Easy Security Acquisition

Intro
Now that the visibility of information security has grown, information security programs are facing a new problem, the bonanza of investments that can be made to 'enhance' a security program.  With so much money in the pool, there are many vendors doing all they can to encourage the purchase of their product.  So how is a company to choose it's investments?

The Best Way isn't Always Best
Most people would immediately go to a risk-based system.  The logic being, "If I choose the projects which mitigate the most risk, I will make the greatest improvements in my security posture."  While this is true, there is a subtle technicality hidden in that statement.

The statement above requires an extremely mature risk program. The risk program must not have any biases. It must include all areas of mitigation (identify, protect, detect, respond, recover) and methods (Doctrine, Organization, Training, Materiel, Leadership, Personnel, Facilities and Policy). It must be tailored to the threats the organization faces as well as the vulnerable conditions that exist within the organization. It must consider the entire attack path and must consider alternate branches an attack might take, (coming in the window when the door is locked).  It must capture all of these characteristics in a continuous manner across the organization.  Additionally, none of these characteristics can be biased as the bias will then be reflected in the acquisition.  While it is possible to have such a risk program, very few organizations do.

The Next Best Way

In lieu of the perfect risk program, the next best way is Operations-Based Acquisition.  In this scenario, we are going to assume our goal is to prevent attacks and that our security operations team is our last line of defense in preventing attack.

The first thing we must do is ensure our security operations team is competent.  This means that if the investments haven't been made already, they will need to be made to build the team, develop procedures, and train the team.

However, once the team is established, they will be able to identify the opportunities for investment.  Instead of measuring investments by decrease in risk, we measure by increase in security operations teams efficiency. 

We can look to the security operations team to help inform this.  When they notice that they are having to deal with attacks from a segment of the network that could be firewalled, we can segment the network and be more efficient.  When they notice that they don't find out about attacks until they are wide-spread due to lack of visibility, we can invest in IDSs and SIEMs.  When we notice human error taking lots of the security operations team's time, we can increase training.  And the beauty is that the use of the security operations team's time is measurable, and so the return on the investment can be captured!

Conclusion

Is it perfect?  No.  Is it quick, easy, and useful?  Yes!  And it is certainly better than simply buying the newest tool based on the newest report of evil hackers!  It is measurable and it is needs-driven.  All and all, a good approach.

Data: Defense's Home Field

If vulnerabilities are attack's home field, then data is defense's.

Vulnerabilities Are Attack's Advantage
When we talk in terms of vulnerabilities, attackers inherently have the advantage.  We have to defend against many.  They have to find few.  They can continuously look for them without our knowledge.  A new vulnerability's use may be the first time we become aware of it.  Simple imperfection means that there will always be vulnerabilities available to the attacker. Economically, it will always be more rewarding for the attacker to exploit vulnerabilities than for us to fix them.

The Goals of Defense
Data, on the other hand, is where defense has the advantage.  But to understand why, lets first step back and understand the goals of defense.  Attacks only end in three ways.  The attacker reaches his/her goal (and likely causes a negative impact for us).  Defense prosecutes the attacker (whether it be holding them accountable to company policy or the law).  Defense makes the cost of attack so high the attacker either can't or doesn't want to attack any more.

To come to either defensive win (prosecution or disengagement), defense needs data.  The attacker must be identified and profiled in either case.  To prosecute them, we must know who they are, where they are, and what they did to the point where we can prove it to others.  For disengagement, we need to know so much about them that it becomes too resource intensive for them to do something we don't know about.  (i.e. take action that we cannot identify as an incident, or as them.)

Data Is Attack's Disadvantage
If vulnerabilities economically benefit the attacker, data economically benefits defense.  To get data, defense must simply have sensors where data is being generated and a means to identify profiles within that data.

For attackers it is very resource intensive to not generate data.  In the real world, just sitting quietly generates data.  You generate a heartbeat and a heat signature, both of which can be sensed through walls.  The character Jack Reacher is based around the premise of someone minimizing the data they generate.  It takes a lot of time and effort for Jack to do so.  As can be seen from my blog on Multi-Persona Anonymity, it is very resource intensive to separate your profiles; (not generate data that links one you to another you).

Every time an attacker touches a computer, they generate reams of data.  Every time they use the network.  Every time they interact with a server or run a program, they are generating huge amounts of information.  They are generating logs of who they are, where they are, what actions they took, and what the outcomes of those actions are.  Anything that can in, any way, be tied back to their profile as a threat actor can be used by defense to end the attack.

And the more data they generate and we collect, the easier it becomes.  We can build profiles of everything they do forcing them to change everything from the computer they use to the timezone and geographical location the attack comes from.  We can force the attacker to create completely new tactics, techniques, and procedures in addition to tools for every single attack they attempt.  Attackers will no longer be able to try and fail until they get the attack right.  Every time they fail, they both increase our ability to prosecute them while having to expend significant resources to completely change their profile before trying and failing again.

Investment Needed
To realize this advantage, some investment is needed.  We need the tools to parse sensor data into standard, inoperable formats such as STIX, CYBOX, CAGS, and VERIS.  We need integration of transport systems that move data between tools and organizations such as PxGRID, TAXII, IF-MAP, and Moirai.  And we need investment in tools to parse the data and build the profiles of attackers; an active area of research from individuals and companies such as the MLSec Project.

In Conclusion
With data, the "try, try, again" approach to attack will be over.  By stopping it, the vast majority of attackers will be priced out of the market, leaving defense to deal with truly dangerous threats who are willing and able to commit massive resources to the attack.  And defense will still have the advantage.

Multi-Persona Anonymity

Recently Janet Vertesi, an assistant professor of sociology at Princeton University, tried to hide her pregnancy from the internet.  While she found it was extremely hard and some have questioned the value of going to the trouble, I believe her experiment may be seminal.  Here's why.

Anonymity vs Privacy
But before the why, a little discussion of privacy and anonymity.  There has been much debate about privacy, but it is assuredly dead.  This report proves it.  None of the things Janet did were private.  Each was logged, tracked, analyzed.  However, they were anonymous in that they were not correlated back to a central persona; to her.  I think this is the fundamental difference between privacy and anonymity.  Privacy means no-one or few know what you did.  Anonymity means no-one or few know it was you.

What Janet did was anonymity.  Her purchases were tracked and shared.  Her browsing habits were tracked and shared.  Her purchases were associated with an anonymous address, (an Amazon delivery locker).  Of the things she did, communicating her pregnancy by phone or in person was probably the only private thing she did.  Even that was probably not a great idea as the metadata from the phone calls and the phone call content it's self could easily have been recorded.

Why What She Did Was Important
What Janet did was seminal:

1. She proved you could could disassociate multiple personal personas through anonymity.  Something that is no longer possible through privacy.
2. She identified the touch points necessary to disassociate and proved they could be disassociated, at least for a short period.

To expand on the first bullet, people think they want privacy.  They don't.  They want to do things without everyone knowing they did them.  That will never again be accomplished through privacy.  However, it can be accomplished through anonymity.  The trick is to maintain multiple disjointed personas.  In this case, Janet had two: "a pregnant woman" and "indeterminately pregnant Janet".  However, people could have multiple personas: "Work", "Family", "Hobbies", etc.  All kept completely separate.

The 'how' of keeping them completely separate is captured in number two of what Janet did.  She determined what the touch points were. As an example:

1. Communication
2. Physical interaction.  (In this case transfer of goods)
3. Economic interaction
4. Authentication

She also identified ways of dealing with all of these: in-person communication, amazon lockers, pre-paid debit cards/cash, separate email addresses to create accounts with.  Unfortunately, there are multiple issues with what she identified such as monetary limits, potentially monitored phone calls, physically accessing the amazon locker, etc.  This is where the technology community needs to come together.

The Future
We need to stop trying to ensure privacy and instead start trying to ensure anonymity between personas.  We already have the building blocks.  Bitcoin provides economic interaction.  VPNs, anonymizing proxies, TOR, etc provide communications.  Crypto-currency based identities such as namecoin can provide anonymous identities for personas to authenticate against.  Even physical interaction could be anonymized through things like full-body suits.  Just such a physical situation is envisioned in the movie Surrogates.  However, we need to make anonymizing multiple personas the explicit goal of the tools we create to ensure they provide the security we desire.

This does not eliminate the need for privacy.  There will be locations where a person's personas interact.  Historically, this is a person's home.  This is why it receives unique legal protection.  However, this could also be a business model, allowing people to change personas, allow interaction between personas or shed/create personas in privacy.  This would likely be a physical facility with little to no monitoring behind closed doors. An example even exists in the Game of Thrones universe.

Ultimately, it will end in an arms race.  Those hoping to attempting to associate different personas will compete against those maintaining different personas and the projects to produce the tools to allow them to do so.  However, as the abuse of breaches of privacy become more egregious, the practice of strictly maintaining multiple personas will become more socially acceptable and the act of attempting to associate personas more malevolent.

In Summary
What Janet did is seminal and should open our eyes to the world we really live in.  The sooner we start work on maintaining separate personas, the sooner we may be able to enjoy the benefits we will never again get from privacy.

Of Vulnerabilities and Bullets

Where I explain why no-one cares about the vulnerability you found.

I've had many people try to convince me that infosec vulnerabilities are the base unit of infosec.  My experience is that vulnerabilities are something, but not much.

But lets talk guns.  Everyone has heard the saying, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people."  Probably more accurate would be that bullets kill people, but only in very specific situations.  There must be a gun, a target (in the same area) and a threat actor to pull the trigger to go with that bullet.

Vulnerabilities are about the same thing.  Vulnerabilities are like bullets.  They play a part, but no more.  The same way their are innumerable bullets out there yet very few ever kill people, there are innumerable vulnerabilities, yet very few are used to realize a risk.   This is because, just like a bullet, a vulnerability must exist in a greater context that makes it part of a risk that a threat actor can exploit and an impact that matters.  And of course the threat actor must exist to pull the trigger.

So, as a security researcher, if you feel that your vulnerabilities are not taken seriously, don't just consider the vulnerability when presenting it.  Consider the context the vulnerability is likely to exist in.  Consider whether a threat actor even exists to exploit the vulnerability.

If they do, convince people.  Show them where similar vulnerabilities have been exploited by threat actors.  Show them where the vulnerability helps known threat actors realize their stated goals.  Show them how the only part of the context preventing exploitation is that the threat actor simply hasn't made it to their organization.

Only then will the vulnerability matter.

Infosec, It's About What You Think You Know

Both the current core failure of infosec defense and it's ultimate success are fundamentally tied to what you think you know. Let me explain.

First and foremost: We don't lose because of vulnerabilities. We lose because we believe we are in one infosec state, and the threat realizes we are in a different, more vulnerable, state. That means that it's not whether or not the vulnerable condition exists that matters, it's whether the threat actor knows it does and we think it doesn't.

Second, if losing is about believing you are in one security state when you are in another, winning is about the threat actor believing they are in an infosec state when they are actually in another. We make this happen in the one place we control: our network.

Currently, threat actors can operate with impunity because our network is operating the way the threat actor believes it's operating. To tip the balance of power in infosec conflict, we need the network to be operating differently than the threat actor believes it's operating. To do that, we need to do a few things:

1. We need to treat the SIEM like a big data warehouse. Our SIEM should be a network telemetry data warehouse. It needs to receive as much alert data as possible through integration layers capable of dealing with the specific data types being inputted. It needs to be able to pull in additional associated data. In the data marts, it needs to detect not just malice, but any activity outside of the normal network profile. (This leads to a separate question of how to profile a network which I'll leave for another post.)
2. The network telemetry data warehouse needs to be able to correlate detected anomalies with other data to piece together the picture of what is happening. Understanding the relationships between observations is critical to understanding the ground truth of the conflict.
3. Most important, it needs to have a feedback loop; changing how the network is operating based on what the SIEM believes is anomalous or malicious. When potential malice is detected, it needs to take a different route though the network. Malice needs to have different rules applied to it's traffic. It needs to have different tools applied to delaying the threat, gathering intelligence, and responding to the threat to prevent negative impacts. This can all be accomplished in an automated feedback loop so that the network is pitching itself against any anomalous behavior.

On the network of the future, the network is not a static battlefield, but a living, pulsating thing. The network uses the massive amount of telemetry data at it's disposal and broad flexibility provided by Software Defined Networking and virtualization to respond to perceived threats. It put threat actors at the same type of disadvantage that defenders currently face. And, ultimately, the advantage in infosec conflict will pitch in defense's favor because threat actors will be unable to trust that the network environment they believe they are operating in is the true network state.

Gabe's Three Assumptions of Risk Assessment. i.e. the Chain of Trust

Over the years of discussing vulnerable conditions and risks, I've come up with three assumptions which help ground the risk assessment in reality:

1. If the threat actor has superuser privilege, they can realize the risk.  (This one has some caveats, however exceptions to this rule are so rarely implemented they are likely to not matter in any practical cases.)
1. This might not apply if you have immutable files
2. Off-host logging may detect the threat actor
2. If the threat actor has physical access, they can deny availability.
3. If the threat actor has unlimited physical access, they can gain superuser.  (see Assumption 1)

This could probably be summed up with a single concept:  the Chain of Trust.  In this case we are implying that the system's security is based on superuser's security and the system and superuser are based on the physical security.  If you haven't secured this chain of trust, any security established farther on in the chain is moot. 

I believe Dan Kaminsky's take is, "If you have root, you can get root" (paraphrased).  So when doing risk assessments, if at any point you assume the threat actor has compromised something farther back in the Chain of Trust, the rest of the line of reasoning is at issue.

As an example:  "If the threat actor pushes the power button on the computer, they could turn it off and shut everything down.  Therefore we should lock the power button." This assumes the threat has physical access in which they could pull the cables out of the computer, hit the emergency power off, or do any number of other things.

Alternately: "The bad guy can run code that can read all memory, so lets encrypt the data in memory."  This implies the threat already has superuser privileges and so could simply prevent the encryption, read prior to encryption, or copy the encryption key and decrypt.

So whether you are assessing risk or planning mitigations, remember the Assumptions and remember the Chain of Trust.

P.S. The Chain of Trust was not my idea but one that I got from Travis Howerton at Innovalysis.  It just fit well in explaining the three assumptions.

Infosec Strategy in 1

Target, Neiman Marcus, Microsoft, and many, many more...

Corporate America has a huge security problem.  And it's not compromises.  It's a lack of strategic vision in cyber security.

With a never-ending litany of massive breaches, organizations are spending so much time trying to put fingers in the dikes, that no-one is stepping back to look at the whole levee.  Websites being compromised?  Buy WAFs.  Point of sale being compromised?  Put more tools on the PCI LAN. China hacking people?  Get a cyber intelligence feed.  PHI/PII being leaked to pastebin?  Get DLP.  No-one stops to ask the question, "Do these fit together?"  And when you don't, your infosec defense looks like this:

Friday’s Friendly Funny by Dave Blazek is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.

Before thinking about point solutions, an organization must come up with a strategy.  I would suggest a Strategy Statement such as:

Delay threat actors from realizing risks until they give up or are detected and responded to.  Respond effectively.  Degrade gracefully and remediate effectively when threat actors realize risks.

The above single statement sum up an entire infosec program, laying out specific steps that can be used to plan and measure the program.  Yours doesn't need to be the same, but it needs to be a clear and concise statement you can make measurable progress against.  This one lays out base truths:

• That the program will be operations driven.
• That risk is a fundamental element of the security program (You can read some of my views on risk here, here, here, and here.)
• That the fundamental measurement of effectiveness is Delay vs Detection & Response.
• That the organization should expect to operate in and recover from a compromised environment.

It also establishes the stages of incident life-cycle that drive the strategy:

1. Delay
2. Detect
3. Respond
4. Remediate

Calling the first step Delay is meant to be a bit controversial.  I think normally it would be 'deny', 'protect', 'deter', or something else.  However, as a community, we need to get out of the idea that if we just build it secure enough, the threat will go away and never come back.  Obviously, not all threats will stick with their attack, however we need to plan our strategy for the ones that do and those are the cases where all we are doing is delaying.

This is a statement we can easily track progress against in one, easy to read, table:

Infosec Defense Execution Strategy

You can download the Infosec Defense Execution Strategy spreadsheet including an example. We also add reporting and after action review to the stages.  The states can easily be modified to meet an organization's process.  The Defensive Execution Strategy also breaks each step out into discrete levels of completion:

1. Define (Document what you want to do)
2. Build (Create anything you need to do it)
3. Train (Practice doing it)
4. Grade (Measure how well you do it)
5. (There is an implicit 5th step that, if you find any deficiencies in your grading you feed the measurement back into improving the step where the deficiency can be rectified.)

Within the levels of completion we define two specific things:  Who and What.  Without who, it is unclear as to who will actually get the work done.  If an organization doesn't know who will get the work done, you can almost guarantee no-one will do it.  A good model to use is RACI: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed.

'What' is also critical to tracking the strategy.  There needs to be deliverables which clearly show that a step has been performed. Managing based on deliverables significantly simplifies tracking of progress.  In the same vain, you need to know what products need to exist prior to starting a step.  If you don't, you have no way of measuring if you are ready to begin or not.  Ultimately the topic of management by deliverables could fill a book.

From this one table of levels of completion above, all information security projects can be planned.  This also helps keep the organization focused on more than just the 'build' step.  

And each stage can be decomposed.  Delay may be broken down into:

1. Preventing incidents
2. Operating in a compromised environment

Detection may be broken down into:

1. Internal awareness
2. External intelligence
3. Prioritizing potential malice to investigate
4. Facilitating correlation of prioritized information

(As an aside, #3 and #4 above are a fundamentally new way of looking at DFIR that is not yet widely adopted and deserves it's own post.)

All projects and all security requirements should be traceable to the Strategy Statement through the Infosec Defense Execution Strategy and the various levels of decomposition.  With this as a starting point, organizations can see how all of their projects and requirements fit together, identify gaps, and form a unified defense that looks less like the first picture and more like this:

Image by Hao Wei, licensed licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.