You can read all the details on their website (except for the part about the certification not being a measure of practical skills). From what I can tell, the CSSLP is just the CISSP with different CBKs, or Common Bodies of Knowledge. As with the CISSP, they are going for broad knowledge, not depth. Starting in June 2009, you can get certified by taking a paper exam, likely a multiple choice test similar to the CISSP. Why June? Because the test isn’t even written yet — I’ve heard from several sources that they are actively soliciting their existing pool of CISSPs to help write test questions.

Ah, but what if you can’t wait that long and want to get certified right away? You’re in luck. If you act before March 31, 2009, you can get grandfathered in without even having to take the exam! That’s right, they call it the CSSLP Experience Assessment, and here are the requirements:

• Upload a resume showing three years of experience related to software security, or four years if you don’t have a college degree
• Write short essays (500 words maximum) discussing four CBKs of your choice
• Get a CISSP to vouch for you
• Pay $650

Let’s examine these requirements one at a time.

Three years of experience. (ISC)2 doesn’t provide any requirements on depth of experience, other than citing the broadly-defined CBKs. Considering they are targeting everyone from software developers to security assessors to business analysts (yes, really), chances are they are going to accept any experience that is even tangential to the SDLC or software security.

Short essays on four of the CBKs. I asked the (ISC)2 exhibitors specifically what they are looking for to satisfy this requirement, and they said the essays should be a general discussion of the CBK topic, optionally citing your personal experience in that area if you have any. This messaging is not quite aligned with the website guidance, which states that the essays should be “Accomplishment Records” which are self-reported descriptions of experience. Either way, with a maximum essay length of 500 words, it’s pretty obvious that substance is not (ISC)2’s first priority. Here’s one data point for you: I spoke to someone who has already submitted the CSSLP Experience Assessment, and he said it took about an hour to write the essays.

Get a CISSP to vouch for you. Actually this can be any (ISC)2 certified person, not just CISSPs. Contrary to what you’d expect, though, the person isn’t vouching for your skillset so much as they are confirming that the attestations on your resume are accurate.

Pay $650. You knew it was coming. After all, there is money to be made. How is it that qualifying for the CSSLP through professional experience should cost $650? If you’re taking the written exam, fair enough, (ISC)2 does incur the cost of administering and grading that exam (even though the Scantron machine is probably paid off by now). But $650 for the submitted-online Experience Assessment? If we assume that the person reading these essay submissions makes a rather generous $100k per year, then $650 accounts for roughly a day and a half. Will it really take that long to read a maximum of 2,000 words and pass judgment? Of course not. (ISC)2 wants to get as many people as possible to qualify based on “experience”, seeding the initial pool of CSSLPs and netting them $650 per head for doing next to nothing.

As Lee Kushner stated during his OWASP AppSec presentation (7 Habits of Highly Effective Career Managers), “the more people who own a cert, the less relevant it becomes.” Irrelevant — that’s exactly what the CISSP has become, and it’s exactly where the CSSLP is headed. Meanwhile, (ISC)2 will sit back and watch while you and your employers continue to fill their coffers.

In closing, let me acknowledge that this blog entry probably comes across as judgmental. I accept that. I’m not ranting against the idea of certifications, though admittedly I’m not a fan of them either. I am disappointed that (ISC)2, an organization with tremendous influence, could have created something more meaningful but chose not to. Why bother when people will just fork over the cash anyway?

When an alternate email account or cell phone number is not tied to an account, online services often use personal information, supposedly only known by the account holder, to verify identity and reset a password. The risk here is the personal information is often known to other individuals and if the account holder is a public figure then the information may be easily researched. Birthdays, names of pets, locations of homes, schools, and events can often be discovered online or guessed.

Paris Hilton’s T-Mobile account, and thus all her Sidekick cell phone contents which were mirrored online, was compromised when someone “guessed” the answer to her secret question. The secret questions was, “What is your pet’s name.” The answer of course was, “Tinkerbell”. Something easily researched. Many people would not have their pet’s name online but friends, family members, or perhaps an ex would know the answer. Using a pet’s name is a very bad security practice.

Now we have Sarah Palin, another public figure, having her online account compromised because someone used the password reset functionality and guessed the answer to Sarah Palin’s secret question. This is how the attacker says he found out her personal information and guessed the answer to her secret question. He details this on 4chan.org:

rubico 09/17/08(Wed)12:57:22 No.85782652

Hello, /b/ as many of you might already know, last night sarah palin’s yahoo was “hacked” and caps were posted on /b/, i am the lurker who did it, and i would like to tell the story.

In the past couple days news had come to light about palin using a yahoo mail account, it was in news stories and such, a thread was started full of newfags trying to do something that would not get this off the ground, for the next 2 hours the acct was locked from password recovery presumably from all this bullshit spamming.

after the password recovery was reenabled, it took seriously 45 mins on wikipedia and google to find the info, Birthday? 15 seconds on wikipedia, zip code? well she had always been from wasilla, and it only has 2 zip codes (thanks online postal service!)

the second was somewhat harder, the question was “where did you meet your spouse?” did some research, and apparently she had eloped with mister palin after college, if youll look on some of the screenshits that I took and other fellow anon have so graciously put on photobucket you will see the google search for “palin eloped” or some such in one of the tabs.

I found out later though more research that they met at high school, so I did variations of that, high, high school, eventually hit on “Wasilla high” I promptly changed the password to popcorn and took a cold shower…

Best practices for setting up the password reset functionality of any online service:

1. Tie an account to another email account or cell phone number if that is an option. This will cause the service to send an out of band message and in essence make the password reset a 2-factor authentication.
2. Do not use any personal information that can be guessed as the answers to secret questions. Treat these answers like passwords. Don’t use dictionary words. Add some numbers or symbols to the answer. For example is Sarah Palin had used “Wasilla high 1964″ or “!Wasilla high!” it is far less likely it would be guessed. Pick a scheme to modify your secret answers so they aren’t guessable.
3. Try resetting your password. See if there are downgrade attacks which make it easier to reset the password. Yahoo for instance will allow you to specify that you don’t have access to the email address tied to your account and thus not send a password reset email. Since an attacker can do this the safety of using another account is eliminated thus making the answers to the secret question all that more important.

Almost as bad as the Sprint PCS password reset fiasco that made the news in April, here is the Yahoo Mail password reset screen:

As you can see, you need to know the user’s birthday, country of residence, and postal code. Not difficult information to dig up in Palin’s case, as shown here. After you enter this information correctly, you are asked to type in the alternate e-mail address that’s associated with the account. But they give you hints — so if your alternate e-mail was sarah@alaska.gov, they would show you s****@a*****.gov.

Assuming you guess the alternate e-mail correctly, Yahoo mails a password reset link to that address. So it’s likely that the attacker may have also had to gain access to her alternate e-mail account. Either that, or they exploited a vulnerability in the Yahoo password reset mechanism itself, which seems less likely but not implausible.

So Yahoo itself probably didn’t get hacked, per se, even though there will probably be a lot of FUD in the media about that.

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Sarah_Palin_Yahoo_email_hack_2008

Circa midnight Tuesday the 16th of September (EST) Wikileaks’ sources loosely affiliated with the activist group ‘anonymous’ gained access to U.S. Republican Party Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account gov.palin@yahoo.com. Governor Palin has come under criticism for using private email accounts to avoid government transparency mechanisms. The zip archive made available by Wikileaks contains screen shots of Palin’s inbox, example emails, address book and two family photos. The list of correspondence, together with the account name, appears to re-enforce the criticism.

Internet security has finally become an issue in presidential politics.

Palin’s use of a Yahoo account has been the subject of recent newspaper articles. The Washington Post published her Yahoo email address, which was likely a precursor to the attack.

The idea is simple — find SQL Injection vulnerabilities in high-traffic, trusted websites where the site’s content is dynamically fetched from a database (i.e. just about any content-rich site). Then use an automated tool to prepend or append malicious content to that content in the database. When the unsuspecting user visits the page to read an article, they will be treated to a barrage of <script> or other tags fetching content from sites in .ru, .cn, or who knows where else.

The guidance you give to mom and dad, “don’t visit sketchy looking sites in other countries,” is no longer good enough. If BusinessWeek can be compromised, it’s a given that USA Today, CNN, the New York Times, and other establishments are being targeted as well.

For this and similar examples, NoScript would have thwarted the attack because it wouldn’t permit the .js file to be loaded from an off-domain location. But what happens when the attackers start injecting the entire .js payload into the database instead of just a <script> tag? Now the malicious code is coming from the trusted domain, and if I’ve configured NoScript to allow scripts from businessweek.com, I’m out of luck. In fact, I have no idea why the attackers aren’t using this tactic already. Any ideas?

The Anchorage Daily News reports back in September 2004:

Sarah Palin never thought of herself as an investigator. Yet there she was, hacking uncomfortably into Randy Ruedrich’s computer, looking for evidence that the state Republican Party boss had broken the state ethics law while a member of the Alaska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission.

The next week, when Palin went back to work at the AOGCC, she noticed that Ruedrich had removed his pictures from the walls and the personal effects from his desk. But as she and an AOGCC technician worked their way around his computer password at the behest of an assistant attorney general in Fairbanks, they found his cleanup had not extended to his electronic files.

The technician “said it looked like he tried to delete this, but she knew a way to go around and get some of the deleted stuff,” Palin said in an interview. “I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I was there.”

And this is how Salon reports the same incident:

“In a neat symbolic fit, the agent responsible for Alaska’s current moment of reform and modernization is a woman, a breed once nearly as rare in far Northwest politics as a Democrat. Sarah Palin, a libertarian and hockey mom from the fast-growing suburbs of Anchorage, began her political career — as an appointed member of the state’s Oil and Gas Commission — by hacking into the computer of another commissioner, Randy Ruedrich, chairman of the Alaska Republican Party. Palin was seeking the evidence that she would eventually use to charge him with an improper relationship with lobbyists. (Ruedrich would later settle state ethics charges against him by paying a $12,000 fine.)”

Is this where the McCain administration is going to get their computer security expertise? She’s not a security expert but it is nice to see someone at the level of state govenor who knows their way around a computer.

Hackers getting a free T pass may be the least of our worries — local hackers-turned-security experts suggest RFID keycards, wireless networks and medical devices implanted in the body are also vulnerable to hacks.

At last week’s Defcon hacker convention in Las Vegas, a team of researchers showed it was possible to get information such as Social Security numbers and medical diagnoses, and change the settings on an implantable defibrillator by impersonating the computer it communicates with wirelessly. By doing so, a hacker could send a fatal shock to a patient’s heart, said William Maisel of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

It is almost like things haven’t changed since the 90’s when the L0pht worked to change the mindset of security:

1. Don’t trust vendor claims around security
2. Attacks aren’t “theoretical”
3. Security by obscurity is no security

The L0pht worked as an independent security research think tank.  For us it was non-profit side job researching and publishing vulnerabilities in software and hardware.  We did it for our love of technology and published what we found out because purchasers and users of the vulnerable systems deserve to know.

It’s 10 years later and the situation hasn’t improved much.  Mudge talks about the vulnerabilities the L0pht found in highway transponder systems that are still in systems being fielded today.  But more important than the vulnerabilities themselves is the nature of how these vulnerabilities are coming to light.  They are being found by hobbyists, students, and IT people working in their spare time.  How can something as important as the security of public fare collection systems and medical equipment not have a standard process for security acceptance testing? 

As we become more reliant on digital systems, with some even keeping us alive, it is high time for security testing to move beyond student papers and part time IT work.  Security testing needs to become a formal part of the process of purchasing and fielding digital systems.  Our lives are starting to depend on it.

The lawsuit claimed that the students’ planned presentation would violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) by enabling others to defraud the MBTA of transit fares. A different federal judge, meeting in a special Saturday session, ordered the trio not to disclose for ten days any information that could be used by others to get free subway rides.

“The judge today correctly found that it was unlikely that the CFAA would apply to security researchers giving an academic talk,” said EFF Staff Attorney Marcia Hofmann. “A presentation at a security conference is not some sort of computer intrusion. It’s protected speech and vital to the free flow of information about computer security vulnerabilities. Silencing researchers does not improve security — the vulnerability was there before the students discovered it and would remain in place regardless of whether the students publicly discussed it or not.”

This sets a good precedent for future cases, and perhaps next time a similar situation arises, a judge will not be so quick to issue a gag order. It’s not a happy ending yet though, as the original lawsuit is still in effect.

As Chris Wysopal pointed out last week, the MBTA’s ire is misdirected. Rather than suing the vendor who sold them the defective system, they sued and attempted to silence the students who discovered the weakness. This is 2008, not 1988 — did they honestly think a gag order would prevent the information from reaching the general public? The DEFCON presentation was already available on the Intertubes prior to the injunction being issued, and the MBTA attorneys included a copy of the confidential whitepaper with their filing, thereby making it public.

I guess you wouldn’t expect that a transit authority would have paid any attention to theCiscogate fiasco from a few years ago. That presentation never got out either, did it? All that taxpayer money the MBTA spent on ridiculous lawsuits and restraining orders could have been put toward fixing the security flaws. What a concept.

From the Confidential Memo Prepared for the MBTA which was publicly disclosed by the MBTA is court filing:

This seems to break all the rules of integrity of sensitive data storage. How could someone store money on a magnetic stripe in 2008 and not store an identifier that references the account in a central database?

The tickets do have a unique identifier generated when the card is initially purchased so a fraud detection system could be in place or is planned. But this would require tracking the value on the ticket or the usage of the ticket centrally so it isn’t clear why the value is stored on the card in the first place.

There are so many question about the security of this public system.  Fraud costs the Massachusetts taxpayer money and refitting an insecure, ill-designed system costs the Massachusetts taxpayer money. [Disclosure: I am a Massachusetts taxpayer.]

It should be a requirement that the current system or the (hopefully) upgraded system be tested by an independent organization that specializes in cryptosystems.  If the independent testing uncovers vulnerabilities, they need to be fixed before the system is fielded. Then the system should be retested to verify the fixes.  Once the system is deemed secure by an independent organization, a summary of the test document should be published for public inspection.  It should include the types of testing conducted and the results.

The public trust requires inspection of taxpayer funded projects to make sure they meet acceptible standards and vendors held responsible for deficiencies.  Projects that use computers and software should not get a free pass. It will be interesting to see if the CharlieTicket system is ever held up to public scrutiny.

From the Confidential Memo Prepared for the MBTA which was publicly disclosed by the MBTA is court filing:

This seems to break all the rules of integrity of sensitive data storage. How could someone store money on a magnetic stripe in 2008 and not store an identifier that references the account in a central database?

The tickets do have a unique identifier generated when the card is initially purchased so a fraud detection system could be in place or is planned. But this would require tracking the value on the ticket or the usage of the ticket centrally so it isn’t clear why the value is stored on the card in the first place.

There are so many question about the security of this public system. Fraud costs the Massachusetts taxpayer money and refitting an insecure, ill-designed system costs the Massachusetts taxpayer money. [Disclosure: I am a Massachusetts taxpayer.]

It should be a requirement that the current system or the (hopefully) upgraded system be tested by an independent organization that specializes in cryptosystems. If the independent testing uncovers vulnerabilities, they need to be fixed before the system is fielded. Then the system should be retested to verify the fixes. Once the system is deemed secure by an independent organization, a summary of the test document should be published for public inspection. It should include the types of testing conducted and the results.

The public trust requires inspection of taxpayer funded projects to make sure they meet acceptible standards and vendors held responsible for deficiencies. Projects that use computers and software should not get a free pass. It will be interesting to see if the CharlieTicket system is ever held up to public scrutiny.