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.

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

TECHNOLOGY AREAS: Air Platform, Information Systems, Space Platforms, Human Systems

The technology within this topic is restricted under the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), which controls the export and import of defense-related material and services. Offerors must disclose any proposed use of foreign nationals, their country of origin, and what tasks each would accomplish in the statement of work in accordance with section 3.5.b.(7) of the solicitation.

OBJECTIVE: Develop visualization techniques for planning and execution of Cyberspace operations.

DESCRIPTION: Fulfilling the Air Force mission “… to fly and fight in Air, Space, and Cyberspace” requires effective C2 tools for the observation, planning and execution of cyberspace operations. Conventional battlespace visualization tools were developed for the physical world (i.e., geospatially oriented), where the battlespace, weapons and effects are concrete, often observable entities. Cyberspace and its critical electronic infrastructures are an artificial world that must be created, modified and sustained by the warfighter. This artificial world of cyberspace has concrete links back to the physical world that shape the information landscape, affect the decision-making process, and control the communication channels crucial to C2.

Standard, geospatially oriented C2 tools are not suitable for providing cyber combatants with comparable situation awareness to understand events, evaluate options, and make decisions in the electromagnetic domain. The combatants in the cyber domain needs to be able to quickly see and understand not just the physical relationships of the traditional battlespace, but also the logical relationships and information dependencies in the abstract landscape of cyberspace. Cyber C2 visualizations need to provide information for strategy, tactics and execution of effects that may, or may not, have physical correlates. Examples of these cyber events include network attack detection, attack identification, damage assessment, denial of service (DOS) warnings, and information warfare or cyber-attack operations.

For example, a commander may be planning to intentionally disrupt a portion of his network to investigate a cyber-attack. He will need to understand what ripple effects will occur across the functionally diverse and geographically distributed network. These ripple effects will have both a cyber component (e.g., locations that will lose connectivity or suffer degraded performance characteristics) and a real-world component (e.g., information about enemy forces may be unavailable or delayed, reducing blue force effectiveness) that must be visualized, explored and tasked from within his C2 tools.

Decision makers will greatly benefit from innovative visualization tools that can improve their understanding of all aspects of the Cyber domain. These aspects include 1) the current state of the information environment, the physical and virtual battlespace and enemy and friendly capabilities and vulnerabilities; 2) the scope and scale of courses of action that affect information or information networks; 3) the primary effects and ripple effects of an operation in both the physical and cyber battlespaces, and 4) the risks for collateral damage associated with cyber warfare activities.

PHASE I: Identify cyberspace characteristics relevant to C2 visualization. Identify correlation methods and visualization techniques to understand battlespace, operations, and effects. Define metrics to evaluate efficacy. Document results in a written report, including mockups of proposed visualizations.

PHASE II: Construct a working prototype to demonstrate integrated visualization of cyber data showing 1) the status of information environment, 2) its effect on the conventional battlespace, and 3) the status of information operations. Evaluate effectiveness using metrics defined in Phase I.

PHASE III / DUAL USE: Military application: Additional military applications include command and control environments, like the Air Operations Centers (AOCs). Commercial application: Monitoring and defending infrastructures (e.g., financial and energy) against cyber-attacks. Visualization cyberspace is beneficial for security of commercial communication and information networks.

REFERENCES:

1. ‘Air Force leaders to discuss new ‘Cyber Command’

2. Laura S. Tinnel, O. Sami Saydjari, and Joshua W. Haines, An Integrated Cyber Panel System, IEEE Computer Society,

3. Anita D’Amico and Stephen Salas, Visualization as an Aid for Assessing the Mission Impact of Information Security Breaches, IEEE 2003.

4. Tim Bass, “Cyberspace Situational Awareness Demands Mimic Traditional Command Requirements,” AFCEA Signal Magazine, February 2000.

KEYWORDS: visualization, cyber, human factors, planning, situation awareness, command and control, HCI

Reference. SITIS Topic Details, Visualization for Command and Control of Cyberspace Operations

See also:  http://www.dodsbir.net/solicitation/sbir083/af083.doc

Setting the Web Application Security Agenda for 2009: OWASP Invites You to Join Our Summit in Portugal

http://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_EU_Summit_2008

With the theme ‘Setting the AppSec agenda for 2009′, the OWASP Summit will be a worldwide gathering of OWASP leaders and key industry players to present and discuss the latest OWASP tools, documentation projects, and web application security trends. Join us in Portugal in just a few short weeks! This venue hosts a diverse selection of training courses along with technical and business tracks, making it THE place to learn about web application security and the resources OWASP has available for use today.

OWASP is a not-for-profit organization with the purpose of supporting the Web Application Security community around the world, and has granted $250,000 USD for web application security research. In addition to over 40 presentations from the OWASP Leaders and grant recipients, the OWASP Summit will host multiple Working Sessions designed to improve collaboration, achieve specific objectives and identify roadmaps for OWASP projects, chapters, and the OWASP community itself.

To facilitate this event, OWASP is investing $150,000 USD which will be used to cover air travel and accommodation expenses for OWASP leaders, active contributors, and select key industry leaders. With their confirmed presence, the OWASP Summit will provide a relaxed but professional environment to meet, discuss, influence and contribute to OWASP projects.

There are still funds available! If you are interested in attending and you meet the profile of the current OWASP supported attendees (see list here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pAX6n7m2zaTVLrPtR07riBA) contact Paulo Coimbra (paulo.coimbra@owasp.org). Please note that you should do so only if you meet the paid attendance criteria (see herehttps://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_EU_Summit_2008_paid_participation_rules) and are unable to get corporate support to attend this event (for other corporate sponsorship opportunities see http://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_EU_Summit_2008_Sponsors).

The OWASP Summit will also host a large and diverse selection of training courses, covering multiple OWASP specific and Web Application Security Topics.

The remarkable impact of OWASP is made possible only by the collaboration of many dedicated people and organizations worldwide. In that spirit of cooperation, OWASP invites all its members (who have 20% discount + 1 VIP Ticket) and interested individuals and companies to attend this thrilling event. Please join us and help to set the Web Application Security Agenda for 2009!

Please see below for additional details about the OWASP Summit or visit the OWASP Summit website: http://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_EU_Summit_2008.

Projects

OWASP projects selected for Summit presentation include new documentation and innovative tools to help developers, architects, and security specialists ensure that applications are secure:

• Application Security Verification Standard,
• Code review guide, V1.1,
• Ruby on Rails Security Guide v2,
• Securing WebGoat using ModSecurity,
• Testing Guide v3,
• GTK+ GUI for w3af project,
• Access Control Rules Tester,
• AntiSamy .NET,
• Live CD & DVD Project,
• OpenPGP Extensions for HTTP,
• Orizon Project,
• Python Static Analysis,
• WebScarab-NG,
• And many, many others.

Working Sessions

Expecting the presence of the application security industry key players, the Working Sessions will cover a wide range of issues such as:

• OWASP Top 10 2009,
• Browser Security,
• Web Application Framework Security,
• Enterprise Security API Project,
• Best Practices for OWASP Chapter Leaders,
• OWASP Documentation Projects,
• OWASP Tools Projects,
• OWASP Education Project,
• OWASP Strategic Planning for 2009,
• OWASP Certification,
• OWASP Winter of Code 2009
• Two-way Internationalization of OWASP Content
• And many more.

Training

These 2-day, 1-day or 1/2-day training courses cover a wide range of OWASP specific and Web Application Security Topics:

• OWASP Top 10 - What Developers Should Know on Web Application Security
• Uncovering WebScarab’s Secret Treasures
• Securing WebGoat with ModSecurity
• Secure Programming with Java
• Advanced Web Application Security Testing
• Building Secure Web 2.0 Applications
• Building Secure Web Services
• Building Secure Web Applications with OWASP’s Enterprise Security API (ESAPI)
• Classic ASP Security using OWASP tools
• Web Application Assessments
• Hacking Owasp Orizon Project v1.0
• Ajax Security
• Practical Penetration Testing: Think Like an Attacker to Stop Attacks
• Linux Software Exploitation
• Web server/services hardening using SELinux

Main Contact:

Kate Hartmann
OWASP Operations Director
9175 Guilford Road, Suite 300
Columbia, MD 21046, USA
Phone: +1-301-575-0189
Facsimile: +1-301-604-8033
Email: kate.hartmann@owasp.org