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The next step in our journey to understand and select an enterprise firewall has everything to do with management. During procurement it’s very easy to focus on shiny objects and blinking lights. By that we mean getting enamored with speeds, feeds, and features – to the exclusion of what you do with the device once it’s deployed. Without focusing on management during procurement, you may miss a key requirement – or even worse, sign yourself up to a virtual lifetime of inefficiency and wasted time struggling to manage the secure perimeter. To be clear, most of the base management capabilities of the firewall devices are subpar. In fact, a cottage industry of firewall management tools has emerged to address the gaps in these built-in capabilities. Unfortunately that doesn’t surprise us, because vendors tend to focus on managing their devices, rather than focusing on process of protecting the perimeter. There is a huge difference, and if you have more than 15-20 firewalls to worry about, you need to be very sensitive to how the rule base is built, distributed, and maintained. What to Manage? Let’s start by making a list of the things you tend to need to manage. It’s pretty straightforward and includes (but isn’t limited to): ports, protocols, users, applications, network access, network segmentation, and VPN access. You need to understand whether the rules will apply at all times or only at certain times. And whether the rules apply to all users or just certain groups of users. You’ll need to think about what behaviors are acceptable within specific applications as well – especially web-based apps. We talk about building these rule sets in detail in our Network Security Operations Quant research. Once we have lists of things to be managed, and some general acceptance of what the rules need to be (yes, that involves gaining consensus among business users, tech colleagues, legal, and lots of other folks there to make you miserable), you can configure the rule base and distribute to the boxes. Another key question is where you will manage the policy – or really at how many levels. You’ll likely have some corporate-wide policies driven from HQ which can’t be messed with by local admins. You can also opt for some level of regional administration, so part of the rule base reflects corporate policy but local administrators can add rules to deal with local issues. Given the sheer number of options available to manage an enterprise firewall environment, don’t forget to consider: Role-based access control: Make sure you get different classes of administrators. Some can manage the enterprise policy, others can just manage their local devices. You also need to pay attention to separation of duties, driven by the firewall change management workflow. Keep in mind the need to have some level of privileged user monitoring in place to keep everyone honest (and also to pass those pesky audits) and to provide an audit trail for any changes. Multi-domain administration: As the perimeter gets more complicated, we see a lot of focus around technologies to allow somewhat separate rule bases to be implemented on the firewalls. This doesn’t just provision for different administrators needing access to different functions on the devices, but supports different policies running on specific devices. Large enterprises with multiple operating units tend to have this issue, as each operation may have unique requirements which require different policy. Ultimately corporate headquarters bears responsibility for the integrity of the entire perimeter, so you’ll need a management environment that can effectively map to your the way your business operates. Virtual firewalls: Since everything eventually gets virtualized, why not the firewall? We aren’t talking about running the firewall in a virtual machine (we discussed that in the technical architecture post), but instead about having multiple virtual firewalls running on the same device. Depending on network segmentation and load balancing requirements, it may make sense to deploy totally separate rule sets within the same device. This is an emerging requirement but worth investigating, because supporting virtual firewalls isn’t easy with traditional hardware architectures. This may not be a firm requirement now, but could crop up in the future. Checking the Policy Those with experience managing firewalls know all about the pain of a faulty rule. To avoid that pain and learn from our mistakes, it’s critical to be able to test rules before they go live. That means the management tools must be able to tell you how a new rule or rule change impacts the rest of the rule base. For example, if you insert a rule at one point in the tree, does it obviate rules in other places? First and foremost, you want to ensure that any change doesn’t violate your policies or create a gaping hole in the perimeter. That is job #1. Also important is rule efficiency. Most organizations have firewall rule bases resembling old closets. Lots of stuff in there, and no one is quite sure why you keep this stuff or which rules still apply. So having the ability to check rule hits (how many times the rule was triggered) helps ensure all your rules remain relevant. It’s helpful to have a utility to help optimize the rule base. Since the rules tend to be checked sequentially for each incoming packet, making sure you’ve got the most frequently used rules early for maximum efficiency, so your expensive devices can work smarter rather than harder and provide some scalability headroom. But blind devotion to a policy tool is dangerous too. Remember, these tools simulate the policies and impact of new rules and updates. Don’t mistake simulation for reality – we strongly recommend confirming changes with actual tests. Maybe not every change, but periodically pen testing your own perimeter will make sure you didn’t miss anything, and minimize surprises. And we know you don’t like surprises. Reporting As interesting as managing the rule base is, at some point you’ll need to prove that you are doing the right thing. That means a set of reports substantiating the controls in place. You’ll want to be able to schedule

As I mentioned previously, I’m working on an update to Understanding and Selecting a DLP Solution. While much of the paper still stands, one area I’m adding a bunch of content to is the selection process. I decided to buff it up with more details, and also put together a selection worksheet to help people figure out their requirements. This isn’t an RFP, but a checklist to help you figure out major requirements – which you will use to build your RFP – and manage the selection process. The first step, and this post, are fairly short and simple: Define the Selection Team Identify business units that need to be involved and create a selection committee. We tend to include two kinds of business units in the DLP selection process: content owners with sensitive data to protect, and content protectors with responsibility for enforcing controls over the data. Content owners include business units that hold and use the data. Content protectors tend to include departments like Human Resources, IT Security, Corporate Legal, Compliance, and Risk Management. Once you identify the major stakeholders you’ll want to bring them together for the next few steps. This list covers a superset of the people who tend to be involved with selection (BU stands for “Business Unit”). Depending on the size of your organization you may need more or less, and in most cases the primary selection work will be done by 2-3 IT and IT security staff, but we suggest you include this larger list in the initial requirements generation process. The members of this team will also help obtain sample data/content for content analysis testing, and provide feedback on user interfaces and workflow if they will eventually be users of the product. Share:

I just got back from the AppSec 2010 OWASP conference in Irvine, California. As you might imagine, it was all about web application security. We security practitioners and coders generally agree that we need to “bake security in” to the development process. Rather than tacking security onto a product like a band-aid after the fact, we actually attempt to deliver code that is secure from the get-go. We are still figuring out how to do this effectively and efficiently, but it seems to me a very good idea. One of the OWASP keynote presentations was at odds with the basic premise held by most of the participants. The idea presented was (I am paraphrasing) that coders suck at secure code development. Further, they will continue to suck at it, in perpetuity. So let’s take security out of the application developers’ hands entirely and build it in with compilers and pre-compilers that take care of bad code automatically. That way they can continue to be ignorant, and we’ll fix it for them! Oddly, I agree with two of the basic premisses: coders for the most part suck today at coding securely, and a couple common web application exploits can be addressed with this technique. Technology, including real and conceptual implementations, can deal with a wide variety of spoofing and injection attacks. Other than that, I think this idea is completely crazy. Coders are mostly ignorant of security today, but that’s changing. There are some vendors looking to productize some secure coding automation tactics because there are practical applications that are effective. But these are limited to correcting simple coding errors, and work because machines can easily recognize some patterns humans tend to overlook. Thinking that automating software security into a product through certifications and format checking programs is not just science fiction, it’s fantasy. I’ll give you one guess on who I’ll bet hasn’t written much code in her career. Oh crap, did I give it away? On the other hand, I have built code that was perfect. Until it was hacked. Yeah, the code was exactly to specification, and performed flawlessly. In fact it performed too flawlessly, and was subject to a timing attack that leaked enough information that the output was guessed. No compiler in the world would have picked this subtle issue up, but an attacker watching the behavior of an application will spot it quickly. And they did. My bad. I am all for automating as much security as we can into the development process, especially as a check on developer activities. Nothing wrong with that – we do it today. But to think that we can automate security and remove it from the hands of developers is naive to the point of being surreal. Timing attacks, logic attacks, and architectural flaws do not show up to a compiler or any form of pre/post automated checks. There has been substantial research on how to validate state machine behavior to detect business transaction fraud, but there has never been a practical application: it’s more work to establish the rules than to simply have someone manually verify the process. It doesn’t work, and it won’t work. People are crafty. Ingenious. Devious. They don’t play by the rules. Compilers and processors do. That’s certainly my opinion. I’m sure some entrepreneur just slit his/her wrists. Oh, well. Okay, smart guy/gal, tell me why I’m wrong. Especially if you are trying to build a company around this. Share:

I attended the OWASP Phoenix chapter meeting earlier this week, talking about database encryption. The crowd was small as the meeting was the Tuesday after Labor day, rather than the normal Thursday slot. Still, I had a good time, especially with the discussion afterwards. We talked about a few things I know very little about. Actually, there are several areas of security that I know very well. There are a few that I know reasonably well, but as I don’t practice them day to day I really don’t consider myself an expert. And there are several that I don’t know at all. And I find this odd, as it seemed that 15 years ago a single person could ‘know’ computer security. If you understood netword security, access controls, and crypto, you had a pretty good handle on things. Throw in some protocol design, injection, and pen test concepts and you were a freakin’ guru. Given the handful of people at the OWASP meeting, there were diverse backgrounds in the audience. After the presentation we were talking about books, tools, and approaches to security. We were talking about setting up labs and CTF training sessions. Somewhere during the discussion it dawned on me just how much things have changed; there are a lot of different subdisciplines in computer security. Earlier this week Marcus Carey (@marcusjcarey) tweeted “There is no such thing as a Security Expert”, which I have to grudgingly admit is probably true. Looking across the spectrum we have everything from reverse engineering malware to disk drive forensics. It’s reached a point where it’s impossible to be a ‘security’ expert, rather you are an application security expert, or a forensic auditor, or a cryptanalyst, or some other form of specialist. We’ve undergone several evolutionary steps in understanding how to compromise computer systems, and there are a handful of signs we are getting better at addressing bad security. The depth of research and knowledge in the field of computer security has progressed at a staggering rate, which keeps things interesting and means there is always something new to learn. With Rich in Babyland, the Labor Day holiday, and me travelling this week, you’ll have to forgive us for the brevity of this week’s summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences Seven Features To Look For In Database Assessment Tools. Adrian’s Dark Reading post. Favorite Securosis Posts Adrian Lane: Market For Lemons. Mike Rothman: This week’s Incite: Iconoclastic Idealism. Yes, voting for myself is lame, but it’s a good piece. Will be hanging on my wall as a reminder of my ideals. Other Securosis Posts New Release: Data Encryption 101 for PCI. Understanding and Selecting an Enterprise Firewall: Technical Architecture, Part 1. Understanding and Selecting an Enterprise Firewall: Application Awareness, Part 2. Favorite Outside Posts Adrian Lane: Interview Questions. I know it’s a week old, but I just saw it, and some of it’s really funny. Mike Rothman: Marketing to the Bottom of the Pyramid. We live a cloistered, ridiculously fortunate existence. Godin provides interesting perspective on how other parts of the world buy (or don’t buy) innovation. Project Quant Posts NSO Quant: Take the Survey and Win an iPad. NSO Quant: Manage IDS/IPS Process Revisited. NSO Quant: Manage IDS/IPS – Monitor Issues/Tune. Research Reports and Presentations Data Encryption 101: A Pragmatic Approach to PCI. White Paper: Understanding and Selecting SIEM/Log Management. White Paper: Endpoint Security Fundamentals. Top News and Posts IE 8 Bug. Vuln popped up late last Friday. Adobe Patches via Brian Krebs. Apple OS X Security Patch. 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 ds, in response to FireStarter: Market for Lemons. I guess this could be read both ways… more insight as would be gained from researchers could help shift the ballance of information to the consumer, but it could also confirm the conclusion that a product was low quality. I don’t know of any related research that shows that consumer information helps improve consumer outcomes, though that would be interesting to see. Does anyone know if the “security seal” programs actually improve user’s perceptions? And do those perceptions materialize in greater adoption? Also may be interesting. I don’t think we need something like lemon laws for two reasons: 1) The provable cost of buying a bad product for the consumer is nominal; not likely to get any attention. The cost of the security product failing are too hard to quantify into actual numbers so I am not considering these. 2) Corporations that buy the really expensive security products have far more leverage to conduct pre-purchase evaluations, to put non-performance clauses into their contracts and to readily evaulate ongoing product suitability. The fact that many don’t is a seperate issue that won’t in any case be fixed by the law. Share:

Now that we’ve been through technical architecture considerations for the evolving firewall (Part 1, Part 2), let’s talk about deployment considerations. Depending on requirements, there many different ways to deploy enterprise firewalls. Do this wrong and you end up with either too many or too few boxes, single points of failure, suboptimal network access, and/or crappy application performance. We could talk about all sorts of different models and use fancy names like tiered, mesh, peer to peer, and the like for them – but fortunately the situation isn’t really that complicated. To choose the most appropriate architecture you must answer a few questions: Public or Private Network? Are your remote locations all connected via private connections such as MPLS or managed IP services, or via public Internet services leveraging site-to-site VPN tunnels? How much is avoiding downtime worth? This fairly simple question will drive both network architecture and perimeter device selection. You can implement high availability architectures to minimize the likelihood of downtime but the cost is generally significant. What egress filtering/protection do you need? Obviously you want to provide web and email filtering on outbound traffic. Depending on bandwidth availability and cost, it may make sense to haul that back to a central location to be processed by large (existing) content security gateways. But for bandwidth-constrained sites it may make more sense to do web/email filtering locally (using a UTM box), with the understanding that filtering at the smaller sites might be less sophisticated. Who controls gateway policy? Depending on the size of your organization, there may be different policies for different geographies, business units, locations, etc. Some enterprise firewall management consoles support this kind of granular policy distribution, but you need to figure out who will control policy, and use this to guide how you deploy the boxes. Remember the technical architecture post where we pointed out the importance of consistency. A consistent feature set on devices up and down a vendor’s product line provides a lot of flexibility in how you can deploy – this enables you to select equipment based on the throughput requirement rather than feature set. This is also preferable because application architectures and requirements change, and support for all features on branch equipment (even if you don’t initially expect to use them) saves deploying new equipment remotely if you decide to take advantage of those features later, but we recognize this is not always possible. Economic reality rears its head every so often. Bandwidth Matters We most frequently see tiers of firewalls implemented in either two or three tiers. Central sites (geographic HQ) get big honking firewalls deployed in a high-availability cluster configuration to ensure resilience and throughput – especially if they provide higher-level application and/or UTM features. Distribution locations, if they exist, are typically connected to the central site via a private IP network. These tend to be major cities with good bandwidth. With plentiful bandwidth, most organizations tend to centralize egress filtering to minimize the control points, so outbound traffic tends to be centralized through the central site. With smaller locations like stores, or in emerging countries with expensive private network options, it may make more economic sense to use public IP services (commodity Internet access) with site-to-site VPN. In this case it’s likely not performance (or cost) effective to centralize egress filtering, so these firewalls generally must do the filtering as well. Regardless of the egress filtering strategy you should have a consistent set of ingress policies in place, which usually means (almost) no traffic originating from the Internet is accepted: a default deny security posture. Most organizations leverage hosting providers for web apps, which allow tight rules to be placed on the perimeter for inbound traffic. Likewise, allowing inbound Internet traffic to a small location usually doesn’t make sense, since those small sites shouldn’t be directly serving up data. Unless you are cool with tellers running their Internet-based side businesses on your network. High Availability Clusters Downtime is generally a bad thing – end users can get very grumpy when they can’t manage their fantasy football teams during the work day – so you should investigate the hardware resilience features of firewall devices. Things like hot swappable drives and power supplies, redundant backplanes, multiple network connections, redundant memory, etc. Obviously the more redundancy built into the box, the more it will cost, but you already knew that. Another option is to deploy a high availability cluster. Basically, this means you’ve got two (or more) boxes using sharing a single configuration, allowing automated and transparent load balancing between them to provide stable the performance and ride out any equipment failures. So if a box fails its peer(s) transparently pick up the slack. High availability and clustering used to be different capabilities (and on some older firewall architectures, still are). But given the state of the hardware and maturity of the space, the terminology has evolved to active/active (all boxes in the cluster process traffic) and active/passive (some boxes are normally hot spares, not processing traffic). Bandwidth requirements tend to drive whether multiple gateways are active, but the user-visible functioning is the same. Internal Deployment We have mostly discussed the perimeter gateway use case. But there is another scenario, where the firewall is deployed within the data center or at distribution points in the network, and provides network segmentation and filtering. This is a bit different than managing inbound/outbound traffic at the perimeter, and largely driven by network architecture. The bandwidth requirements for internal devices are intense – typically 40-100gbps and here downtime is definitely a no-no, so provision these devices accordingly and bring your checkbook. Migration The final issue we’ll tackle in relation to deployment is getting old boxes out and new boxes in. Depending on the size of the environment, it may not be feasible to do a flash cutover. So the more the new vendor can do to assist in the migration, the better. Fortunately the market is mature enough that many vendors can read in their competitors’

Tonight starts the Jewish New Year celebration – Rosh Hashanah. So L’Shana Tova to my Jewish peeps out there. I send my best wishes for a happy and healthy 5771. At this time of year, I usually go through my goals and take a step back to evaluate what I’ve accomplished and what I need to focus on for the next year. It’s a logical time to take stock of where I’m at. But as I’ve described, I’m moving toward a No Goal philosophy, which means the annual goal setting ritual must be jettisoned. So this year I’m doing things differently. As opposed to defining a set of goals I want to achieve over the next 12 months, which build towards my 3 and 10 year goals, I will lay down a set of ideals I want to live towards. Yeah, ideals seem so, uh, unachievable – but that’s OK. These are things that are important to my personal evolution. They are listed in no particular order: Be Kind: Truth be told, my default mode is to be unkind. I’m cynical, snarky, and generally lacking in empathy. I’m not a sociopath or anything, but I also have to think consciously to say or do something nice. Despite that realization, I’m not going to stop speaking my mind, nor will I shy away from saying what has to be said. I’ll just try to do it in a nicer way. I realize some folks will continue to think I’m an ass, and I’m OK with that. As long as I go about being an ass in the right way. Be Active: As I’ve mentioned, I don’t really take a lot of time to focus on my achievements. But my brother was over last week, and he saw a picture from about 5 years ago, and I was rather portly. Since that time I’ve lost over 60 pounds and am probably in the best shape I’ve been since I graduated college. The key for me is activity. I need to work out 5-6 times a week, hard. This year I’ve significantly increased the intensity of my workouts and subsequently dropped 20 pounds, and am finally within a healthy range of all the stupid actuarial tables. No matter how busy I get with all that important stuff, I need to remain active. Be Present: Yeah, I know it sounds all new age and lame, but it’s true. I need to appreciate what I’m doing when I’m doing it, not focus on the next thing on the list. I need to stay focused on the right now, not what screwed up or what might (or might not) happen. Easier said than done, but critical to making the most of every day. As Master Oogway said in Kung Fu Panda: You are too concerned about what was and what will be. There is a saying: yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the ‘present’. Focus on My Problems: I’ve always been way too focused on being right. Especially when it doesn’t matter. It made me grumpy. I need to focus on the things that I can control, where I can have an impact. That means I won’t be so wrapped up in trying to get other people to do what I think they should. I can certainly offer my opinion, and probably will, but I can’t take it personally when they ignore me. After all, if I don’t control it, I can’t take ownership of it, and thus it’s not my problem. Sure that’s a bit uncaring, but if I let someone else’s actions dictate whether I’m happy or not, that gives them way too much power. Accept Imperfection: Will I get there? Not every day. Probably not most days. But my final ideal is to realize that I’m going to continue screwing things up. A lot. I need to be OK with that and move on. Again, the longer I hold onto setbacks and small failures, the longer it will take me to get to the next success or achievement. This also applies to the folks I interact with, like my family and business partners. We all screw up. Making someone feel bad about it is stupid and counterproductive. Yes, this is a tall order. Now that I’m paying attention, over the past few days I’ve largely failed to live up to these ideals. Imperfect I am, that’s for sure. But I’m going to keep trying. Every day. And that’s my plan for the New Year. – Mike. Photo credits: “Self Help” originally uploaded by hagner_james Recent Securosis Posts With Rich being out on paternity leave (for a couple more days anyway), activity on the blog has been a bit slower than normal. But that said, we are in the midst of quite a few research projects. I’ll start posting the NSO Quant metrics this week, and will be continuing the Enterprise Firewall series. We’re also starting a new series on advanced security monitoring next week. So be patient during the rest of this holiday week, and we’ll resume beating you senseless with loads of content next week… FireStarter: Market for Lemons Friday Summary: September 3, 2010 White Paper Released: Understanding and Selecting SIEM/Log Management Understanding and Selecting an Enterprise Firewall: Application Awareness, Part 1 Application Awareness, Part 2 LiquidMatrix Security Briefing: August 25 September 1 September 2 Incite 4 U We’re from the Government, and we’re here to help… – Yes, that sentence will make almost anyone cringe. But that’s one of the points Richard Clarke is making on his latest book tour. Hat tip to Richard Bejtlich for excerpting some interesting tidbits from the interview. Should the government have the responsibility to inform companies when they’ve been hacked? I don’t buy it. I do think we systematically have to share data more effectively and make a concerted effort to benchmark our security activities and results. And yes, I know that is

In the first part of our Enterprise Firewall technical discussion, we talked about the architectural changes required to support this application awareness stuff. But the reality is most of the propaganda pushed by the firewall vendors still revolves around speeds and feeds. Of course, in the hands of savvy marketeers (in mature markets), it seems less than 10gbps magically becomes 40gbps, 20gbps becomes 100gbps, and software on an industry-standard blade becomes a purpose-built appliance. No wonder buying anything in security remains such a confusing and agonizing endeavor. So let’s cut through the crap and focus on what you really need to know. Scalability In a market dominated by what I’ll call lovingly “bit haulers” (networking companies), everything gets back to throughput and performance. And to be clear throughput is important – especially depending on how you want to deploy the box and what security capabilities you want to implement. But you also need to be very wary of the religious connotations of a speeds and feeds discussion, so be able to wade through the cesspool without getting lost, and determine the best fit for your environment. Here are a few things to consider: Top Speed: Most of the vendors want to talk about the peak throughput of their devices. In fact many pricing models are based on this number – which is useless to most organizations in practice. You see, a 100gbps firewall under the right circumstances can process 100gbps. But turn anything on – like more than two filtering rules, or application policies, or identity integration, and you’ll be lucky to get a fraction of the specified throughput. So it’s far more important to understand your requirements, which will then give you a feel for the real-world top speed you require. And during the testing phase you’ll be able to ensure the device can keep up. Proprietary or industry-standard hardware: Two camps exist in the enterprise firewall market: those who spin their own chips and those who don’t. The chip folks have all these cool pictures that show how their proprietary chips enable all sorts of cool things. On the other hand, the guys who focus on software tell stories about how they take advantage of cool hardware technologies in industry-standard chips (read: Intel processors). This is mostly just religious/PR banter, and not very relevant to your decision process. The fact is, you are buying an enterprise firewall, which needs to be a perimeter gateway solution. How it’s packaged and who makes the chips don’t really matter. The real question is whether the device will provide the services you need at the speed your require. There is no place for religion in buying security devices. UTM: Many of the players in this space talk about their ability to add capabilities such as IDS/IPS and content security to their devices. Again, if you are buying a firewall, buy a firewall. In an enterprise deployment, turning on these additional capabilities may kill the performance of a firewall, which kind of defeats the purpose of buying an evolved firewall. That said there are clearly use cases where UTM is a consideration (especially smaller/branch offices) and having that capability can swing the decision. The point here is to first and foremost make sure you can meet your firewall requirements, and keep in mind that additional UTM features may not be important to the enterprise firewall decision. Networking functions: A major part of the firewall’s role is to be a traffic cop for both ingress and egress traffic passing through the device. So it’s important that your device can run at the speeds required for the use case. If the plan is to deploy the device in the data center to segment credit card data, then playing nice with the switching infrastructure (VLANs, etc.) is key. If the device is to be deployed on the perimeter, how well it plays with the IP addressing environment (network address translation) and perhaps bandwidth rate limiting capabilities are important. Are these features that will make or break your decision? Probably not, but if your network is a mess (you are free to call it ‘special’ or ‘unique’), then good interoperability with the network vendor is important, and may drive you toward security devices offered by your primary network vendor. So it’s critical that in the initial stage of the procurement process you are very clear about what you are buying and why. If it’s a firewall, that’s great. If it needs some firewall capabilities plus other stuff, that’s great too. But figure this out, because it shapes the way you make this decision. Product Line Consistency Given the significant consolidation that has happened in the network security business over the past 5 years, another aspect of the technical architecture is product line consistency. By that, we mean to what degree to the devices within a vendor’s product line offer the same capabilities and user experience. In an enterprise rollout you’ll likely deploy a range different-sized devices, depending on location and which capabilities each deployment requires. Usually we don’t much care about the underlying guts and code base these devices use, because we buy solutions to problems. But we do have to understand and ask whether the same capabilities are available up and down the product line, from the small boxes that go in branches to the big box sitting at HQ. Why? Because successfully managing these devices requires enforcing a consistent policy across the enterprise, and that’s hard if you have different devices with different capabilities and management requirements. We also need to mention the v-word – virtualization. A lot of the vendors (especially the ones praying to the software god) offer their firewalls as virtual appliances. If you can get past the idea that the anchor of your secure perimeter will be abstracted and run under a hypervisor, this opens up a variety of deployment alternatives. But again, you need to ensure that a consistent policy can be implemented, the user experience is the same, and

During BlackHat I proctored a session on “Optimizing the Security Researcher and CSO relationship. From the title and outline most of us assumed that this presentation would get us away from the “responsible disclosure” quagmire by focusing on the views of the customer. Most of the audience was IT practitioners, and most were interested in ways research findings might help the end customer, rather than giving them another mess to clean up while exploit code runs rampant. Or just as importantly, which threat is hype, and which threat is serious. Unfortunately this was not to be. The panel got (once again) mired in the ethical disclosure debate, with vendors and researchers staunchly entrenched in their positions. Irreconcilable differences: we get that. But speaking with a handful of audience members after the presentation I can say they were a little ticked off. They asked repeatedly how does this help the customers? To which they got a flippant answers to the effect “we get them boxes/patches as fast as we can”. Our contributing analyst Gunnar Peterson offered a wonderful parallel that describes this situation: The Market for Lemons. It’s an analysis of how uncertainty over quality changes a market. In a nutshell, the theory states that a vendor has a distinct advantage as they have knowledge and understanding of their product that the average consumer is incapable of discovering. The asymmetry of available information means consumers cannot judge good from bad, or high risk from low. The seller is incentivized to pass off low quality items as high quality (with premium pricing), and customers lose faith and consider all goods low quality, impacting the market in several negative ways. Sound familiar? How does this apply to security? Think about anti-virus products for a moment and tell me this isn’t a market for lemons. The AV vendors dance on the tables talking about how they catch all this bad stuff, and thanks to NSS Labs yet another test shows they all suck. Consider product upgrade cycles where customers lag years behind the vendor’s latest release or patch for fear of getting a shiny new lemon. Low-function security products, just as with low-quality products in general, cause IT to spend more time managing, patching, reworking and fixing clunkers. So a lot of companies are justifiably a bit gun-shy to upgrade to the latest & greatest version. We know it’s in the best interest of the vendors to downplay the severity of the issues and keep their users calm (jailbreak.me, anyone?). But they have significant data that would help the customers with their patching, workarounds, and operational security as these events transpire. It’s about time someone started looking at vulnerability disclosures from the end user perspective. Maybe some enterprising attorney general should stir the pot? Or maybe threatened legislation could get the vendor community off their collective asses? You know the deal – sometimes the threat of legislation is enough to get forward movement. Is it time for security Lemon Laws? What do you think? Discuss in the comments.   Share:

In the first part of our series on Understanding and Selecting an Enterprise Firewall, we talked mostly about use cases and new requirements (Introduction, Application Awareness Part 1, and Part 2) driving a fundamental re-architecting of the perimeter gateway. Now we need to dig into the technical goodies that enable this enhanced functionality and that’s what the next two posts are about. We aren’t going to rehash the history of the firewall – that’s what Wikipedia is for. Suffice it to say the firewall started with application proxies, which led to stateful inspection, which was supplemented with deep packet inspection. Now every vendor has a different way of talking about their ability to look into packet streams moving through the gateway, but fundamentally they’re not all that different. Our main contention is that application awareness (building policies and rules based on how users interact with applications) isn’t something that fits well into the existing firewall architecture. Why? Basically, the current technology (stateful + deep packet inspection) is still focused on ports and protocols. Yes, there are some things (like bolting an IPS onto the firewall) that can provide some rudimentary application support, but ultimately we believe the existing firewall architecture is on its last legs. Packet Processing Evolves So what is the difference between what we see now and what we need? Basically it’s about the number of steps to enforce an application-oriented rule. Current technology can identify the application, but then needs to map it to the existing hierarchy of ports/protocols. Although this all happens behind the scenes, doing all this mapping in real time at gigabit speeds is very resource intensive. Clearly it’s possible to throw hardware at the problem, and at lower speeds that’s fine. But it’s not going to work forever. The long term answer is a brain transplant for the firewall, and we are seeing numerous companies adopting a new architecture based not on ports/protocols, but on specific applications and identities. So once the application is identified, rules can be applied directly to the application or to the user/group for that application. State is now managed for the specific application (or user/group). No mapping, no performance hit. Again, at lower speeds it’ll be hard to decipher which architecture a specific vendor is using, but turn on a bunch of application rules and crank up the bandwidth, and old architectures will come grinding to a stop. And the only way to figure it out for your specific traffic is to actually test it, but that’s getting a bit ahead of ourselves. We’ll talk about that at the end of the series when we discuss procurement. Application Profiles For a long time, security research was the purview of the anti-virus vendors, vulnerability management folks, and the IDS/IPS guys. They had to worry about these “signatures,” which were basically profiles of bad things. Their devices enforce policies by looking for bad stuff: a typical negative security model. This new firewall architecture allows rules to be set up to look only for the good applications, and to block everything else. A positive security model makes a lot more sense strategically. We cannot continue looking for, identifying, and enumerating bad stuff because there is an infinite amount of it, but the number of good things that are specifically authorized is much more manageable. We should mention this does overlap a bit with typical IPS behavior (in terms of blocking stuff that isn’t good), and clearly there will be increasing rationalization of these functions on the perimeter gateway. In order to make this architecture work, the application profiles (how you recognize application one vs. application two) must be correct. If you thought bad IPS rules wreak havoc (false positives, blocked traffic, & general chaos), wait until you implement a screwy firewall application profile. So as we have mentioned numerous times in the Network Security Operations Quant series on Managing Firewalls, testing these profiles and rules multiple times before deploying is critical. It also means firewall vendors need to make a significant and ongoing investment in application research, because many of these applications will be deliberately difficult to identify. With a variety of port hopping and obfuscation techniques being used even by the good guys (to enhance performance mostly, but also to work through firewalls), digging deeply into a vendor’s application research capabilities will be a big part of choosing between these devices. We also expect open interfaces from the vendors to allow enterprise customers to build their own application profiles. As much as we’d like to think all of our applications are all web-friendly and stuff, not so much. So in order to truly support all applications, customers will need to be able to build and test their own profiles. Identity Integration Take everything we just said about applications and apply it to identity. Just as we need to be able to identify applications and apply certain rules to those application behaviors, we need to apply those rules to specific users and groups as well. That means integration with the dominant identity stores (Active Directory, LDAP, RADIUS, etc.) becomes very important. Do you really need real-time identity sync? Probably not. Obviously if your organization has lots of moves/adds/changes and those activities need to impact real-time access control, then the sync window should be minutes rather than hours. But for most organizations, a couple hours should suffice. Just keep in mind that syncing with the firewall is likely not the bottleneck in your identity management process. Most organizations have a significant lag (a day, if not multiple days) between when a personnel change happens and when it filters through to the directories and other application access control technologies. Management Evolution As we described in the Application Awareness posts, thinking in terms of applications and users – rather than ports and protocols – can add significantly to the complexity of setting up and maintaining the rule base. So enterprise firewalls leveraging this new architecture need to bring forward enhanced management capabilities. Cool application

We are happy to announce the availability of Data Encryption 101: A Pragmatic Approach to PCI Compliance. It struck Rich and myself that data storage is a central topic for PCI compliance which has not gotten a lot of coverage. The security community spends a lot of time discussing the merits of end-to-end encryption, tokenization, and other topics, but meat and potatoes stuff like encryption for data storage is hardly ever mentioned. We feel there is enough ambiguity in the standard to warrant deeper inspection into what merchants are doing to meet the PCI DSS requirements. For those of you who followed along with the blog series, this is a compilation of that content, but it has been updated to reflect all the comments we received and additional research, and the entire report was professionally edited. We especially want to thank our sponsor, Prime Factors, Inc., for stepping up and sponsoring this research! Without them, we couldn’t produce free research like this. As with all our papers, the content was developed independently and completely out in the open using our Totally Transparent Research process. The white paper is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0. And in keeping with our ideals on privacy, we don’t require registration to download the paper so you don’t need to think up some clever pseudonym, turn off JavaScript, or worry about tracking cookies. Finally, we would like to thank Dan, Jay Jacobs, and Kevin Kenan; as well as those of you who emailed inquires and feedback; your participation helps us and the community.   Share: