“We sell Hammers” – Not Security!

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“We sell Hammers” – Not Security!

“Several former Home Depot employees said they were not surprised the company had been hacked. They said that over the years, when they sought new software and training, managers came back with the same response: “We sell hammers.””

Failure to understand the dependence that we have not just on our obvious digital devices – smart phone, laptop, tablet, fancy fitness bling on your wrist – but also on a matrix of interconnection tying all these devices and billions more together – will land you in the hot seat. For about three billion out of the seven billion people on this planet, we have long since passed the point where we are isolated entities who act alone and in some measure of unconnected global anonymity. For most of us, our lives are not just dependent upon technology itself, but also on the capabilities of innumerable, faceless business entities acting on our behalf.

Consider the following, common, but trivial example.

When I swipe my credit card at the pump to purchase petrol, that transaction passes through any number of computation devices and applications operated by a chain of business entities. The following is a typical scenario (an example flow – but not the only one, of course):

  • The point of sale device1, itself (likely supplied by a point of sale provider)
  • The networking equipment at the station2
  • The station’s Internet provider’s equipment (networking, security, applications – you have no idea!)
  • One or more telecom company’s networking infrastructure across the Internet backbone
  • The point of sale company or their proxy
  • More networking equipment and Internet providers
  • A credit card payment processor
  • More networking equipment and Internet providers
  • The card issuer who must validate the card and agree to pay the transaction for me

And so on…. All just to fill my tank up. It’s seamless and invisible – the communications between entities usually bring up an encrypted tunnel, though the protection offered is not as solid as you may hope – Invisible and seamless, except when the processing is not so invisible, like during a compromise and breach.

Every one of these invisible players has to have good enough security to protect me, and you, if you also use some sort of payment card for your petrol.

Home Depot, and Target before them, (and who knows who’s next?) failed to understand that in order to sell a hammer in the Internet world, you’re participating in this huge web of digital interconnection. Even more so, if you’re large enough, your business network will have become an eco-system of digital entities, many of whose security practices will affect your security posture in fairly profound ways. When 2 (or more) systems connect, each may affect the security posture of the other, sometimes in profound ways.

And there be pirates in them waters, Matey. As I wrote in the introduction to my next book, Securing Systems: Applied security architecture and threat models:

“…as of this writing, we are engaged in a cyber arms race of extraordinary size, composition, complexity, and velocity.”

One of the biggest problems for security practitioners remains that the cyber “arms race” isn’t just between a couple of nation-states. Foremost, the nation-state cyber war has to cross the same digital ocean that we use for our daily lives and digital entertainment. The shared web makes every digital citizen, potential “collateral damage”. But, there are more players than governments.

As can occur in a ground war, virtual “warlords” have private cyber armies marauding for loot, my loot, your loot. Those phishing spam don’t come from your friends, right3? Just trying to categorize the various entities engaged in cyber attacks could generate a couple of fine PhD theses and perhaps even provide years of follow-on papers? The number and varying loyalties of the many players who carry out cyber attacks increases the “size” of the problem, adds to the “composition”, and generates a great deal of “complexity”. It’s enough to make a well-meaning box-store retailer bury its collective head in the virtual sand. Which is precisely what happened to that hammer seller, Home Depot.

But answering the “who” doesn’t complete the picture. There’s the macro “how”, as well4. The Internet seems to suffer the “tragedy of the commons“.

In order to keep the Internet sufficiently interesting with compelling content such that we want to participate, it absolutely must remain neutral in character5. While Internet democracy certainly appears to be quite messy, the very thing that drives the diversity of content on the Internet is its level playing field6.

But leaving the Internet as an open field for all to enjoy means that some will take advantage of the many simply because the “pickings” are too rich to ignore. There is just too much to steal to let those resources lay untouched. And the pirates don’t! People actually do answer those “Nigerian Prince” scam emails. Really, someone does. People do buy those knock-off drugs. For the 3 billion of us who are digitally connected, it’s a dangerous digital day, every single day. Watch what you click!

In short, if you’re reading this on my blog site, you are perhaps an unwitting participant in that “cyber arms race of extraordinary size, composition, complexity, and velocity.” And so is every business that employs modern digital capabilities, whether for payments, or any other task. Failure to understand just how dependent a business is upon this matrix of digital interaction will make one a Target (pun intended). CEO’s, you may want to pay closer attention? Ignoring the current realities could cost you your job, perhaps even your career7!

If you think that you only sell objects and not some level of digital security, I fear that you are likely to be very sadly mistaken?

cheers,

/brook

  1. My friend and former colleague, Lucy McCoy, wrote the communications code in the first generation of gas pump payment terminals. At that time, terminals communicated via modem and phone line. She was a serial communications wiz. I remember the point of sale terminal laid out in her lab area. Lucy has since passed away. She was a brilliant engineer; she gave my code the best quality testing ever.
  2. The transactions have to get from station to payment processing, right? Who runs those cable modems and routers at the station? Could be the Internet provider, or maybe not. I run my own modem/routers/switches at home to which I have full admin access.
  3. I don’t know any spammers, as far as I know? Perhaps I make an unwarranted assumption that you don’t, either?
  4. The “what” and “why” of cyber attack seem pretty clear. Beyond attackers after money, they are after some other advantage: geo-political, business, just causes (pick your favourite or most hated cause), career enhancement, what-have-you. This is all pretty well documented. The security industry seems preoccupied with the “what”, i.e., the technical details of exploits. Again, these technical details seem pretty well documented.
  5. Imagine if your most hated or feared government had control over your Internet use, even the Internet itself, and proceeded to feed you exactly what they wanted you to know and prevented you from any other content. How would you like that?
  6. The richness and depth that is an emergent and continuing quality of the Internet, to me, demonstrates the absolute genius of the originators and early framers of the protocols and design.
  7. Of course, if I had a severance of $15.9 million, maybe I wouldn’t very much mind ending my career?

Heartbleed Exposure, What Is It Really?

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Heartbleed Exposure, what is it really?

“Heap allocation patterns make private key exposure unlikely” Neel Mehta, discoverer of HeartBleed” 

In the media, there’s been a lot of discussion about what might be exposed from the heartbleed OpenSSL attack. It is certainly true that very sensitive items can be exposed. And over thousands of test runs, sensitive items like private keying materials and the like have been returned by the heartbleed buffer overread.

A very strong case can be made for doing exactly as industry due diligence suggests. Teams should replace private keys on servers that had been vulnerable, once these are patched. But should every person on the Internet change every password? Let’s examine that problems by digging into the details of exactly how heartbleed works.

First, heartbleed has been characterized as an “overflow” error: “Heartbleed is basically a buffer-overflow vulnerability”. This unfortunately is a poor descriptor and somewhat inaccurate. It may make better media copy, but calling heartbleed an “overflow” is a poor technical description upon which to base a measured response.

Heartbleed is not a classic buffer overflow. No flow control or executable code may be injected via heartbleed. A read of attacker chosen memory locations is not possible, as I will explain, below. A better descriptor of heartbleed is a “buffer over-read”. Unintentionally, some data from memory is returned to the attacker. To be precise, heartbleed is a data leak, not a flow control error.

In order to understand what’s possible to disclose, it’s key to understand program “heap” memory. The heap is an area of memory that programs use to store data. Generally speaking, well-written programs (like OpenSSL) do not to put executable code into heap (that is, data) memory[1]. Because data and execution are separated, the attacker has no way through this vulnerability to execute code. And that is key, as we shall see.

As a program runs, bits of data, large and small, temporary and more or less permanent for the run, are put into the heap[2]. Typically, data are put wherever is convenient at the moment of allocation, depending upon what memory is available.

Memory that’s been deallocated gets reused. If an available piece of memory happens to be larger than a requested size, the new sized piece will be filled with the new data, while adjacent to the new data will remain bits and pieces of whatever was there previously.

In other words, while not entirely random, the heap is filled with bits and pieces of data, a little from here, a little from there, a nice big chunk from this session, with a bit left over from some other session, all helter-skelter amongst each other. The heap is a jumble; taking random bits from the heap may be considered to be like attending a jumble sale.

Now, let’s return to heartbleed. The heartbleed bug returns whatever happens to be on the heap just above the 16 bytes that are required for the TLS heartbeat packet. The attacker may request as much as 64K bytes. That’s a nice big chunk of stuff from the heap; make no mistake about it. Anything might be in there. At the very least, decrypted  data intended for application processing will be returned to the attacker[3]. That’s certainly bad! It breaks the confidentiality supposedly gained through the TLS encryption. But getting a random bit is different than requesting an arbitrary memory location at the discretion of the attacker. And that is a very important statement to hold in mind as we respond to this very serious situation.

An analogy to Heartbleed might be a bit like going fishing. Sometimes, we fish where we can clearly see the fish (mountain streams) or signs of fish (clearer lakes), or with a “fish finder” appliance, that identifies fish  under the surface when the fish aren’t visible.

Heartbleed is a lot more like fishing for fish that are deep in a turbulent lake with no fish finding capability. The fisher is guessing. If she or he guesses correctly, fish for dinner. If not, it’s a long day holding onto the fishing rod.

In the same manner, the attacker, the “fisher” as it were, doesn’t know where the “fish”, the goodies are. The bait (the heartbleed request) is cast upon the “lake” (the program heap) in the hopes that a big fish will “bite” (secret “bytes” will get returned).

The attacker can heartbleed to her or his heart’s content (pun intended). That is, if left undiscovered, an attacker can continuously pound the other side of the connection with heartbleeds, perhaps thousands of times. Which means multiple chunks of memory will be returned to the attacker, as the heap allocates, deallocates, and moves data around.

Lots of different heap chunks will get returned. There will likely also be overlap between the chunks that are returned to the attacker. Somewhere within those memory chunks are likely to be some sensitive data. If the private key for a session happens to be in one of those chunks, it will be exposed to the attacker. If any particular session open through the OpenSSL library happens to a contain a password that had been transmitted, it’s been exposed. It won’t take an engineering genius to do an ASCII dump of returned chunks of memory in order to go poking about to find interesting bits.

Still, and nonetheless, this is hunting for goodies in a bit of a haystack. Some people are quite good at that. Let’s acknowledge that outright. But that’s very different than a directed attack.

And should a wise and prepared security team, making good use of appropriate security tools, notice a heartbleed attack, they will most likely kill the connection before thousands of buffers can be read. Heartbleed over any particular connection is a linear process, one packet retrieved at a time. Retrieving lots of data takes some time. Time to respond. Of course, an unprotected and unaware site could allow many sessions to get opened by an attacker, each linearly heartbled, thus revealing far more of what’s on the heap than a single session might. Wouldn’t you notice such anomalous behaviour?

It’s important to note that the returns in the heartbleed packets are not necessarily tied to the attackers’ session. Again, it’s whatever happens to be on the heap, which will contain parts of other sessions. And any particular heartbleed packet is not necessarily connected to the data in a previous or subsequent packet. Which means that there’s no continuity of session nor any linearity between heartbleed retrievals. All session continuity must be pieced together by the attacker. That’s not rocket science. But it’s also work, perhaps significant work.

I’ll reiterate in closing, that this is a dangerous bug to which we must respond in an orderly fashion.

On the other hand, this bug does not give attackers free reign to go after all the juicy targets that may be available on any host, server, or endpoint that happens to have OpenSSL installed. Whatever happens to be on the heap of the process using the OpenSSL library and that is adjacent to the heartbeat buffer will be returned. And that attack may only occur during a TLS session. Simply including the vulnerable library poses no risk, at all. Many programs make use of OpenSSL for other functionality beyond TLS sessions.

This bug is not the unfettered keys to the kingdom, unless a “key to the kingdom” just happens to be on the heap and happens to get returned in the over-read. What gets returned is entirely due to the distribution of the heap at the moment of that particular heartbeat.

Cheers,

/brook

These assertions have been demonstrated in the lab through numerous runs of the heartbleed attack by a  team who cannot be named here. My thanks to them for confirming this assessment. Sorry for not disclosing.

[1] There are plenty of specialized cases that break this rule. But typically, code doesn’t run from the heap; data goes onto the heap. And generally speaking, programs refrain from executing on the heap because it’s a poor security practice. Let’s make that assumption about OpenSSL (and there’s nothing to indicate that this is NOT true in this case), in order to make clear what’s going on with heartbleed.

[2] The libraries that support programs developed with the major development tools and running on the major operating systems have sophisticated heap management services that are consumed by the running application as it allocates and deallocates memory. While care must be exercised in languages like C/C++, the location of where data end up on the heap is controlled by these low-level services.

[3] That is, intended for the application that is using OpenSSL for TLS services.

Book Signing At RSA

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I’m signing books along with James Ransome and Anmol Misra at 11:30AM at the bookstore at RSA in San Francisco, Digital Guru. If you’re at the conference, please do come by and say “hello”.

James and Anmol  were kind enough to give me a few of their book’s pages, Core Software Security, so that I could ramble on about Secure Development Lifecycles (SDL).

cheers,

/brook

The “Real World” of Developer-centric Security

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My friend and colleague, Dr. James Ransome, invited me late last Winter to write a chapter for his 10th book on computer security, Core Software Security, (with co-author, Anmol Misra)  published by CRC Press. My chapter is “The SDL In The Real World”, SDL = “Secure Development Lifecycle”. The book was released December 9, 2013. You can get copies from the usual sources (no adverts here, as always).

It was an exciting process. James and I spent hours white boarding possible SDL approaches, which was very fun, indeed*. We collectively challenged ourselves to uncover current SDL assumptions, poke at the validity of these, and find better approaches, if possible.

Many of you already know that I’ve been working towards a different approach to the very difficult, multi-dimensional and multi-variate problem of designing and implementing secure software for a rather long time. Some of my earlier work has been presented to the industry on a regular basis.

Specifically, during the period of 2007-9, I talked about a new (then) approach to security verification that would be easy for developers to integrate into their workflow and which wouldn’t require a deep understanding of security vulnerabilities nor of security testing. At the time, this approach was a radical departure.

The proving ground for these ideas was my program at Cisco, Baseline Application Vulnerability Assessment, or BAVA, for short (“my” here does not exclude the many people who contributed greatly to BAVA’s structure and success. But it was more or less my idea and I was the technical leader for the program).

But, is ease and simplicity all that’s necessary? By now, many vendors have jumped on the bandwagon; BAVA’s tenets are hardly even newsworthy at this point**. Still, the dream has not been realized, as far as I can see. Vulnerability scanning still suffers from a slew of impediments from a developer’s view:

  • Results count vulnerabilities not software errors
  • Results are noisy, often many variations of a single error are reported uniquely
  • Tools are hard to set up
  • Tools require considerable tool  knowledge and experience, too much for developers’ highly over-subscribed days
  • Qualification of results requires more in-depth security knowledge than even senior developers generally have (much less an average developer)

And that’s just the tool side of the problem. What about architecture and design? What about building security in during iterative, fast paced, and fast changing agile development practices? How about continuous integration?

As I was writing my chapter, something crystalized. I named it, “developer-centric security”, which then managed to get wrapped into the press release and marketing materials of the book. Think about this:  how does the security picture change if we re-shape what we do by taking the developer’s perspective rather than a security person’s?

Developer-centric software security then reduced to single, pointed question:

What am I doing to enable developers to innovate securely while they are designing and writing software?

Software development remains a creative and innovative activity. But so often, we on the security side try to put the brakes on innovation in favour of security. Policies, standards, etc., all try to set out the rules by which software should be produced. From an innovator’s view at least some of the time, developers are iterating through solutions to a new problem while searching for the best way to solve it. How might security folk enable that process? That’s the question I started to ask myself.

Enabling creativity, thinking like a developer, while integrating into her or his workflow is the essence of developer-centric security. Trust and verify. (I think we have to get rid of that old “but”)

Like all published works, the book represents a point-in-time. My thinking has accelerated since the chapter was completed. Write me if you’re intrigued, if you’d like more about developer-centric security.

Have a great day wherever you happen to be on this spinning orb we call home, Earth.

cheers,

/brook

*Several of the intermediate diagrams boggle in complexity and their busy quality. Like much software development, we had to work iteratively. Intermediate ideas grew and shifted as we worked. a creative process?

**At the time, after hearing BAVA’s requirements, one vendor told me, “I’ll call you back next year.”. Six months later on a vendor webcast, that same vendor was extolling the very tenets that I’d given them earlier. Sea change?

Of Flaws, Requirements, And Templates

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November 13th, 2013, I spoke at the annual BSIMM community get together in Reston, Virginia, USA. I had been asked to co-present on Architecture Risk Assessment (ARA) and threat modeling along side Jim Delgrosso, long time Cigital threat modeler. We gave two talks:

  1. Introduction to  Architecture Risk Assessment And Threat Modeling
  2. Scaling Architecture Risk Assessment And Threat Modeling To An Enterprise

Thanks much, BSIMM folk, for letting me share the tidbits that I’ve managed to pick up along my way. I hope that we delivered on some of  the promises of our talks? One of my personal values from my participation in the conference was interacting with other experienced practitioners.

Make no mistake! ARA-threat modeling is and will remain an art. There is science involved, of course. But people who can do this well learn through experience and the inevitable mistakes and misses. It is a truism that it takes a fair amount of background knowledge (not easily gained):

  • Threat agents
  • Attack methods and goals used by each threat agent type
  • Local systems and infrastructure into which a system under analysis will go
  • Some form of fairly sophisticated risk rating methodology.

These specific knowledge sets sit on top of significant design ability and experience. The assessor has to be able to understand a system architecture and then to decompose it to an appropriate level.

The knowledge domains listed above are pre-requisite to an actual assessment. That is, there are usually years of experience in system and/or software design, in computer architectures, in attack patterns, threat agents, security controls, etc., that the assessor  brings to an ARA. One way of thinking about it is that ARA/threat modeling is applied computer security, computer security applied to the system under analysis.

Because ARA is a learned skill with many local variations, I find it fascinating to match my practice to practices that have been developed  independent of mine. What is the same? Where do we have consensus? And, importantly, what’s different? What have  I missed? How can I improve my practice based upon others’? These co-presentations and conversations are priceless. Interestingly, Jim and I agreed about the basic process we employ:

  • Understand the system architecture, especially the logical/functional representation
  • Uncover intended risk posture of the system and the risk tolerance of the organization
  • Understand the system’s communication flows, to the protocol interaction level
  • Get the data sensitivity of each flow and for each storage. Highest sensitivity rules any resulting security needs
  • Enumerate attack surfaces
  • Apply relevant active threat agents and their methodologies to attack surfaces
  • Filter out protected, insignificant, or unlikely attack vectors and scenarios
  • Output the security that the system or the proposed architecture and design are missing in order to fulfill the intended security posture

There doesn’t seem to be much disagreement on what we do. That’s good. It means that this practice is coalescing.The places were we disagree or approach the problem differently I think are pretty interesting.

Gary McGraw calls security architecture misses, “flaws”. Flaws as opposed to software bugs. bugs can be described as errors in implementation, usually, coding. Flaws would then be those security items which didn’t get considered during architecture and design, or which were not designed correctly  (like poorly implemented authentication, authorization, or encryption). I would agree that implementing some sort of no entropy scramble and then believing that you’ve built “encryption” is, indeed both a design flaw and an implementation error*.

I respect Gary’s opinion greatly. So I carefully considered his argument. My personal “hit”, not really an opinion so much as a possible rationale, is that “flaw” gets more attention than say, “requirement”? This may especially be true at the senior management level? Gary, feel free to comment…

Why do I prefer the term “requirement”? Because I’m typically attempting to fit security into an existing architecture practice. Architecture takes “requirements” and turns these into architecture “views” that will fulfill the requirements. So naturally, if I want security to get implemented, I will have to deliver requirements into that process.

Further, if I name security items that the other architects may have missed, as “flaws”, I’m not likely to make any friends amongst my peers, the other architects working on a system. They may take umbrage in my describing their work as flawed? They bring me into analysis in order to get a security view on the system, to uncover through my expertise security requirements that they don’t have the expertise to discover.

In other words, I have very good reasons, just as Gary does, for using the language of my peers so that my security work fits as seamlessly as possible into an existing architecture practice.

The same goes for architecture diagram preferences. Jim Delgrosso likes to proffer a diagram template for use. That’s a great idea! I could do more with this, absolutely.

But once again, I’m faced with an integration problem. If my peers prefer Data Flow Diagrams (DFD), then I’d better be able to analyze a system based upon its DFD. If architects use UML, I’d better be able to understand UML. Ultimately, if I prize integration, unless there’s no existing architecture approach with which to work, my best integration strategy is to make use of whatever is typical and normal, whatever is expected. Otherwise, if I demand that my peers use my diagram, they may see me as obstructive, not collaborative. I have (so far) focused on integration with existing practices and teams.

As I spend more time teaching (and writing a book about ARA), I’m finding that having accepted whatever I’ve been given in an effort to integrate well, I haven’t created a definitive system  ARA diagram template from which to work (though I have lots of samples). That may be a miss on my part? (architectural miss?)

Some of the different practices I encountered may be due to differing organizational roles? Gary and Jim are hired as consultants. Because they are hired experts, perhaps they can prescribe more? Or, indeed, customers expect a prescriptive, “do it this way” approach? Since I’ve only consulted sparingly and have mostly been hired to seed and mentor security architecture practices from the inside, perhaps I don’t have enough experience to understand consultative demands and expectations? I do know that I’ve had far more success through integration than through prescription. Maybe that’s just my style?

You, my readers, can, of course, choose whatever works for you, depending upon role, maturity of your organization, and such.

Thanks for the ideas, Jim (and Gary). It was truly a great experience to kick practices around with you two.

cheers,

/brook

*We should be long past the point where anyone believes that a proprietary scramble protects much. (Except, of course, I occasionally do come across exactly this!).

Security Testing Is Dead. Rest In Peace? Not!

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Apparently, some Google presenters are claiming that we can do away with the testing cycles in our software development life cycles? There’s been plenty of reaction to Alberto Savoia’s Keynote in 2011. But I ran into this again this Spring (2013)! So, I’m sorry to bring this up again, but I want to try for a security-focused statement…

The initial security posture of a piece of software is dependent upon the security requirements for that particular piece of software or system. In fact, the organizational business model influences an organization’s security requirements, which in turn influence the kinds of testing that any particular software or system will need before and after release. We don’t sell and deliver software in a vacuum.

Google certainly present a compelling case for user-led bug hunting. Their bounty programme works! But there are important reasons that Google can pull off user-led testing for some of their applications when other businesses might die trying.

It’s important to understand Google’s business model and infrastructure in order to understand a business driven bounty programme.

  • Google’s secured application infrastructure
  • Build it and they might come
  • If they come, how to make money?
  • If Google can’t monetize, can they build user base?

First and foremost, Google’s web application execution environment has got to have a tremendous amount of security built into it. Any application deployed to that infrastructure inherits many security controls. (I’ll exclude Android and mobility, since these are radically different) Google applications don’t have to implement identity systems, authorization models, user profiles, document storage protection, and the panoply of administrative and network security systems that any commercial, industrial strength cloud must deploy and run successfully. Indeed, I’m willing to guess that each application Google deploys runs within a certain amount of sandboxed isolation such that failure of that application cannot impact the security and performance of the other applications running on the infrastructure. In past lives, this is precisely how we built large application farms: sandbox and isolation. When a vulnerable application gets exploited, other applications sharing the infrastructure cannot be touched.We also made escape from the sandbox quite  difficult in order to protect the underlying infrastructure. Google would be not only remiss, but clueless to allow buggy applications to run in any less isolating environment. And, I’ve met lots of very smart Google folk! Scary smart.

Further, from what I’ve been told, Google has long since implemented significant protections for our Google Docs. Any application that needs to store documents inherits this document storage security. (I’ve been told that Google employ some derivation of Shamir’s Threshold Scheme such that unless an attacker can obtain M of N  stored versions of a document, the attacker gains no data whatsoever. This also thwarts the privileged insider attack)

My simple point is that Google is NOT entirely relying upon its external testers, its bug bounty programme. A fair amount of security is inherent and inherited by Google’s web application experiments.

And, we must understand Google’s business model. As near as I can tell from the outside, Google throws a lot of application “spaghetti” onto the Web. If an application “sticks”, that is, attracts a user base, then Google figure out how to monetize the application. If the application can’t be monetized, Google may still support the application for marketing (popularity, brand enhancement) purposes. Applications that don’t generate interest are summarily terminated.

In my opinion, Google’s business model leaves a lot of wiggle room for buggy software. Many of these experiments have low expectations, perhaps no expectation at the outset? This gives Google time to clean the code as the application builds user base and penetration. If nobody is dependent upon an application, then there’s not a very high security posture requirement. In other words, Google can take time to find the “right product”. This is entirely opposite for security function that must deliver protection independent of any support (like on an end point that can be offline). Users expect security software to be correct on installation: the product has to be built “right”, right from the start.

And, the guts of Google are most likely protected from any nasty vulnerabilities. So, user testing makes a lot of business sense and does not pose a brand risk.

Compare this with an endpoint security product from an established and trusted brand. Not only must the software actually protect the customer’s endpoint, it’s got to work when the endpoint is not connected to anything, much less the Internet (i.e., can’t “phone home”). Additionally, security software must meet a very high standard for not degrading the posture of the target system. That is, the software shouldn’t install vulnerabilities that can be abused alongside the software’s intended functionality. Security software must meet a very high standard of security quality. That’s the nature of the business model.

I would argue that security software vendors don’t have a great deal of wiggle room for user-discovery of vulnerabilities. Neither do medical records software, nor financials. These applications must try to be as clean as possible from the get go. Imagine if your online banking site left its vulnerability discovery to the user community. I think it’s not too much of a leap to imagine the loss in customer confidence that this approach might entail?

I’ll state the obvious: different businesses demand different security postures and have different periods of grace for security bugs. Any statement that makes a claim across these differences is likely spurious.

Google, in light of these obvious differences, may I ask your pundits to speak for your own business, rather than assuming that you may speak for all business models, rather than trumpeting a “new world order”? Everyone, may I encourage us to pay attention to the assumptions inherent in claims? Not all software is created equally, and that’s a “Good Thing” ™.

By the way, Brook Schoenfield is an active Google+ user. I don’t intend to slam Google’s products in any manner. Thank you, Google, for the great software that I use every day.

cheers

/brook

 

 

 

Agile & Security, Enemies For Life?

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Are Agile software development and security permanent enemies?

I think not. In fact, I have participated with SCRUM development where building security into the results was more effective than classic waterfall. I’m an Secure Agile believer!

Dwayne Melancon, CTO of Tripwire, opined for BrightTALK on successful Agile for security.

Dwayne, I wish it was that simple! “Engage security early”. How often have I said that? “Prioritize vulnerabilities based on business impact”. Didn’t I say that at RSA? I hope I did?

Yes, these are important points. But they’re hardly news to security practitioners in the trenches building programmes.

Producing secure software when using an Agile menthod is not quite as simple as “architect and design early”. Yes, that’s important, of course. We’ve been saying “build security in, don’t bolt it on” for years now. That has not changed.

I believe that the key is to integrate security into the Agile process from architecture through testing. Recognize that we have to trust, work with, and make use of the agile process rather than fighting. After all, one of the key values that makes SCRUM so valuable is trust. Trust and collaboration are key to Agile success. I argue that trust and collaboration are keys to Agile that produces secure software.

In SCRUM, what is going to be built is considered during user story creation. That’s the “early” part. A close relationship with the Product Owner is critical to get security user stories onto the backlog and critical during user story prioritization. And, the security person should be familiar with any existing architecture during user story creation. That way, security can be considered in context and not ivory tower.

I’ve seen security develop a basic set of user stories that fit a particular class or type of project. These can be templated and simply added in at the beginning, perhaps tweaked for local variation.

At the beginning of each Sprint, stories are chosen for development from out of the back log, During this process, considerable design takes place. Make security an integral part of that process, either through direct participation or by proxy.

Really, in my experience, all the key voices should be a part of this selection and refinement process. Quality people can offer why a paticular approach is easier to test, architects can offer whether a story has been accounted for in the architecture, etc. Security is one of the important voices, but certainly not the only one.

Security experts need to make themselves available throughout a Sprint to answer questions about implementation details, the correct way to securely build each user story under development.  Partnership. Help SCRUM members be security “eyes and ears” on the ground.

Finally, since writing secure code is very much a discipline and practice, appropriate testing and vulnerability assurance steps need to be a part of every sprint. I think that these need to be part of Definition of Done.

Everyone is involved in security in Agile. Security folk can’t toss security “over the wall” and expect secure results. We have to get our hands dirty, get some implementation grease under the proverbial fingernails in order to earn the trust of the SCRUM teams.

Trust and collaboration are success factors, but these are also security factors. If the entire team are considering security throughout the process, they can at the very least call for help when there is any question. In my experience, over time, many teams will develop their team security expertise, allowing them to be far more self-sufficient – which is part of the essence of Agile.

Us security folk are going to have to give up control and instead become collaborators, partners. I don’t always get security built the way that I might think about it, but it gets built in. And, I learn lots of interesting, creative, innovative approaches from my colleagues along the way.

cheers

/brook

RSA 2013 & Risk

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Monday, February 25th, I had the opportunity to participate in the Risk Seminar at RSA 2013.

My co-presenters/panelists are pursuing a number of avenues to strengthen not only their own practices, but for all. As I believe, it turns out that plenty of us practitioners have come to understand just how difficult a risk practice is. We work with an absence of hard longitudinal data, with literally thousands of variant scenarios, generally assessing ambiguous situations. Is that hard enough?

Further complicating our picture and methods is the lack of precision when we discuss risk. We all think we know what we mean, but do we? Threats get “prioritized” into risks. Vulnerabilities, taken by themselves with no context whatsoever, are assigned “risk levels”. Vulnerability discovery tools ratings don’t help this discussion.

We all intuitively understand what risk is; we calculate risk every day. We also intuitively understand that risk has a threat component, a vulnerability component, vulnerabilities have to be exploited, threats must have have the capacity and access to exploit. There are mitigation strategies, and risk always involves some sort of  impact or loss. But expressing these relationships is difficult. We want to shorthand all that complexity into simple, easily digestible statements.

Each RSA attendee received a magazine filled with short articles culled from the publisher’s risk archives. Within the first sentences risk was equated to threat (not that the writer bothered to define “threat”), to vulnerability, to exploit. Our risk language is a jumble!

Still, we plod on, doing the best that we can with the tools at hand, mostly our experience, our ability to correlate and analyze, and any wisdom that we may have picked up along the journey.

Doug Graham from EMC is having some success through focusing on business risk (thus bypassing all those arguments about whether that Cross-site Scripting Vulnerability is really, really dangerous). He has developed risk owners throughout his sister organizations much as I’ve used an extended team of security architects successfully at a number of organizations.

Summer Fowler from Carnegie-Mellon reported on basic research being done on just how we make risk decisions and how we can make our decisions more successful and relevant.

All great stuff, I think.

And me? I presented the risk calculation methodology that Vinay Bansal and I developed at Cisco, based on previous, formative work by Catherine Blackadder Nelson and Rakesh Bharania. Hopefully, someday, the SANS Institute will be able to publish the Smart Guide that Vinay and I wrote describing the method?*

That method, named “Just Good Enough Risk Rating” (JGERR) is lightweight and repeatable process through which assessors can generate numbers that are comparable. That is one of the most difficult issues we face today; my risk rating is quite likely to be different than yours.

It’s difficult to get the assessor’s bias out of risk ratings. Part of that work, I would argue, should be done by every assessor. Instead of pretending that one can be completely rational (impossible and actually wrong-headed, since risk always involves value judgements), I call upon us all to do our personal homework by understanding our own, unique risk preferences. At least let your bias be conscious and understood.

Still, JGERR and similar methods (there are similar methods, good ones! I’m not selling anything here) help to isolate assessor bias and at the very least put some rigour into the assessment.

Thanks  to Jack Jones’ FAIR risk methodology, upon which JGERR is partly based, I believe that we can adopt a consistent risk lexicon, developing a more rigorous understand of the relationships between the various components that make up a risk calculation. Thanks, Jack. Sorry that I missed you; you were speaking at the same time that I was in the room next door to mine. Sigh.

As Chris Houlder, CISO of Autodesk, likes to say, “progress, not perfection”. Yeah, I think I see a few interesting paths to follow.

cheers

/brook

*In order to generate some demand, may I suggest that you contact SANS and tell them that you’d like the guide? The manuscript has been finished and reviewed for more than a year as of this post.

Seriously? Product Security?

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Seriously? You responded to my security due diligence question with that?

Hopefully, there’s a lesson in this tale of woe about what not to do when asked about product security?

This incident has been sticking in my craw for about a year. I think it’s time to get it off my chest. If for no other reason, I want to stop thinking about this terrible customer experience. And yes, for once, I’m going to name the guilty company. I wasn’t under NDA in this situation, as far as I know?

There I was, Enterprise Security Architect for a mid-size company (who shall not be named. No gossip, ever, from this blog). Part of my job was to ensure that vendors’ product security was strong enough to protect my company’s security posture. There’s a due diligence responsibility assigned to most infosec people. In order to fulfill this responsibility, it has become a typical practice to research software vendors’ product security practices.Based upon the results, either mitigate uncovered risks to policy and industry standards or raise the risk to organizational decision makers (and there are always risks, right?).

Every software vendor goes through these due diligence investigations on a regular basis. And I do mean “every”.

I’ve lived on both sides of this fence, conducting the investigations and having my company’s software go through many investigations. This process is now a part of the fabric of doing secure business. There should be nothing surprising about the questions. In past positions, we had a vendor questionnaire, a risk scale based upon the expected responses, and standards against which to measure the vendor. These tools help to build a repeatable process. One of these processes is documented in a SANS Institute Smart Guide released in 2011 and was published by Cisco, as well.

Now, I’m going to name names. Sorry, Google, I’m going to detail just what your Docs sales team said to me. Shame on you!

When I asked about Google Docs product security here is the answer, almost verbatim, that I received from the sales team:

“We’re Google. We can hire Vint Cerf if we want. That is enough.”

Need I point out to my brilliant readers that Dr. Vint Cerf, as far as I know, has never claimed to be an information security expert? I’m sure he knows far more about the design of TCP/IP than I? (but I remind readers that I used to write TCP/IP stacks, so I’m not entirely clueless, either). And, Dr. Cerf probably knows a thing or two about Internet Security, since he runs ICANN?

Still, I can tell you authoritatively that TCP/IP security and Domain Name Registry security are only two (fairly small) areas of an information security due diligence process that is now standard for software vendors to pass.

Besides, the sales team didn’t answer my questions. This was a classic “Appeal to Authority“. And, unfortunately, they didn’t even bother to appeal to a security authority. Sorry Vint; they took your name in vain. I suppose this sort of thing happens to someone of your fame all the time?

Behind the scenes, my counter-part application architect and I immediately killed any possible engagement with Google Docs. Google Sales Team, you lost the sale through that single response. The discussion was over; the possibility of a sale was out, door firmly closed.

One of the interesting results from the wide adoption of The Web has been the need for open and transparent engagement. Organizations that engage honestly gain trust through their integrity, even in the face of organizational mis-steps and faux pas. Organizations who attempt the old fashion paradigm, “control all communications”, lose trust, and lose it rapidly and profoundly. Commercial companies, are you paying attention? This is what democracy looks like (at least in part. But that’s a different post, I think?).

Product security is difficult and demanding. There are many facets that must compliment each other to deliver acceptable risk. And, even with the best intentions and execution, one will still have unexpected vulnerabilities crop up from time to time. We only have to look at development of Microsoft’s product security programme to understand how one of the best in the industry (in my humble opinion) will not catch everything. Do Microsoft bugs surface? Yes. Is the vulnerability level today anywhere near what it was 10 years ago? Not even close. Kudos, Microsoft.

It’s long past the time that any company can coast on reputation. I believe that Google do some very interesting things towards the security of their customers. But their  sales team need to learn a few lessons in humility and transparency. Brand offers very little demonstrable protection. Google, you have to answer those due diligence questionnaires honestly and transparently. Otherwise the Infosec person on the other side has nothing against which to base her/his risk rating. And, in the face of no information, the safest bet is to rate “high risk”. Default deny rule.

It’s a big world out there and if your undiscovered vulnerabilities don’t get’cha now, they will eventually. Beware; be patient; be humble; remain inquisitive; work slowly and carefully. You can quote me on that.

cheers,

/brook

Human Assisted Automated Analysis

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I think that we’re beginning to see a pattern emerging for solving some of information security’s most pressing, complex problems.

I get a lot of vendor announcements. That comes with my territory; I feel that I have to stay tuned as new developments appear. Another motivation, of course, are the raft of new attack types, combined attacks, carefully orchestrated attacks: it’s a dangerous Internet out there. It should be no surprise to any of my readers that there are individuals and groups who want what you have, irrespective of your values and your politics (and, of course, in some cases, because of your values and your politics. We all get attacked out of multiple motivations).

So what’s a poor security guy to do? Well, I do my day job, of course. And, I try to stay informed. Plus, as many of you know, I know a few folks in the industry, many of whom are a lot smarter than yours truly. Lucky me, these very smart people sometimes tell me about what problems they’re working on and how they’re approaching that work.

A couple of days ago, I received a link to an article in Computerworld purportedly about “DLP1 in the Cloud” from BEW Global. OK, everyone wants to jump on the “cloud” bandwagon. It’s true. The hype machine is definitely running2. But the cloud claim was not what caught my eye.

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is one of the trickier problems to solve for unstructured and/or poorly normalized data. We’ve had functioning regular expression or signature-based identification DLP software for quite a while. This is nothing new. In my experience, and, talking to others running DLP programmes, the existing toolset is accurate enough when pointed at highly predictable data types: government numbers, credit card numbers, any field who’s form can be normalized. This is what computer programmes are good at, yes?

But, try to write a regular expression to identify code written in any one of several languages, each with a distinct syntax. That is a problem. When I have broached this problem with vendors, they admit that it’s a tough nut to crack. I fear that one would have come fairly close to writing a language parser3; usually not a trivial problem.

So, what are BEW Global bringing to the problem that’s new? “Firm leverages cloud, human capital to offer data loss prevention services”. Their new element is the addition of a human analyst.

But BEW aren’t the only ones trying to do this on an enterprise scale. Whitehat Security have been doing this for a number of years. Within the last year, I’ve also heard this approach from a few other companies. Look who else is adding human analysts to supplement automated techniques4:

The idea as I understand it is that every variation that can be identified through programmatic techniques simply gets cataloged by the software. Outliers, exceptions, unique patterns get punted off to humans for their analysis as a part of the normal operation of the product.

There is, obviously, nothing new about human powered analysis5. Who else is going to create the algorithms initially? That’s really the only approach when tackling entirely new problems. Additionally, most security tools are enhanced cyclically; this is most often done through human programming. However, the norm has been that the running tool functions entirely by its programming6.

The emerging new architectural pattern includes analysts as a part of the running solution. Humans are not confined to updating the solution (additions, adjustments, new). Analysts are employed as a part of the running product, augmenting processing power with brain power.

Truly difficult problems apparently require highly trained people. It seems obvious in its way. This idea has taken a while to emerge. Whitehat were the first7 that I’d heard of sending outliers to human staff as a part of their standard analysis.

Apparently, we’re starting to see this idea catch on?

Thoughts? Other instances? Have I missed something?

Cheers

/brook
1 Data Loss Prevention
2 I sometimes see that the “cloud” is a couple of servers hosted at one of the big providers. Hmmm… ?!?
3 The usual front end for a compiler.
4 Vendor mention must in no manner be construed as a product or company endorsement by Brook Schoenfield whatsoever, without restriction. My understanding of any one of these products may be faulty. I have listed these as examples only, to the best of my understanding of what has been told to me. I have performed no due diligence on the statements of these organizations. Brook Schoenfield makes no warranty or representation whatsoever on the truthfulness of company claims nor on the fitness of any product.
5 Even if the humans are employing automated tools.
6 I’m including updating signatures and similar data upon which the automation will base its decisions.
7 I haven’t done any research on who was first. I remember who told me about this pattern the first time.