporting. These features are frequently the most influential in the selection process. There are a lot of differences between the various products on the market; rather than trying to cover every possible feature, we’ll focus on the baseline of functions that are most important. User Interface Unlike other security tools, DLP/CMP tools are often used by non-technical staff ranging from HR, to executive management, to corporate legal and business unit heads. As such the user interface needs to account for this mix of technical and non-technical staff and should be easily customized to meet the needs of any particular user group. Due to the complexity and volume of information a DLP solution may deal with, the user interface can make or break a DLP product. For example, simply highlighting the portions of an email in violation of a policy when displaying the incident can shave minutes off handling time. A DLP user interface should include the following elements: Dashboard: A good dashboard will have user-selectable elements and defaults for technical and non-technical users. Individual elements can be enabled or restricted based on user and group. The dashboard should focus on the information valuable for that user, and not be just a generic system-wide dashboard. Elements should include number and distribution of violations based on severity and channel and other top-level information to summarize the overall risk to the enterprise. Incident Management Queue: The incident management queue is the single most important component of the user interface. This is the screen incident handlers will use to monitor and manage policy violations. The queue should be concise, customizable, and easy to read at a glance. Due to the importance of this feature we will detail recommended functionality later in this post. Single Incident Display: When a handler digs into a single incident, the display should cleanly and concisely summarize the reason for the violation, the user involved, the criticality, the severity (criticality is based on what policy is violated, severity on how substantial the violation is), related incidents, and all other information needed to make an intelligent decision on incident disposition. System Administration: Standard system status and administration interface. Includes user and group administration. Hierarchical Administration: Status and administration for remote components of the DLP solution, such as enforcement points, remote offices, and endpoints. Reporting: A mix of pre-built reports and ad-hoc reporting. Policy Creation and Management: Next to the incident queue this is the most important element of the central management server. It includes the creation and management of policies. Because it’s so important, we’ll cover it in more detail later. A DLP interface should be clean and easy to navigate. That may sound basic, but we’re all far too familiar with poorly designed security tools that rely on the technical skills of the administrator to get around. Since DLP is used outside of security, possibly even outside of IT, the user interface needs to appeal to a wider range of users. Hierarchical Management, Directory Integration, and Role Based Administration DLP policies and enforcement often need to be tailored to the needs of individual business units or geographical locations. Hierarchical management allows you to establish multiple policy servers distributed throughout the organization, with a hierarchy of administration and policies. For example, a geographic region can have its own policy server slaved to a central policy server. That region can create their own specific policies, ignore (with permission) central policies, and handle local incidents. Violations are aggregated on the central server while some policies are always enforced centrally. The DLP tool must support the creation of global and local policies, assign policies for local or global enforcement, and manage multi-regional workflow and reporting. DLP solutions also integrate with enterprise directories (typically Microsoft Active Directory) so violations can be tied to users, not IP addresses. This is complex when you realize you’re dealing with a mix of managed and unmanged (guest/temporary) employees without assigned IP addresses. The integration should tie DHCP leases to users based on their network login, and update to avoid accidentally tying a policy violation to an innocent user. For example, one product in an earlier version would keep a user associated with an IP address until that address was assigned to another user in the directory. One reference almost fired an employee because a contractor, not in Active Directory, was the next person to use that IP and committed a policy violation. The tool tied the violation to the innocent employee. The system should also allow internal role based administration for both internal administrative tasks, and monitoring and enforcement of users. Internally, users can be assigned to administrative and policy groups for separation of duties. For example, someone can be given the role of enforcing any policy assigned to the accounting group, but not administer the system, create policies, see violations for any other group, or alter policies. Since your Active Directory might not fully represent how you’d like to divide up monitored users, the system should also support groups and roles for dividing up employees for monitoring and enforcement. Policy Creation and Management Policy management and creation is a critical function at the heart of DLP solutions; it’s also (potentially) the most difficult part of managing DLP. The policy creation interface should be accessible to both technical and non-technical users, although heavily customized policies will nearly always need technical skills to define. For policy creation, the system should let you identify the kind of data to protect, a source (if needed)

H D Moore published details on exploiting the iPhone today using the same vulnerability as the jailbreaks/unlockers. It takes advantage of a vulnerability in the libtiff library for processing TIFF image files. The exploit is now in Metasploit, which means someone with only the technical skills of an ex-analyst can exploit you via email or a web page with a special image file. Apple will hopefully patch this quickly. The bad news is that it will kill all current attempts to load custom applications on the iPhone, but since it’s now remotely exploitable the risk outweighs the reward. Libtiff is a common library and this vulnerability was not unknown. This demonstrates a big problem in locking down a popular system like the iPhone or the Sony PSP- the same techniques needed to customize the device can often be used to exploit the security. For a wildly popular device like the iPhone it seems to make sense to open it up to legitimate, safe developers. This also proves that the excuse of locking the system down to protect the phone network (AT&T) is total bollocks, since it’s far from a perfectly secure system to start. Yes, I’m biased- I want custom apps on the iPhone I’ll probably eventually buy. Doesn’t mean I’m wrong… Share:

This weekend I was doing a little electrical work at my house, which is probably the riskiest area of Do-It-Yourself home repair. You only need to cross a couple of live AC wires once and see the “pop” (and smell the ozone) before the point hits home. In my case, I was installing a bunch of new light switches for a home automation project (dual-mode mesh network, if you care about those sorts of things). In the process I’m fixing some screwed up wiring installed by the builder; mostly three-way circuits they set up wrong. I was getting ready to work on the only four-way in the house (that’s when you have 3 switches controlling one light) and cut the power at the circuit breaker. Each of the switches was in multi-gang boxes with other switches controlling other lights, so I had to kill all those circuits as well. From what I could tell, all the power was off and it was safe to work. But being the paranoid that I am, I also checked with the AC indicator on my multimeter. I just press a button, wave it over a switch or outlet, and if it’s live the multimeter beeps. And beep it did. Despite killing (I thought) all the lighting circuits for the first floor of my house, one switch was still hot. I then started the methodical process of hitting the rest of the breakers to find the right one. About thirty minutes later I’d killed power to just about my entire house and still couldn’t find that damn circuit. Staring at my breakout panel (a second panel with the arc fault protection circuits for the bedrooms) I noticed two unlabeled breakers, figured out one of those was what I needed, and got back to work. In this case my instincts told me the circuit was safe, but my detection tool dissolved that particular illusion. In other cases, especially with my crappy stud detector, my tools are often wrong and my instincts are right. I guess it’s all a balancing act. Now I just need to figure out how to get my alarm panel to stop beeping randomly at me. Something about losing power really pissed it off. Share:

October 12, 2007, Phoenix, AZ Securosis, the world’s leading security blog, is proud to announce that it is now being protected by quantum cryptography. “After reading about Swiss officials using quantum cryptography to protect ballot results entered by hand we realized that this advanced technology is now ready for mainstream adoption,” stated Rich Mogull, Founder, CEO, and fun-guy-but-not-that-kind-of-fun-guy. “We feel that quantum cryptography is the ultimate data protection technology and the best way to assure that our blog posts are not tampered with until we post them on our remotely hosted WordPress blog.” Securosis has installed a fiber optic connection between their authoring system and posting system to support the new security program. Although posts were previously authored and posted using the same MacBook Pro, a second machine was needed to create the fiber connection required for the quantum cryptography. The two systems are located on the same desk with the fiber connection completely visible. The fiber line is under constant observation using video surveillance to further hamper tampering, but the recordings aren’t reviewed to avoid quantum effects such as the observed systems switching places or becoming “strangely attracted”. “We can now be assured that our posts maintain both their confidentiality and integrity during the development process, until they are posted unencrypted over the public Internet. We felt this was a far better investment than renewing our expired SSL certificate.” Securosis evaluated a number of competing technologies, including checksums, hashes, and TLS, but concluded that quantum cryptography was superior because it used the word “quantum”. “History has shown, as documented in Star Trek, that anything quantum has to be better. It’s a totally cool word and scientists are really into it, so it has to be more secure.” Share:

October 12, 2007, Phoenix, AZ Securosis, L.L.C., the world’s leading provider of security consulting services, announces that cybercrime has reached record levels since the dawn of history. “Cybercrime continues to increase at a staggering rate,” says Rich Mogull, Founder, CEO, Jedi, and part-time neurosurgeon. “Losses are higher this year than at any time in history. We highly advise companies to immediately engage with us at non-discounted rates to assure they are protecting their children and stopping terrorism.” About Securosis Securosis, L.L.C. is the world’s leading provider of IT security consulting services and impractical security dribble. Securosis’ customers include all of the Fortune 1000, most major governments, and a few minor religious institutions. Securosis helps customers achieve compliance with all international laws and defend themselves from all known zero-day attacks while leveraging synergies through thought leadership. We’re really smart- give us money or we’ll scare your grandma. Share:

Remember this post? If InfoWorld is accurate, Symantec will announce next week that they are acquiring Vontu. This would be consistent with the industry rumors that inspired my earlier post. I have no inside knowledge of this deal. The article states: Security software giant Symantec is preparing to announce an acquisition of Vontu, one the largest remaining independent providers of data leakage prevention software, which is used to control the flow of sensitive information across corporate networks. Multiple industry sources have confirmed to InfoWorld that Symantec will soon announce a buyout of Vontu, perhaps as early as next week, which will significantly further the trend of consolidation that has played-out in the red-hot DLP (data leakage prevention) space over the last year. … Sources said that the proposed deal will have Symantec paying $300-$350 million for privately-held Vontu, whose revenues are estimated at roughly $30 million per year by some industry analysts. Symantec and Vontu representatives declined to comment on the reported acquisition. This is a far more significant deal than McAfee’s acquisition of Onigma. Between Symantec, Websense, and EMC/RSA I think McAfee is now in the weakest position for DLP among the larger vendors. Since it’s late on a Friday, and the deal isn’t confirmed yet, I’ll save full analysis for next week. I think this is positive for Vontu and I hope that Symantec keeps them as independent as possible internally, similar to the Brightmail acquisition, and in opposition to most of their buys. It’s also positive for the remaining independent DLP players, especially Reconnex and Vericept. More next week… Share: