I am in a bit over my head here, but take a look at the first two presentations at the Workshop on Hardware and Architectural Support for Security and Privacy. Intel is preparing to introduce a new capability in their processors to support use of secure encrypted memory spaces on commodity CPUs. Their objective is to provide applications with a secure ‘enclave’ (their term) with a protected memory and execution space. It’s called Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX).
I was reading Roger Grimes’ interview with an offensive cybersecurity operator, and one key quote really stood out:
I wish we spent as much time defensively as we do offensively. We have these thousands and thousands of people in coordinate teams trying to exploit stuff. But we don’t have any large teams that I know of for defending ourselves. In the real world, armies spend as much time defending as they do preparing for attacks. We are pretty one-sided in the battle right now.
APIs go through a software lifecycle, just like any other application. The purchaser of the API develops, tests, and manages code as before, but when they publish new versions the API gateway comes into play. The gateway is what implements operational polices for APIs – serving as a proxy to enforce security, application throttling, event logging, and routing of API requests.
As we discussed in Defining CSM, identifying your critical assets and monitoring them continuously is a key success factor for your security program – at least if you are interested in figuring out what’s been compromised. But reality says you can’t watch everything all the time, even with these new security big data analytical thingies.
Our man Dave Lewis has a great post on CSO Online, When Disaster Comes Calling, about the importance of making sure your disaster recovery plan actually can help you when you have, uh, a disaster. Folks don’t always remember that sometimes success is living to fight another day.
Last year we documented our thoughts on buying Endpoint Security Management offerings, which basically include patch, configuration, device control, and file integrity monitoring – increasingly bundled in suites to simplify management. We planned to dig into the evolution of endpoint security suites earlier this year but the fates intervened and we got pulled into other research initiatives. Which is just as well because these endpoint security and management offerings have consolidated more…
@gepeto42 had a good post:
Windows Azure SQL Database, formely known as SQL Azure, is Microsoft’s managed database platform in Azure. While it is based on Microsoft SQL Server, it has various limitations that can impact how you secure and manage it. It also has some features that can help improve security.
I picked this one up from Slashdot (yes, I still read it sometimes):
Following a blog post by security company Secunia, VideoLAN (vendor of popular VLC media player) president Jean-Baptiste Kempf accuses Secunia of lying in a blog post titled ‘More lies from Secunia.’ It seems that Secunia and Jean-Baptiste Kempf have different views on whether a vulnerability has been patched.
Many people focus (often wrongly) on the new risks of cloud computing, but I am far more interested in leveraging cloud computing to improve security.
Before she left for camp XX1 asked me to download her iPhone photos to our computer, so she could free up some space. Evidently 16gb isn’t enough for these kids today. What would Ken Olson say about that? (Dog yummy for those catching the reference.) I happened to notice that a large portion of her pictures were these so-called selfies. Not in a creeper, micro-managing Dad way, but in a curious, so that’s what the kids are up to today way. A selfie is where you take a picture of yourself (and…