[SecurityRatty] tag: developers

America's Next Top Hash Function Begins

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:00:00 +0000

You might not have realized it, but the next great battle of cryptography began this month. It's not a political battle over export laws or key escrow or NSA eavesdropping, but an academic battle over who gets to be the creator of the next hash standard.

Hash functions are the most commonly used cryptographic primitive, and the most poorly understood. You can think of them as fingerprint functions: They take an arbitrary long data stream and return a fixed length, and effectively unique, string. The security comes from the fact that while it's easy to generate the fingerprint from a file, it's infeasible to go the other way and generate a file given a fingerprint.

Originally created to make digital signatures more efficient, hashes are now used to secure the very fundamentals of our information infrastructure: in password logins, secure web connections, encryption key management, virus and malware scanning, and almost every cryptographic protocol in current use. Without cryptographic hash functions, the internet would simply not work. At the same time, there isn't a good theory of hash functions. Unlike encryption algorithms, there are no secret keys involved; this makes it harder to mathematically define exactly what hash functions are.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, is holding a competition to replace the SHA family of hash functions. "SHA" stands for "Secure Hash Algorithm." It was developed by the NSA in 1993 to replace the commercial MD4 and MD5 algorithms, and has been updated several times since then. All the SHA algorithms are very similar, and have been increasingly under attack, so NIST wants to replace them.

The competition is important because, unlike other technological standards, committee design — balancing the interests of diverse constituents — isn't conducive to good security. Security is best when it's designed by expert teams and then subjected to public review. And cryptography is best when it's chosen by competition.

In 1997, NIST held a competition for a block cipher to replace DES. Fifteen candidates and three-and-a-half years later, Rijndael became the new Advanced Encryption Standard — AES. NIST is doing the same thing for what it's calling SHA-3 (not, for some unexplained reason, the Advanced Hash Standard or AHS).

The deadline was October 31, and NIST received 64 submissions. This isn't surprising — I predicted 80 — as most of the 15 AES submitters were professors, whose students at the time have become professors themselves, with their own students. (If NIST does a stream cipher competition in another ten years, they should expect about 256 submissions.) These submissions came from academia, from industry, and from hobbyists. CIO magazine recently interviewed one of the submitters, who is 15. Twenty-eight submissions have been made public by the submitters, and six of those have been broken.

NIST is going through all the submissions right now, making sure they are complete and proper. Their goal is to publish all accepted submissions by the end of November, in advance of the First Hash Function Candidate Conference, to be held in Belgium right after the Fast Software Encryption workshop in February.

The group expects to quickly make a first cut of algorithms — hopefully to about a dozen — and give the community a year of cryptanalysis before making a second cut in 2010. After another year of cryptanalysis, NIST will choose a winner in 2011. Expect a final standard by 2012.

My advice for software developers is to let the process run its course. While it's tempting to use the new cool algorithms in your designs, it's far too soon to trust any of them. This process is likely to result in all sorts of new research results in hash function security, and some real cryptanalytic surprises. Give the community a few years to figure out which ones are good and which aren't.

I've previously called this sort of thing a cryptographic demolition derby: The last one left standing wins. But that's only partially true. Certainly all the groups will spend the next few years trying to cryptanalyze each other, but in the end there will be a bunch of unbroken algorithms. NIST will select one based on performance and features.

NIST has stated that the goal of this process is not to choose the best standard but to choose a good standard. I think that's smart; in this process, the best is the enemy of the good. While there's no rush to choose a new standard — the SHA-2 algorithms will remain secure for the foreseeable future — we don't want to analyze the candidates forever.

Personally, I was part of a group of eight cryptographers that submitted Skein to the competition. A decade ago, writing Twofish and participating in the AES process was the most fun I had ever had in cryptography. These next few years promise to be even more fun.

---

Bruce Schneier is chief security technology officer of BT. His new book is Schneier on Security.

The Economics of Finding and Fixing Vulnerabilities in Distributed Systems

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:47:55 +0000

The Economics of Finding and Fixing Vulnerabilities in Distributed Systems

Quality of Protection Keynote

Alexandria, VA

October 27. 2008

Gunnar Peterson

Managing Principal, Arctec Group

Blog: http://1raindrop.typepad.com

When Andy Ozment asked me over the summer to do this talk at QoP, I knew back in August that the topic I wanted to address was security and economics. So to that end I would like to start by thanking all of our friends on Wall Street and here in Washington DC for providing such a rich tapestry of recent events that I can speak to.

Like many people in this industry, my focus on security was fundamentally altered by Dan Geer's speech "Risk Management is Where the Money Is"[1], there are not many people who can call a ten year shot in the technology business, but Dan Geer did. The talk revolutionized the security industry. Since that speech, the security market, the vendors, consultants, and everyone else has realized that security is really about risk management.

Of course, saying that you are managing risk and actually managing risk are two different things. Warren Buffett started off his 2007 shareholder letter [2] talking about financial institutions' ability to deal with the subprime mess in the housing market saying, "You don't know who is swimming naked until the tide goes out." In our world, we don't know whose systems are running naked, with no controls, until they are attacked. Of course, by then it is too late.

So the security industry understands enough about risk management that the language of risk has permeated almost every product, presentation, and security project for the last ten years. However, a friend of mine who works at a bank recently attended a workshop on security metrics, and came away with the following observation - "All these people are talking about risk, but they don't have any assets." You can't do risk management if you don't know your assets.

Risk management requires that you know your assets, that on some level you understand the vulnerabilities surrounding your assets, the threats against those, and efficacy of the countermeasures you would like to use to separate the threat from the asset. But it starts with assets. Unfortunately, in the digital world these turn out to be devilishly hard to identify and value.

Recent events have taught us again, that in the financial world, Warren Buffett has few peers as a risk manager. I would like to take the first two parts of this talk looking at his career as a way to understand risk management and what we can infer for our digital assets.

Warren Buffett's evolution as an investor can be broken up into two parts. He began his career very much influenced by Ben Graham, who sought to buy "cheap stocks", comparing the price of the stock to value of the company's assets, and placing many, diversified bets on companies whose share price was below the total assets. Note that the businesses may have been of unremarkable quality, but when the price was right Graham would buy in, wait for it to rise and then sell. This was the dawn of value investing.

Buffett's later career departed from Graham's strict, statistical measures, where he sought to buy into companies that were selling at a fair price, but were also high quality businesses. We will examine high quality in Part 2 of this talk, but first we go to Part 1 which is asset value.

Why does a talk on finding and fixing vulnerabilities start with valuing assets? The reason is that vulnerabilities are everywhere, we are literally marinating in them. Interesting vulnerabilities are attached to high value assets. In a world that quite literally presents us with too much information, we need screens to sift out what is worth paying attention to. You can run your vulnerability assessment tool of choice on your system, and come back with hundreds or thousands of vulnerabilities, but which ones should you pay attention to and act on? The first part of answering this question is asset value.

When Warren Buffett was 19 years old studying at the University of Nebraska, he read Ben Graham's book "The Intelligent Investor", Buffett said he thought it was the best book on investing he has ever read and still feels that way today. In the Intelligent Investor Graham lays out the framework of value investing. Specifically, Graham talks about three concepts - Mr. Market, a stock is a piece of a business, and Margin of Safety.

Mr. Market is a fictional, teaching device invented by Graham. You imagine that you have a somewhat manic depressive business partner called Mr. Market. Every day, Mr. Market comes into the office and offers you quotes on companies, some days he is in a good mood and the prices are high, other days he is gloomy and prices are low. The market is a quote machine, for quoting prices, not a value assessment machine. Your job is to wait for the right price, and you are free to take as many passes and be as patient as you would like, Mr. Market will just show up the next day and throw out a new price.

Graham used Mr. Market to teach us the separation between a price of a stock, and the value of a company. The second big concept from Intelligent Investor is that buying a stock is buying a small piece of the underlying business. You are not buying a roulette chip, or a number that fluctuates in the newspaper every day, rather you are buying a piece of the company's existing and future cash flow. What the stock market says General Electric is worth yesterday, today or tomorrow is separate from GE's actual ability to generate cash flow.

The last big concept in "The Intelligent Investor" and the one seemingly most applicable to information security is the Margin of Safety. Graham's margin of safety involved calculating the intrinsic value of a business and then buying stock where the market cap of a company is less than its intrinsic value. So if a company has $100 million in assets and a market capitalization of $75 million, then an investor would get a 25% margin of safety. Ideally, Graham wanted to buy stocks that were selling for one half of their book value, i.e. with a 50% margin of safety. Graham said that buying stocks without a margin of safety, above their book value, speculation, not investing.

So price is readily available, but how do we calculate intrinsic value so that we can ascertain the margin of safety? Graham used quantitative statistical measures, relying heavily on the company's book value, like its hard assets. What would it take for a competitor to reproduce the company's assets - its factories, distribution system, and so on. The difference between the book value of the assets and market cap is the margin of safety.

What can we learn in information security from this quantitative approach? Where price and value are readily ascertainable we should build countermeasures and eliminate on vulnerabilities that give our assets a wide margin of safety. Since budgets are not unlimited we should prefer vulnerabilities that are cheap to find, cheap to fix.

First to the asset question, information security budgets like all IT budgets are crufty, they are not a reflection of today's top issues and priorities so much as an accumulating snowball of decisions, legacy contracts, and solution attempts to yesteryear's problems. Today the normal Information Security budget is just a legacy artifact from bygone years when the network was the purported greatest vulnerability. If you were around in 1995, you remember the great gnashing of gears as the enterprises opened up their networks, connected their back ends to the Web and began to transact business in the giant virtual space.

The security people huffed and puffed that it was dangerous but there was simply too much money to be made, so businesses went ahead. The security people would not go down without a fight and insisted on countermeasures. They got two - the network firewall and SSL. The firewall was used to separate the average Fortune 500s network of hundreds of thousands of machines, employees, consultants, and partners from the web at large. SSL was used to protect the network channel between the web server and the client browser. so the network firewall separated the network segments, and SSL in effect encrypted the last mile of many million complex transactions and computations.

In 1995, this seemed like a good security architecture. When we built out these security architectures, the eCommerce market was derided as a toy. Amazon famously lost money for years - losing a little on every transaction but making it up in volume. When the market is nascent, a quaint security architecture offers cost effective protection. But what about 2008? Those cute little eCommerce buggers have grown they even make profits now - market caps measured in the tens of billions, accumulating large cash hordes, no debt, and the largest ones are in better financial shape than the financial services players that kicked sand in their face in the dotcom era.

And its not just eCommerce, the "real" economy Fortune 500 types are all connected as well. Directly and indirectly the Web is seeping into all businesses. Major changes from when the security architecture of the web was built out. But has the security architecture changed to reflect these new business realities? Not a bit of it!

We can use the book value of the IT budget investments and the book value of the Information Security investments to see what kind of Margins of Safety Information Security groups are engineering.

Let's look at some market data, Gary McGraw reviewed the numbers [2] in software security for 2007, breaking down software security sectors like tools and services. Here is a summary of his findings on software security tools:

"One of the most important developments in the software security market can be seen in the tools space which, combined, almost doubled to $150-180 million. Top of list are two major acquisitions that closed in 2007: Watchfire's purchase by IBM (somewhere in the range of $120-150 million on 2006 revenue of $26 million) and SPI Dynamics's purchase by HP (for around $100 million on 2006 revenue of $21.2 million).

...

The black box space was flat in 2007, with IBM/Watchfire checking in at $24.1 million and HP/SPI Dynamics earning $22.3 million. Smaller companies in the space, including Cenzic, Codenomicon, WhiteHat and the like had combined revenues around $12.5 million (a growth of 25%, though Cenzic grew 16% and WhiteHat 52%). Most of the growth "hiccup" in the black box market can be attributed to the serious challenges posed by any acquisition. So far 2008 looks to be back on track from a growth perspective in the black box testing space. The global reach that IBM and HP offer are already making a big difference.

On a more positive note, static analysis tools for code review grew at a healthy clip in 2007 into a $91.9 million dollar market. Fortify was up 83% to $29.2 million. Klocwork grew over 60% to $26 million. Coverity grew over 50% to $27.2 million. Ounce Labs tripled their revenue to $9.5 million."

These are very nice growth numbers, what company doesn't want 83% growth? However, the let's look at the total picture and compare the software security countermeasures against other security mechanisms. Gary McGraw's estimate shows the software security space coming in at $150 Million total, yet we see a company like Checkpoint that won the network security war in 1995 with earnings of around $900 Million! One single network security vendor is 6 times bigger than the entire software security space, in what alternate universe does this make sense?

This is where we begin to see that decisions in the People's Republic of Information Security have no real risk management thinking, they truly are swimming naked and hoping the tide doesn't go out.

Let's look at network assets. Obviously Cisco is the biggest, they earned $39.5 Billion last year. Pretty stellar. So spending $900 Million (Checkpoint) to defined $39.5 Billion seems like a pretty good deal.

Except, let's compare software security spending - last year Microsoft earned $60 Billion, SAP $16 billion, and Oracle $22 Billion. So that is about $98 Billion in just three vendors and you are going to "defend" that with allocating $150 Million worth of software security tools?

On the network side we are buying $900 million of security countermeasures (Checkpoint firewalls) to protect $39.5 billion worth of Cisco gear, about 2.3% of the network investment goes to security.

On the software side, we are buying $150 million of security countermeasures (like static analysis and black box scanners) to protect $98 billion of software (you know the stuff that runs the whole business), roughly coming to about 0.2% of the software budget goes to security.

This is very disturbing. From a prioritization standpoint The People's Republic of Information Security is misaligned by an order of magnitude at least. Next time you read about a data breach, or see an auditor's report with thousands of findings you won't have to wonder how it happened. It happened because Information Security doesn't have its eye on the ball, it invests in network security not because those controls have greater efficacy (the whole point of networks is they are dumb), no, they invest in network firewalls because they bought a bunch in 1995, some more in 1998, and heck they just kept buying them, the Checkpoint rep kept showing up and taking CISOs out to play golf, contracts got renewed, and poof - there goes the security budget.

Consider that software security tools could grow 50% a year for five years and still be half of where Checkpoint is today.

The optimistic way of looking at all this data is that there is major room for growth for software security, if you take network security as a target for a mature industry and assume that 2.3% is a reasonable margin of safety, then the software security space should evolve to around 2% of the software space meaning that it should evolve into a $2 billion space around fifteen times larger than it is today. Unprotected assets will either be protected or will cease to be assets, VCs get your check books ready.

My friend Brian Chess has a nice way of looking at this he says 2007 was the turning point - "the first year there was a bigger market for products that help you get code right than there was for products that help you demonstrate a problem exists."

Now I am not suggesting that Information Security budgets have to be aligned with IT budget one for one, but I do think that looking at the overall IT budget is the starting point. If Information Security has a more cost effective security mechanism they should deploy it, but the starting point should be aligned to the business. Businesses spend most of their money on software, and there are very good reasons - competitive advantage, increased revenues and lower costs. Information Security spends most of its money on network security, and there is no good reason why, except that it was a seemingly good idea in 1995. You really don't have to go beyond the book value of IT investment as a whole versus Information Security to see a stunning disparity. Information Security's job is to deliver a Margin of Safety to the business, but they are not.

To deliver a real Margin of Safety to the business, I propose the following based on a defense in depth mindset. Break the IT budget into the following categories:

- Network: all the resources invested in Cisco, network admins, etc.

- Host: all the resources invested in Unix, Windows, sys admins, etc.

- Applications: all the resources invested in developers, CRM, ERP, etc.

- Data: all the resources invested in databases, DBAs, etc.

Tally up each layer. If you are like most business you will probably find that you spend most on Applications, then Data, then Host, then Network.

Then do the same exercise for the Information Security budget:

- Network: all the resources invested in network firewalls, firewall admins, etc.

- Host: all the resources invested in Vulnerability management, patching, etc.

- Applications: all the resources invested in static analysis, black box scanning etc.

- Data: all the resources invested in database encryption, database monitoring, etc.

Again, tally each up layer. If you are like most business you will find that you spend most on Network, then Host, then Applications, then Data. Congratulations, Information Security, you are diametrically opposed to the business!

Its not just about alignment for alignment's sake, its about applying controls as a way to have a Margin of Safety properly placed so that when not if there is a failure on a higher value asset you are relatively better positioned to deal with it.

The pure statistical approach can only take us so far. Buffett said he would be a lot poorer if all he did was listen to Ben Graham. Book value is great to see the diametric opposition mentioned above, but it doesn't really tell us much about the efficacy of the security mechanisms.

What we do get out of this statistical approach is a screen. The asset value screen filters out subjective opinion and narrows the field for where we need to dig in to do the high value, time consuming analytical work.

The second part of Warren Buffett's career and the second part of this talk leave behind pure statistical measures. In Warren Buffett's case he was joined by a guy named Charlie Munger who talked him out of the pure Ben Graham approach. Charlie Munger has a saying - "a great business at a fair price beats a fair business at a great price." Where Graham was focused on price and margin of safety, Munger wants a fair price but also a high quality business. This lead to Warren Buffett's company Berkshire Hathaway investing in companies like Coca Cola, Wells Fargo, and American Express, where the prices were far from dirt cheap (as Graham would have wanted), but the long term returns were outstanding.

In our world of Information Security, we start by aligning our priorities with the business using the thumbnail defense in depth approach, but then we would like to invest in high quality, effective controls.

To get at the notion of control quality and effectiveness, I am going to start part 2 of this talk with a brief history of software. The first web software was just static HTML, but web software really got interesting when developers started creating dynamic websites using CGI an PERL.

Once websites were hooked up to company databases and were not just serving static content, the security people realized they needed a security architecture, and they sprung into action. What they came up was was model that divided the world into "good stuff" which was comprised of all their networks, systems, and data; and then there was everything else the "bad stuff" on the Internet. So job one of the early days Internet security architecture was to separate all your good stuff (i.e. your network) for the bad stuff (the Internet). To do this the security people used a sophisticated tool called Visio to draw a flaming brick wall on the network diagram, and this flaming brick wall was supposed to keep the good stuff and the bad stuff separate.

The security people also realized that the data and session tokens that they served up from their Web server would have to traverse the "bad" neighborhood called the Internet, so they added one more security mechanism to secure the last mile of the transaction - SSL between the browser and the Web server.

And this was the state of the art security architecture used circa 1995 to protect the earliest dynamic web applications.

What happened next was that the dotcom boom started to happen and businesses realized they could make some real money on the Web, the web apps started to get more sophisticated, more personalization, richer session experiences and so on. This led the Java people to create JSP and the Microsoft people to create ASP, and of course the PERL people to create even greasier PERL scripts, all of this in the effort to pooling resources and sessions on the Web server. The security people defended this new application programming model with network firewall and SSL.

Around 1998, developers began building out more distributed N tier or 3 tier applications that separated the business logic layer, the presentation layer and the data access layer. Among other things, your web application could seamlessly integrate data from multiple back ends systems. Let's say you have pricing data in Oracle, order data in SAP, and customer data in a Mainframe. You write separate data access objects, apply business logic in the middle tier and then you tie it all together in a friendly user interface. At this point the web applications are beginning to integrate across departments and geographic boundaries, huge critical chunks of the business are now connected to the web. How did the security people defend this part of the business? They applied the same 1995 security architecture - network firewall and SSL.

Around 1999-2000 timeframe businesses relied on web applications for major parts of the revenue, and the apps were built in different technologies like Java and Microsoft technologies, but the customer didn't care (still doesn't), the customer wanted (and still wants) data access and functionality. So to integrate the disparate technologies, SOAP and XML were deployed so that Microsoft could talk to Java and so Websphere could talk to Weblogic and so on. And, oh yes, SOAP and XML were used to connect B2B networks so partners in a supply chain and business process can exchange data and interoperate. SOAP and XML present a fundamentally new programming model based on a message document style integration, where XML is used to mesh together data and functionality across platforms. SOAP and XML have no security model by default for authentication, authorization, and confidentiality. How did the security people deal with this? They kept the security architecture the same as they had in 1995 - network firewalls and SSL.

The software world did not stop innovating in 2000 of course, in the last few years we have seen Web services and XML form the basis of baroque and powerful SOAs and simple REST applications. We have seen Web 2.0 come on the scene, and entirely new networked applications built on top of that.

What we have not seen, is a single meaningful change in security architecture in 13 years. Developers have evolved, businesses have increasingly bet their entire business models on the web and they have increased security budgets. But what has the security architecture as its deployed in the field got to show for all of this? More firewalls and more SSL connections.

Since Information Security has proven incapable of evolving, it is time to learn from a discipline that has mastered innovation - software development, and yes, I will step back in case the lightning bolts hits.

What does software development focus on these days? Well, let's look at Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), all hype aside I look at SOA as a set of technologies that delivers three things:

Virtualization: we want Beijing, Bangalore and Boston to communicate.

Interoperability: we want our .Net stuff to talk to our java stuff.

Reusability: how many order/claim/pricing/customer systems does one company need?

To build out their SOA, developers separated the application interface from its implementation. So you can host the interface in a variety of locations, but its separate from the application logic and data.

This is also a useful trick for putting services like SOAP through the firewall. SOAP was designed as a firewall friendly protocol. When SOAP first came out, Bruce Schneier said calling SOAP a firewall friendly protocol is like having a skull friendly bullet. Which is a great line and explains why his books fly off the shelves, it does not explain, why security people think an architecture designed in 1995 is the one we should be using today. Maybe the problem is not that the developers figured out how to go through the firewall to get the data their customers want, maybe the problem is that the firewall is the sum total of the security architecture, and it never adapted.

A big part of this problem is that we have left Newton's world behind and entered Einstein's universe. Mainframes are Newton’s world, we have THE computer, THE price, THE record and so on.

As Pat Helland explained [4,5], Mainframes are Newron's world, but Distributed computing is Einstein’s world. More specifically in the Einstein world of distributed computing - "Computers don’t make decisions, computers try to make decisions." Our computers don't really make a decision, they say you can buy this book from Amazon at this price, we have it in stock and will deliver on such and such a date. But the warehouse runs out, the pallet gets dropped in the warehouse, your boo is crushed, and the package is stolen off your front step. The computer confirmed your transaction, but the real world intervened.

So we don't have iron clad decisions, instead its all about Memories (last time I checked your book was in stock), Guesses (we should be able to ship on this date) and Apologies (sorry the forklift ran over your book)

Translating this into security, security mechanisms don’t make policy-based decisions, security mechanisms try to make policy-based decisions

Some examples of memories, guesses and apologies in security

Memories

Security Policies - for example Triple A policy

Triple A policies can memorize a map of subjects, objects, and roles. They can even replicate these memories and play them back at runtime to try to make policy enforcement decisions.

Guesses

Security Policy Enforcement Decision

Unfortunately, while the policy enforcement decisions can be based on memorized logic, the decision itself is still a guess, even in the case of Triple A. Any guesses why? Because, the authentication process itself is a guess. It happens to be a guess that you then bind to a principal so it looks very official once you bind your guess to a Kerberos ticket or SAML assertion, but it still a guess.

Apologies

Giant Global Bank is sorry your account was compromised!

And this leads to lots and lots of apologies by companies with poor access control models.

Some additional examples of information security memories, guesses and apologies.

Example Memories - Triple A Security Policies, Audit logs, User account information , Authorization Logic - concrete mapping Subject, Resource, Condition, Action

Example Guesses - Security Policy Enforcement Decision Points, Authentication Logic, Monitoring, detection, fraud response

Example Apologies - Identity Management tools - provisioning, deprovisioning, Reimburse customer for fraud losses, Compensating Transaction - Giant Global Bank is still sorry your account was compromised!

The point of this is that security memories, guesses and apologies utilize different processes, different people, and different capabilities to be effective.

What trends can we identify to lead us toward better qualitative analysis based on the best practices of virtualization, interoperability and reusability.

Virtualization

Finding Vulnerabilities in a Virtualized World is a problem because applications are more configured than coded. Runtime behavior and structure not apparent due to weak typing and inversion of control.

Result - finding bugs becomes harder. Action - use screens to target finding time and resources

Fixing Vulnerabilities in a Virtualized World is a problem because how do I locate the controls when interfaces run in Beijing, Bangalore and Boston?

Result - synchronization and/or replication of security policy is problematic. Action - decentralized policy enforcement points and policy decision points.

Interoperability

Finding interoperable vulnerabilities

XSS - Javascript is an equal opportunity offender - interoperability for developers and attackers alike.

Fixing interoperable vulnerabilities

App servers, ESBs, and services are the attacker’s red carpet to your enterprise, right into your book of business. Interoperable access control can be leveraged across the enterprise.

Use XML signature for authentication and integrity

…

Use XML encryption to protect sensitive data, don't pass sensitive data in the clear

My Credit Card Number

Encrypt the data

…

XNQ0a4legiie5mWFxO6CQkk2hhldYNnKroObue/LXS/VYtvaTgMbCujhGExDi+vlkU//Qc2/T6mx0WVTmBMT3z8rogha8jD+nS9Zr2Bc3CwoTh2lh8wL3D0DEu91iwJT9JByLGXvt7v9lyuxK0ooDOYEClsH974CPmTs3tBC+GQ=

To ensure that these controls are applied use automated tools like static analysis to scan for security mechanism use and coverage.

In terms of reusability findings and fixes consider two bug findings

Session management bug: session state is passed around to every component, service and user. Makes for many high priority findings in audit report, also the fix is required on virtually every program

Data validation bug: Data access object (DAO) has a SQL injection hole. One major high priority finding in report. DAO used by many business logic classes, one fix location serves many classes

To bring these factors together, I generally use a scorecard index [6], so you can measure such things as transport security, message security, threat protection and so on. The hard work in developing the index is developing a useful scale. A scale for XML tokens could use the following

0: no token

1: hashed token

2: hashed and signed token

3: hashed and signed token from standard authoritative source

An example scale for XML validation could use:

0: no validation

1: schema validation

2: schema validation against hardened schema

3: schema validation against standard, hardened schema

These indexed scales are used to show maturity across the factors in the scorecard. The first part of the talk described value, the value assessment is used to focus time and effort on high value assets. The value assessment can be determined quantitatively. There is hard analytical work to qualitatively determine the scorecard, index, and scales, the quantitative value assessment is used to screen out high value targets for these endeavors. The scoring index is used to track progress and improve quality over time. In the best case scenario, automated tools are used to perform the checks described in the index, and once security is automated just like software developers we may see security innovation make progress in years not decades.

Thank you for your time.

1 "Risk Management is where the Money Is" by Dan Geer, http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/20.06.html

2 Berkshire Hathaway 2007 Shareholder Letter by Warren Buffett, http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2007ltr.pdf

3 "Software [In]security: Software Security Demand Rising, by Gary McGraw

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1237978

4 "SOA and Newton's Universe" by Pat Helland, http://blogs.msdn.com/pathelland/archive/2007/05/20/soa-and-newton-s-universe.aspx

5 "Memories, Guesses and Apologies" by Pat Helland, http://blogs.msdn.com/pathelland/archive/2007/05/15/memories-guesses-and-apologies.aspx

6 "Web Servicres Security Checklist" by Gunnar Peterson, http://arctecgroup.net/pdf/WebServicesSecurityChecklist.pdf

OAuth for Secure Mashups

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:41:00 +0000

Posted by Eric Sachs, Senior Product Manager, Google Security

A year ago, a number of large and small websites announced a new open standard called OAuth. This standard is designed to provide a secure and privacy-preserving technique for enabling specific private data on one site to be accessed by another site. One popular reason for that type of cross-site access is data portability in areas such as personal health records (such as Google Health or Microsoft Healthvault), as well as social networks (such as OpenSocial enabled sites). I originally became involved in this space in the summer of 2005, when Google started developing a feature called AuthSub, which was one of the pre-cursors of OAuth. That was a proprietary protocol, but one that has been used by hundreds of websites to provide add-on services to Google Account users by getting permission from users to access data in their Google Accounts. In fact, that was the key feature that a few of us used to start the Google Health portability effort back when it was only a prototype project with a few dedicated Googlers.

However, with the development of a common Internet standard in OAuth, we see much greater potential for data portability and secure mash-ups. Today we announced that the gadget platform now supports OAuth, and the interoperability of this standard was demonstrated by new iGoogle gadgets that AOL and MySpace both built to enable users to see their respective AOL or MySpace mailboxes (and other information) while on iGoogle. However, to ensure the user's privacy, this only works after the user has authorized AOL or MySpace to make their data available to the gadget running on iGoogle. We also previously announced that third-party developers can build their own iGoogle gadgets that access the OAuth-enabled APIs for Google applications such as Calendar, Picasa, and Docs. In fact, since both the gadget platform and OAuth technology are open standards, we are working to help other companies who run services similar to iGoogle to enhance them with support for these standards. Once that is in place, these new OAuth-powered gadgets that are available on iGoogle will also work on those other sites, including many of the gadgets that Google offers for its own applications. This provides a platform for some interesting mash-ups. For example, a third-party developer could create a single gadget that uses OAuth to access both Google OAuth-enabled APIs (such as a Gmail user's address book) and MySpace OAuth-enabled APIs (such as a user's friend list) and display a mashup of the combination.

While the combination of OAuth with gadgets is an exciting new use of the technology, most of the use of OAuth is between websites, such as to enable a user of Google Health to allow a clinical trial matching site to access his or her health profile. I previously mentioned that one privacy control provided by OAuth is that it defines a standard way for users to authorize one website to make their data accessible to another website. In addition, OAuth provides a way to do this without the first site needing to reveal the identity of the user -- it simply provides a different opaque security token to each additional website the user wants to share his or her data with. It would allow a mutual fund, for example, to provide an iGoogle gadget to their customers that would run on iGoogle and show the user the value of his or her mutual fund, but without giving Google any unique information about the user, such as a social security number or account number. In the future, maybe we will even see industries like banks use standards such as OAuth to allow their customers to authorize utility companies to perform direct debit from the user's bank account without that person having to actually share his or her bank account number with the utility vendor.

The OAuth community is continuing to enhance this standard and is very interested in having more companies engaged with its development. The OAuth.net website has more details about the current standard, and I maintain a website with advanced information about Google's use of OAuth, including work on integrating OAuth with desktop apps, and integrating with federation standards such as OpenID and SAML. If you're interested in engaging with the OAuth community, please get in touch with us.

OAuth for Secure Mashups

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:41:00 +0000

Yoggie shows first open source portable firewall

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 21:00:00 +0000

Israeli security company Yoggie has come up with an intriguing new direction for its portable firewall platform - let open source developers create the applications that run on it.

Hosting meets the cloud

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 18:38:27 +0000

I’m out at The 451 Group Client Conference in Boston, lovely Boston. It’s been over ten years since I lived here, but somehow Boston always has a feel of home.

After meetings and calls, I was finally able to slip into a conference session – just in time to catch uber-smart analysts Rachel Chalmers (The 451 Group) and Dan Golding (Tier1 Research) engage in a lively and not-so-mock debate on “Hosting Meets the Cloud”.

Now this doesn’t cover the entire debate – and part II is coming tomorrow. But what it does cover is the most interesting questions (to me) and paraphrase the points made by the analysts. I thought they both had very interesting points and more similarities than differences in the end; the real difference is how they thought about the issues and through what lens – for Rachel it was the enterprise and for Dan it was managed hosting providers. (image from inmagine)

Question: What is a cloud and why?

Dan: Shared infrastructure leveraged/run by third parties for the benefit of enterprises, developers, etc. This is not a new idea – just recently “rebranded.” Given all the discussion and disagreement over this now, what will the cloud end up looking like?

Rachel: The cloud is “IT infrastructure as a service” down to the level of a server operating system. Take the example of Amazon web services – in this case it’s not just the infrastructure but also the internal processes built around service delivery, e.g., provisioning, that are being exposed as a commodity to external customers.

Dan’s Question for Rachel: In your opinion, how much is the cloud a fad versus CIOs really trying to solve a problem?

Rachel: For the practical, roll-up-your-sleeves types of CIOs – those coming up from the engineering ranks – that I talk to, the cloud is real, as opposed to SOA and middleware.

What about “internal” cloud computing – built and maintained by an enterprise versus a third-party provider?

Dan: Cloud computing is done by providers for customers. Certainly there are enterprises that have made internal computing investments, e.g., for publishing, large-scale phone systems, etc - but they were stupid ideas made by companies that have too much money. A better question here is does it make any sense for an enterprise to create their own cloud? While an enterprise can play at it, they can’t do it cost-effectively, not in a way that a third party provider can do it.

Rachel: Many CIOs have “managed-hoster” envy – for things like chargeback and billing that hosters understand a do better. Of course there has been a rise in automation and virtualization tools in the enterprise which may not be as efficient and built for scalability as a hoster can achieve, but what is important is that they are customized/specialized for that business.

Dan: Can you give a specific example of optimization to make it worthwhile for enterprises to do it themselves?

Rachel: One example is sovereignty. The privacy laws around financial and healthcare information are not the same everywhere. Clouds and their geographically-dispersed data centers don’t necessarily have “national” borders. This is definitely a concern for the CIO that has to comply with regulations in their industry around privacy protection, for instance. Another example is security. Dow Chemical does a lot of work via joint ventures and has a need to provide but lock down desktops given to contractors as corporate workspaces. For their level of security, they need to “own” their computing resources.

Dan: But why can’t someone like SunGard provide that as they do for many other large companies?

Rachel: It comes down to a question of trust.

Do people trust their hosting providers?

Dan: Yes. Whether it’s for a content delivery network or collocation, hosting the customers of hosting providers are some of the largest companies in the world in industries like energy and financial services. Give me a case when there was a major security issue with a hosting company. In fact, managed hosting providers usually provide better security than enterprises are capable of.

And a question provided by an attendee from EMC: A few years ago, this would have been a grid discussion. How is the cloud different?

Rachel: Grid computing ended up being applicable only for niches – which I predicted. The real opportunity for everyone else with the cloud only comes up when you combine the kinds of automation tools (originally developed for grid computing) with x86 virtualization.

Dan: I agree. Grid was a niche play. There were very few orgs that needed it and that the economics worked for. There were very few enterprises for whom it made sense to build their own for. The cloud is shared/leveraged versus grid computing. It economically makes sense in a way grid never did.

Vulnerabilities quickly mitigated by security-conscious vendors

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 17:10:00 +0000

As you are likely aware, I spend a fair bit of time heckling those I believe deserving due to their shortcomings with regard to protecting online consumers.
I do, however, continue to seek opportunities to shed positive light as well, and recent responses from a number of vendor/developers warrant an opportunity to do just that.
In the last 30 days, I've discovered vulnerabilities in products from four different vendors, and advised them all immediately upon discovery. Usually, that's where the story ends, as sadly, my repeated requests for action are often ignored. The last 30 days have proven to be entirely different, with swift responses and action from ALL vendors to whom I reported vulnerabilities. In all cases I received replies within 24 hours or less, and patches/fixes/updates were typically released within 24-72 additional hours. These are exemplary responses, and reflect why I choose to conduct vulnerability research. I believe we, as web application professionals (both developers and security practitioners), are beholden to the greater public and must endeavor to protect the online safety of the Internet consumer.
To each of these vendors/developers I'd like to issue a hearty "well done" and issue public kudos for their diligence and security consciousness, on behalf of consumers and website operators.
To Lukas of PlanetLuc, Jasper and Eric of Infrae/Silva, Alexander of CompactCMS, and Peter from ActiveCampaign may I say that your efforts are greatly appreciated. Where too few choose to do the right thing, your responses leave us with the perception of caring and integrity.
Thank you.

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Spring Web Flow 2: A boon to JSF developers

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 21:00:00 +0000

Spring Web Flow 2 seems tailored to the needs of JSF developers, and it smoothes out Spring MVC on the front end. Dr. Xinyu Liu explains how new support for Ajax, validation, persistence, and security facilitates the development of rich Web applications using SWF 2.

SDL Announcements at TechEd EMEA

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 19:25:00 +0000

Hello all, Dave here…

I am in Barcelona, Spain with Michael Howard and Adam Shostack at the TechEd EMEA: Developers Conference.

In addition to teaching and attending security sessions, we are in Barcelona to formally announce the launch of the SDL Optimization Model, SDL Pro Network and the Microsoft SDL Threat Modeling Tool Beta! For those of you who are unaware of these initiatives here’s a description of each…

SDL Optimization Model: The SDL Optimization Model was created to facilitate gradual, consistent and cost-effective implementation of the SDL in development organizations outside of Microsoft. It allows development managers and IT policy-makers to assess the state of the security in development and create a vision and road map for reducing customer risk.

Specific objectives of the model include the following:

· Enable organizations outside of Microsoft to create more secure and privacy-enhanced software by successfully implementing the SDL

· Allow organizations to self-assess current software development security practices and create a strategy for gradual improvement

· Provide SDL Pro Network service providers with a consistent and effective framework for providing SDL services

SDL Pro Network: The SDL Pro Network is a group of security service providers that specialize in application security and have substantial experience and expertise with the methodology and technologies of the Microsoft SDL. SDL Pro Network service providers will guide and support organizations in implementing the SDL into their environments.

The primary focus area for all members, both now and in the future, will be to deliver on the program’s commitment to make the SDL available outside Microsoft, specifically focusing on these issues:

· Protecting the customer - Helping customers adopt the SDL or general secure coding practices.

· Improving the SDL - Leveraging member knowledge to understand how the SDL is used by customers, what needs to be modified and what customer needs must be met in the future.

SDL Threat Modeling Tool Beta: The Microsoft SDL Threat Modeling Tool Beta allows for structured analysis, proactive mitigation and tracking of potential security and privacy issues in new and existing applications. Microsoft developed the tool and we use it internally on many of our products. This tool offers a threat modeling methodology that any software architect can lead effectively — in contrast with other processes, which are more expert-dependent. A few quick notes about the features:

· Automated guidance and feedback in drawing threat diagrams

· Guided analysis of threats and mitigations based on the STRIDE taxonomy

· Integration with bug-and issue-tracking systems like Visual Studio Team Foundation Server

To learn more about these, visit the SDL portal, http://www.microsoft.com/sdl.

By the way, if you are in Barcelona and want to stop by and chat, the session list is below:

SDL Theater Sessions:

· Getting started with the new SDL Threat Modeling Tool

Adam Shostack, Theater 1, Tuesday, Nov. 11, 15:20 – 15:40

· You could do that but it would be wrong – a discussion of pros/cons of threat mitigations

Michael Howard & Adam Shostack, Theater 1, Thursday, Nov. 13, 10:20 – 10:40

General Sessions:

· DVP308 How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Threat Modeling Nov. 12, 10:45 – 12:00

· DVP309 How to Review Your Code and Test for Security Bugs Nov. 13, 3:15 – 4:30

· DVP312 Top Ten Strategies to Security Your Code Nov. 14, 10:45 – 12:00

Zeus Crimeware Kit Gets a Carding Layout

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 02:53:52 +0000

With cybercriminals clearly expressing their nostalgia for several notorious and already shut down credit card fraud communities, they seem to have found a way to once again give their self-esteem a boost. Following the ongoing modification of open source crimeware kits and the inevitable innovation introduced by third parties, last week a new layout was introduced for Zeus, once again courtesy of a group that's piggybacking on Zeus popularity.

It's particularly interesting to see how a one-man operation evolves into a group of third-party developers starting to claim ownership rights over the modified versions despite that they're basically brandjacking the Zeus brand and building business models on the top of it.

Open source crimeware and web malware exploitation kits on the other hand undermine the business model of a great number of "malware/spyware for hire" vendors, which surprisingly doesn't stop them from continuing offering their services and products which are often using the de facto crimeware kits as the foundations for their propositions. Are the buyers even aware of this fact? From a buyer's perspective in times when most of the output is sold in bulk form, or access to the botnet rented for a specific period of time, the buyer doesn't care about the cybercrime platform of use, but is looking for transparent ways to justify the investment he's made into renting the service.

Now that Zeus administrators and their cybercrime clerks in the face of those managing the campaigns knowingly or unknowingly knowing the type of campaigns and the data that they manage, can listen to their favorite music within Zeus and choose different layouts for the command and control interfaces while commiting cybercrime, what's next?

Convergence and improved monetization.