I’m sure you already know about the other “network management” – where ISPs and carriers get their hands publicly slapped for limiting bandwidth to high-traffic offenders. But when is this kind of “network management” a good thing? At a panel sponsored by the FCC in DC, reps from carriers and ISPs discussed what steps they’ve been taking to prepare for a pandemic or other major global crisis – that would force workers to stay at home or work from more remote locations to limit exposure.

Are people paying attention to ICANN? They’re saying that IPv4 will be fully allocated in the next two or three years. Does anyone care? In their bid to make people care, ICANN talks about the state of IPv6 adoption and touts Africa as the most rapid adopter.

SOA soon part of the ‘cloud’? No, please no.

Microsoft – The Silver Lining in Every Cloud. Joe Wilcox over at eWeek’s Microsoft Watch, has been following Steve Ballmer around and collecting some nice quotes on how the company is transitioning. “For many years, we had kind of what I would call the all-encompassing mission, vision and scorecard statement: a computer on every desk and in every home. …Well, our footprint and portfolio is broader than that. “ [In every hand and of course, in every cloud…] “So, as a vision statement we talk about creating seamless experiences that combine the magic of software, the power of the Internet across a world of devices.” The magic of software – something I haven’t thought about for a while. And:

“You need a real platform in the cloud. When we wanted to go after the PC, we built an operating system. When we wanted to go after the phone, we built an operating system. When we wanted to go after the enterprise, we built an operating system. We’ll announce a new operating system, one that runs in the cloud and has a wide variety of capabilities.”

Blogger: Dan Blum

It is no surprise for us to hear loose lips flapping in India about a capability to decrypt Blackberry and other carrier traffic.

After all, we’ve done basic threat analysis for years and it was only months ago that I was brought into a company-wide CISO meeting at a U.S. defense contractor to help them hash out their travel policy for mobile devices. Going into the meeting, I knew their policy restricted taking devices to a list of countries considered dangerous – but there was an exemption for BlackBerries.

Our research uncovered that BlackBerry is pretty secure in most respects. It has transport encryption along with optional password protection, remote kill, disk encryption, and S/MIME encryption. Viruses have not flourished on this functionally limited and closed platform. Few if any third party add on programs are required for additional protection. Nonetheless, I went into the meeting prepared to talk with the CISOs about the risks and security limitations of life on BlackBerry.

Was the BlackBerry exemption reasonable? At the time, BlackBerry transport encryption was not known to have been broken (to be fair, the article listed above still qualifies as rumor, not certainty of breakage). However, I pointed out that it is dangerous to assume well-equipped attackers like military or intelligence organizations can’t crack transport encryption. And even if they haven’t cracked the BlackBerry network and whole disk encryption features, sophisticated adversaries have other attack paths. Check out Neal Stephenson’s excellent book Cryptonomicon for a description of how a talented adversary might “see” your keystrokes and screen images through a motel room wall, for example.

If one of your employees – such as a key scientist, project manager, or executive – is targeted for surveillance and is carrying sensitive data through certain countries, one could argue that he or she had better undergo serious counter-intelligence training.  Learn to spot and shake tails, sneak into dark alleys for that BlackBerry fix. Learn to paper the closet with layers of aluminum foil and send messages in the dark. Defend that BlackBerry with encryption, long passphrases, and kung fu. But unless James Bond is running your company, I doubt this is what your executives have in mind for the next business trip!

Assuming your organization’s lower level employees are like needles in a haystack and won’t be bothered could be an exercise in wishful thinking. It is always possible that nation states are monitoring some or all of the airwaves. Not so long ago the NSA had a massive a covert surveillance program in place. Years before the government was reportedly snarfing up terabytes of emails and crunching them through a program called Carnivore. And of course, selective monitoring of people on watch lists continues on a large scale. This is just the surveillance we know about in the U.S. We suspect there’s more behind the scenes and especially in countries such as China. Even if you train your non-specifically-targeted low level employees to write and speak in search-keyword-free code, the carnivore programs of the world are pretty good at sniffing out those interesting needles – such as descriptions of your business plans, manufacturing processes, and trade secrets.

Sound paranoid? I admit that I don’t know what the probabilities of being targeted or monitored are – just that it can happen. It’s the height of arrogance to believe that a nation state can’t get your information if they’ve targeted it and you’re within their borders. And it’s dangerous to rely on security by obscurity when medium or high consequence information must be protected.

What can be done? If key personnel can't dispense with the BlackBerry (or any other email device) during international travel to those countries where information may be most at risk, they (the users) should limit communications to what they’d feel comfortable uttering over a potentially-monitored telephone call. Controlling incoming communications – messages sent by others – is a harder problem. Until data loss prevention (DLP) products become more contextually sensitive about the travel issues, it may be best not to synchronize the BlackBerry with the overseas user’s home mailbox. Instead, have the user give out a temporary address for the BlackBerry and warn senders to be discreet.

Rather than thinking about IDS as a piece of device/software that provides fancy features. Let me try to summarize some assertions about IDS: 

IDS can capture tons of intrusion events, there is so much of don't care events it is difficult to single out event such as zero day event in the midst of such noise.

It requires tremendous effort to sift through the log and derive meaningful actions out of the log entries.

IDS needs a dedicated administrator to manage. An administrator who won't get bored of looking at all the packets and patterns, a truly boring job for a security engineer. Probably this job would interest a geekier person and geeks tend to their own interesting research!

There are companies that do without IDS, and they do just fine. I agree with Alan's assessment that IDS is like a Checkbox in most cases.  Business can run without IDS just fine, why invest in such a technology?

Firewalls and other devices have built in features of IDS, so why invest in a separate product.

IDS is like Vitamins, nice to have, not having won't kill you in most cases. Customers are willing to pay for Pain Killers because they have to address their pain right away. For Vitamins, they can wait. Stop and think for moment, without Anti-virus product, businesses can't run for few days. But, without IDS, most businesses can run just fine and I base it out of my own experience.

Probably, I would have offended folks from the IDS camp. I have a good friend who is a founder of an IDS company, I am sure he will react differently if he reads my narratives about IDS.  Once businesses start realizing that IDS is a Checkbox, they will scale down their investments in this area. In the current economic climate, financial institutions are not doing well. Financial institutions are big customers in terms of security products, with the current scenario of financial meltdown, they would scale down heavily on their spending on Vitamins.

Running IDS software on VMware sounds fancy.  Technology does not matter unless you can address real world pain and prove the utilitarian value of such a technology. I am really surprised that IDS continues to exist. Proof of existence does not forebode great future. Running IDS on VMware does not make it any more utilitarian. I see a bleak future for IDS.

Probabilistic Complex Event Triggering by Daisy Zhe Wang, Eirinaios Michelakis, and Liviu Tancau, Computer Science Division, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley CA 94720, USA.

Abstract. Recently, wireless sensor devices have been widely deployed in various application settings (including environmental research, control systems, etc.). Because of the inherent unreliability of sensor readings, any kind of reasoning in sensor environments needs to carefully account for noise. The key goal of pcet is to build an infrastructure that can automatically infer and reason about the probabilities of triggered events, using a principled probabilistic model for the underlying sensor data. Through such probabilistic reasoning, pcet can incorporate uncertainly factors and make finer – grain decisions on event occurrences. This is achieved through the use of a Bayesian Network to directly model and exploit correlations across different sensors and the definition of a complex – event language, which allows users / applications to create hierarchies of higher-level events. As experimental results verify, pcet simplifies the development process and boosts the efficiency of any system dealing with inherently uncertain data streams.