Category: Doing it Differently

Just Culture and Information Security

Yesterday Twitter revealed they had accidentally stored plain-text passwords in some log files. There was no indication the data was accessed and users were warned to update their passwords. There was no known breach, but Twitter went public anyway, and was excoriated in the press and… on Twitter.

This is a problem for our profession and industry. We get locked into a cycle where any public disclosure of a breach or security mistake results in…

Well, you can imagine what it results in, or you can go read “The Security Profession Needs to Adopt Just Culture” by Rich Mogull. It’s a very important article, and you should read it, and the links, and take the time to consider what it means. In that spirit, I want to reflect on something I said the other night. I was being intentionally provocative, and perhaps crossed the line away from being just. What I said was a password management company had one job, and if they expose your passwords, you should not use their password management software.

Someone else in the room, coming from a background where they have blameless post-mortems, challenged my use of the phrase ‘you had one job,’ and praised the company for coming forward. And I’ve been thinking about that, and my take is, the design where all the passwords are at a single site is substantially and predictably worse than a design where the passwords are distributed in local clients and local data storage. (There are tradeoffs. With a single site, you may be able to monitor for and respond to unusual access patterns rapidly, and you can upgrade all the software at once. There is an availability benefit. My assessment is that the single-store design is not worth it, because of the catastrophic failure modes.)

It was a fair criticism. I’ve previously said “we live in an ‘outrage world’ where it’s easier to point fingers and giggle in 140 characters and hurt people’s lives or careers than it is to make a positive contribution.” Did I fall into that trap myself? Possibly.

In “Just Culture: A Foundation for Balanced Accountability and Patient Safety,” which Rich links, there’s a table in Figure 2, headed “Choose the column that best describes the caregiver’s action.” In reading that table, I believe that a password manager with central storage falls into the reckless category, although perhaps it’s merely risky. In either case, the system leaders are supposed to share in accountability.

Could I have been more nuanced? Certainly. Would it have carried the same impact? No. Justified? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Threat Model Thursday: ARM’s Network Camera TMSA

Last week, I encouraged you to take a look at the ARM Network Camera Threat Model and Security Analysis, and consider:

First, how does it align with the 4-question frame (“what are we working on,” “What can go wrong,” “what are we going to do about it,” and “did we do a good job?”) Second, ask yourself who, what, why, and how.

Before I get into my answers, I want to re-iterate what I said in the first: I’m doing this to learn and to illustrate, not to criticize. It’s a dangerous trap to think that “the way to threat model is.” And this model is a well-considered and structured analysis of networked camera security, and it goes a bit beyond

So let me start with the who, what, why and how of this model.
Continue reading “Threat Model Thursday: ARM’s Network Camera TMSA”

Doing Science With Near Misses

Last week at Art into Science, I presented “That was Close! Doing Science with Near Misses” (Slides as web page, or download the pptx.)

The core idea is that we should borrow from aviation to learn from near misses, and learn to protect ourselves and our systems better. The longer form is in the draft “That Was Close! Reward Reporting of Cybersecurity ‘Near Misses’” Voluntary Reporting of Cybersecurity “Near Misses”

The talk was super-well received and I’m grateful to Sounil Yu and the participants in the philosphy track, who juggled so we could collaborate and brainstorm. If you’d like to help, by far the most helpful way would be to tell us about a near miss you’ve experienced using our form, and give us feedback on the form. Since Thursday, I’ve added a space for that feedback, and made a few other suggested adjustments which were easy to implement.

If you’ve had a chance to think about definitions for either near misses or accidents, I’d love to hear about those, in comments, in your blog (trackbacks should work), or whatever works for you. If you were at Art Into Science, there’s a #near-miss channel on the conference Slack, and I’ll be cleaning up the notes.

Image from the EHS Database, who have a set of near miss safety posters.

Learning from Near Misses

[Update: Steve Bellovin has a blog post]

One of the major pillars of science is the collection of data to disprove arguments. That data gathering can include experiments, observations, and, in engineering, investigations into failures. One of the issues that makes security hard is that we have little data about large scale systems. (I believe that this is more important than our clever adversaries.) The work I want to share with you today has two main antecedents.

First, in the nearly ten years since Andrew Stewart and I wrote The New School of Information Security, and called for more learning from breaches, we’ve seen a dramatic shift in how people talk about breaches. Unfortunately, we’re still not learning as much as we could. There are structural reasons for that, primarily fear of lawsuits.

Second, last year marked 25 years of calls for an “NTSB for infosec.” Steve Bellovin and I wrote a short note asking why that was. We’ve spent the last year asking what else we might do. We’ve learned a lot about other Aviation Safety Programs, and think there are other models that may be better fits for our needs and constraints in the security realm.

Much that investigation has been a collaboration with Blake Reid, Jonathan Bair, and Andrew Manley of the University of Colorado Law School, and together we have a new draft paper on SSRN, “Voluntary Reporting of Cybersecurity Incidents.”

A good deal of my own motivation in this work is to engineer a way to learn more. The focus of this work, on incidents rather than breaches, and on voluntary reporting and incentives, reflects lessons learned as we try to find ways to measure real world security. The writing and abstract reflect the goal of influencing those outside security to help us learn better:

The proliferation of connected devices and technology provides consumers immeasurable amounts of convenience, but also creates great vulnerability. In recent years, we have seen explosive growth in the number of damaging cyber-attacks. 2017 alone has seen the Wanna Cry, Petya, Not Petya, Bad Rabbit, and of course the historic Equifax breach, among many others. Currently, there is no mechanism in place to facilitate understanding of these threats, or their commonalities. While information regarding the causes of major breaches may become public after the fact, what is lacking is an aggregated data set, which could be analyzed for research purposes. This research could then provide clues as to trends in both attacks and avoidable mistakes made on the part of operators, among other valuable data.

One possible regime for gathering such information would be to require disclosure of events, as well as investigations into these events. Mandatory reporting and investigations would result better data collection. This regime would also cause firms to internalize, at least to some extent, the externalities of security. However, mandatory reporting faces challenges that would make this regime difficult to implement, and possibly more costly than beneficial. An alternative is a voluntary reporting scheme, modeled on the Aviation Safety Reporting System housed within NASA, and possibly combined with an incentive scheme. Under it, organizations that were the victims of hacks or “near misses” would report the incident, providing important details, to some neutral party. This database could then be used both by researchers and by industry as a whole. People could learn what does work, what does not work, and where the weak spots are.

Please, take a look at the paper. I’m eager to hear your feedback.

Introducing Cyber Portfolio Management

At RSA’17, I spoke on “Security Leadership Lessons from the Dark Side.”

Leading a security program is hard. Fortunately, we can learn a great deal from Sith lords, including Darth Vader and how he managed security strategy for the Empire. Managing a distributed portfolio is hard when rebel scum and Jedi knights interfere with your every move. But that doesn’t mean that you have to throw the CEO into a reactor core. “Better ways you will learn, mmmm?”

In the talk, I discussed how “security people are from Mars and business people are from Wheaton,” and how to overcome the communication challenges associated with that.

RSA has posted audio with slides, and you can take a listen at the link above. If you prefer the written word, I have a small ebook on Cyber Portfolio Management, a new paradigm for driving effective security programs. But I designed the talk to be the most entertaining intro to the subject.

Later this week, I’ll be sharing the first draft of that book with people who subscribe to my “Adam’s New Thing” mailing list. Adam’s New Thing is my announcement list for people who hate such things. I guarantee that you’ll get fewer than 13 messages a year.

Lastly, I want to acknowledge that at BSides San Francisco 2012, Kellman Meghu made the point that “they’re having a pretty good risk management discussion,” and that inspired the way I kicked off this talk.

2017 and Tidal Forces

There are two great blog posts at Securosis to kick off the new year:

Both are deep and important and worth pondering. I want to riff on something that Rich said:

On the security professional side I have trained hundreds of practitioners on cloud security, while working with dozens of organizations to secure cloud deployments. It can take years to fully update skills, and even longer to re-engineer enterprise operations, even without battling internal friction from large chunks of the workforce…

It’s worse than that. Yesterday Recently on Emergent Chaos, I talked about Red Queen Races, where you have to work harder and harder just to keep up.

In the pre-cloud world, you could fully update your skills. You could be an expert on Active Directory 2003, or Checkpoint’s Firewall-1. You could generate friction over moving to AD2012. You no longer have that luxury. Just this morning, Amazon launched a new rev of something. Google is pushing a new rev of its G-Suite to 5% of customers. Your skillset with the prior release is now out of date. (I have no idea if either really did this, but they could have.) Your skillset can no longer be a locked-in set of skills and knowledge. You need the meta-skills of modeling and learning. You need to understand what your model of AWS is, and you need to allocate time and energy to consciously learning about it.

That’s not just a change for individuals. It’s a change for how organizations plan for training, and it’s a change for how we should design training, as people will need lots more “what’s new in AWS in Q1 2017” training to augment “intro to AWS.”

Tidal forces, indeed.

Yahoo! Yippee? What to Do?

[Dec 20 update: The first draft of this post ended up with both consumer and enterprise advice, which made it complex. The enterprise half is now on the IANS blog: Never Waste a Good Crisis: Yahoo Edition.]

Yesterday, Yahoo disclosed that attackers broke into Yahoo in 2013 and stole details on a billion accounts. Brian Krebs summarizes what was taken, and also has a more general FAQ.

The statement says that for “potentially affected accounts, the stolen user account information may have included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (using MD5) and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers.”

Yahoo says users should change their passwords and security questions and answers for any other accounts on which they used the same or similar information used for their Yahoo account.

The New York Times has an article “How Many Times Has Your Personal Information Been Exposed to Hackers?”

The big question is “How can you protect yourself in the future?” The Times is right to ask it, and their answer starts:

It’s pretty simple: You can’t. But you can take a few steps to make things harder for criminals. Turn on two-factor authentication, whenever possible. Most banking sites and ones like Google, Apple, Twitter and Facebook offer two-factor authentication. Change your passwords frequently and do not use the same password across websites.

I think the Times makes two important “mistakes” in this answer. [Update: I think mistake may be harsher than I mean: I wish they’d done differently.]

The first mistake is to not recommend a password manager. Using a password manager is essential to using a different password on each website. I use 1Password, and recommend it. I also use it to generate random answers to “security questions” and use 1Password’s label/data fields to store those. I do hope that one day they start managing secret questions, but understand that that’s tricky because secret questions are not submitted to the web with standard HTML form names.

The reason I recommend 1Password is that it works well without the cloud, and that means that a cloud provider cannot disclose my passwords. They also can’t disclose my encrypted passwords, where encrypting them is a mitigation for that first-layer information disclosure threat. (One of these days I should write up my complete password manager threat model.) These threats are important and concrete. 1Password competitor Lastpass has repeatedly messed this up, and those problems are made worse by their design of mandatory centralization.

It’s not to say that 1Password is perfect. Tavis Ormandy has said “More password manager bugs out today and more due out soon. I’m not going to look at more, the whole industry is crazy,” and commented on 1Password with a GIF. Some of those issues have now been revealed. (Tavis is very, very good at finding security flaws, and this worries me a bit.)

But: authentication is hard. You must make a risk tradeoff. The way I think about the risk tradeoff is:

  • If I use a single password, it’s easily compromised in many places. (Information disclosure threats at each site, and in my browser.)
  • If I use a paper list, an attacker who compromises my browser can likely steal most of my passwords.
  • If I use a cloud list, an attacker who breaks into that cloud can steal the list. If the list is encrypted, then they can still attack it offline. If the cloud design either sends my master password to the cloud, or javascript to the client, then my master password is vulnerable to an attacker who has broken into the cloud.
  • If I use a paper list, I can’t back it up easily. (My backups are on my phone, and in a PGP encrypted file on a cloud provider.)

So 1Password is the least bad of currently available options, and the Times should have put a stake in the ground on the subject. (Or perhaps their new “Wirecutter” division should take a look. Oh wait! They did. I disagree with their assessment, as stated above.)

The second big mistake is to assert that you can’t fully protect yourself in a simple, declarative sentence at the end of their answer. What’s that you say? It’s not the end of their answer? But it is. In today’s short attention-span world, you see those words and stop. You move on. It’s important that security advice be actionable.

So: use a password manager. Lie in your answers to “secret questions.” Tell different sites different lies. Use a password manager to remember them.

Learning from Our Experience, Part Z

One of the themes of The New School of Information Security is how other fields learn from their experiences, and how information security’s culture of hiding our incidents prevents us from learning.

Zombie survival guide

Today I found yet another field where they are looking to learn from previous incidents and mistakes: zombies. From “The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks:”

Organize before they rise!

Scripted by the world’s leading zombie authority, Max Brooks, Recorded Attacks reveals how other eras and cultures have dealt with–and survived– the ancient viral plague. By immersing ourselves in past horror we may yet prevail over the coming outbreak in our time.

Of course, we don’t need to imagine learning from our mistakes. Plenty of fields do it, and so don’t shamble around like zombies.

The Breach Response Market Is Broken (and what could be done)

Much of what Andrew and I wrote about in the New School has come to pass. Disclosing breaches is no longer as scary, nor as shocking, as it was. But one thing we expected to happen was the emergence of a robust market of services for breach victims. That’s not happened, and I’ve been thinking about why that is, and what we might do about it.

I submitted a short (1 1/2 page) comment for the FTC’s PrivacyCon, and the FTC has published that here.

[Update Oct 19: I wrote a blog post for IANS, “After the Breach: Making Your Response Count“]

[Update Nov 21: the folks at Abine decided to run a survey, and asked 500 people what they’d like to see a breach notice letter. Their blog post.]