Abstract. Describes a decade of experience threat modeling products and services at Microsoft. Describes the current threat modeling methodology used in the Security Development Lifecycle. The methodology is a practical approach, usable by non-experts, centered on data ow diagrams and a threat enumeration technique of 'STRIDE per element.' The paper covers some lessons learned which are likely applicable to other security analysis techniques. The paper closes with some possible questions for academic research.

So can open source weather out the economic storm? Emerging from the dot-com bust, open source has matured, its legal framework and values are established, and serious players are in the game. But as this post on ZDNet points out, consolidation is on the way. “IDC renamed its LinuxWorld Show in San Francisco next year Open Source World – a clear shot across the bow at O’Reilly’s OSCON.” Will open source (from free to lower-cost alternatives to commercial software) flourish in a time of tightening budgets or will projects quietly go away for lack of funding (VC and that pesky business model thing) and, let’s face it, the “extra time” of IT pros tasked yet again to do more with less?

It’s October 2008 and Charles Babcock writes, “CA Embraces Virtualization As Future of Data Center Management”. Beyond keeping up with what competitors are doing, I enjoy this article for the masterful way it depicts the nightmare that is working with traditional frameworks. Too slow, too expensive, too complex, too many modules – it’s all in here. And somehow, I don’t think that was the point of it. So, $154,000 for CA Data Center Automation Manager – which can “consult” the CA CMDB (pricing starting at what do you think, something like $500K to a million – don’t forget those services) plus CA Wily APM (Introscope 8 and Wily Customer Experience Manager 4.2; pricing anyone?) metrics that get fed back into Data Center Automation Manager to help determine the virtual machine resources that are needed. Plus can also integrate info from CA Endeavor’s software change management tracking and CA SysView and in future with CA Management Suite for Mainframe Linux, potentially. I am not kidding about this list. And, we’ve been hearing this for a while – “Unicenter” the brand goes away and is replaced by “CA NSM”. The brand goes away. Why retire a successful brand? Ah.

I love this post on EMC, “Eleven Things You Didn’t Know About the World’s Largest External Disk Storage Company.” Although I guess I really don’t know much about Joe Tucci, since #11 says:

“Contrary to conventional thought, it is not true that the EMC President/CEO is the older, gentler brother of the fictional patriarch of HBO’s hit television series.” Hunh. I just googled him, thinking maybe it was a resemblance thing. Nope."

And on a much lighter note. A funny from Dell. 2 years later, I just stumbled across this Proprietaryville , Jibjab-ish video, called Dell the Journey. Legacy systems being escorted onto the Retirement Home bus. Michael Dell as knight in shining armor, singing no less. Joe Tucci and Larry Ellison showing up as heroes leading the charge against Proprietaryville (yes, funny in and of itself). And my favorite, “Now let’s go kick some proprietary apps.”

Here we talk to John Proctor, who started out as one of our first customers (and the first MSP customer). And he believed in it so much, he eventually became part of the ScienceLogic team. (Remember “I’m not only the President, I’m also a client” from the Hair Club for Men?)

John shares his perspectives about the service provider world and why he took a chance on a little-known product called EM7.

ScienceLogic: What is your background? How many years have you worked as a service provider and for what types of companies?

John Proctor: I have been working with Service providers for over twelve years. I worked at a major regional service provider for six years and before that I designed and built national and international networks for ISP’s and Fortune 500 companies as a consultant for PriceWaterhouseCoopers and WorldComm.

ScienceLogic: You were one of the first customers of EM7 – why did you choose it and how did you get over the hurdles associated with using a start-up company’s product?

John Proctor: We were actually customer number five. Back in 2004 when we evaluated and purchased EM7 we could see that EM7 provided about 80% of what we were looking for in one integrated solution right out of the box. One of the things that sold us on EM7 was that the ScienceLogic founders had all previously worked for a service provider, so we knew they understood our business and our challenges. But in the end, it comes down to features. Once we compared EM7 functionality to the alternatives, it was clearly a “no brainer.”

ScienceLogic: What other alternatives were being considered?

John Proctor: Well, we had started with a few point solutions, but as our business and product offerings matured, this resulted in a growing number of point solutions. What started with 3 or 4 ended up as 14 separate tools. They all had strengths but what they didn’t have was integration and because of this they could not scale. And, if the tools could not scale, our business could not grow.

So, naturally we started looking at framework solutions, but they are expensive to buy, expensive to implement, and expensive to maintain. At one point, we even considered some open source projects. There were several that showed promise, but we would still be stuck with tools that were not integrated. So then we considered hiring developers to cobble something together that would work for our business. The only problem with this alternative was that we felt it would take 6 to 8 months before we could have something viable to work with.

ScienceLogic: What products were you using before EM7? What were your goals?

John Proctor: Before we purchased EM7 we used 14 different point solutions to deliver our products and services to the marketplace. Tools like NetCool, Openview, Argent, Heat, What’s Up Gold as well as several other point solutions, vendor specific applications and manually updated spreadsheets. And, as I mentioned before, this does not scale. This also adds a great deal of complexity when you begin to consider business continuity and disaster recovery. All these tools were vital to the delivery of our products and services. Any service provider will tell you it is all about uptime. So if the product is uptime, the tools used to deliver it have to be available 24×7x365.

Our goals were simple: scale and redundancy. As it turns out, the solution was simple as well. EM7 provided a tool that could replace the functionality of almost half of the existing point solutions and the applications that could not be replaced were integrated with EM7 to provide our staff with a “single pane of glass” to see the status and performance of each area of the business from one application. We had visibility into everything from facility systems to applications using EM7.

ScienceLogic also delivers an extensible configuration that addressed uptime and redundancy. We deployed collectors throughout our network that reported back to a central pair of redundant database servers and with this configuration we were able to perform backups and add capacity without taking the system down.

ScienceLogic: Why are service providers different from enterprises? How are their needs different?

John Proctor: First and foremost, service providers face the same challenges that only the largest enterprises ever face and they also have many unique challenges that only service providers experience.

One challenge we faced was that we had multiple datacenters in different states. They were all interconnected with plenty of bandwidth between each site, but the tools were not designed to be used across the WAN. Our staff in our remote data center did not have the same access as our staff in the corporate office. Since EM7 is web-based, it immediately eliminated this problem.

Another challenge is that service providers must manage systems across multiple domains. Back in the early version of a specific tool we were using before EM7, the only way you could implement it across multiple domains was to put the same username and password on every computer that you monitored. Beyond the security concerns, maintenance was a nightmare. Anytime we had to change the password, we would get locked out of dozens upon dozens of systems. When the password was changed on the monitoring server, it would attempt to login to the remote machines and fail. Repeated attempts would result in the account getting locked. I think that vendor eventually addressed this issue, but service providers seldom find tools that were designed for their unique situations.

ScienceLogic: How is EM7 geared to service providers?

John Proctor: Enterprise IT is a trusted part of the business; they are one of the team. Service providers are outsiders that must earn trust by showing the customer exactly what they are doing.

EM7 provides a multi-tenant environment that allows service providers to manage systems across many different customers while at the same time providing the customer access to see the same information but only what’s relevant to them.

EM7 was built by service providers and even includes a few features just for them. Two of my favorites are bandwidth billing and the emergency notification system. Take bandwidth billing, for instance. EM7 provides a way to collect bandwidth utilization, store subscription information, and calculate a bill from any one of about 10 different methodologies. And at the end of the billing period, EM7 sends the completed report out to whomever you chose via email.

Another unique service provider feature is the emergency notification system. EM7 allows the provider to track what customers used their unique infrastructure components. If they have to perform maintenance on the infrastructure component or have a problem they can send an email to all of the impacted customers in a matter of minutes.

ScienceLogic: What trends do you see for service providers? What about big trends such as virtualization and cloud computing – how will they impact service providers?

John Proctor: Virtualization is really hot for service providers right now and for the same reasons as in the enterprise. Service providers run data centers and data centers must be powered and cooled. So, anytime they can use a virtual server instead of adding physical equipment it is a good thing. But then you add the complexity that multiple customers reside on the same host and you must track things like bandwidth utilizations by guest OS, and it all gets a little harder. Lucky for us this is not a problem for EM7.

I still think it’s early days for cloud computing. Depending on who you talk to, much of what service providers (especially the big ones) have already been doing with SAAS offerings and hosted applications could be described as cloud computing already. In which case, service providers are ahead of the game. But whatever the “final” definition, cloud computing actually shares many similarities with virtualization – in that service providers (or enterprises) will need to be able to manage far more “devices” in real-time with “zero downtime” expectations by customers. What this really means is that you’re going to see much more automation in provisioning and IT monitoring tools to handle the scale and speed with which things can change in the data center given vm migration and the talked-about switching between “clouds” that can be used for high availability.

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.”

Steps are now being taken, rather faster since Dan Kaminsky came up with a really effective DNS poisoning attack, to secure DNS by using DNSSEC.

The basic idea of DNSSEC is that when you get an answer from the DNS it will be signed by someone you trust. At some point the “trust anchor” for the system will be “.” the DNS root, but for the moment there’s just a handful of “trust anchors” one level down from that. One such anchor is the “.se” country code domain for Sweden. Additionally, Brazil (.br), Puerto Rico (.pr), and Bulgaria (.bg) have signed their zones, but that’s about it for today.

So, wishing to get some experience with the brave new world of DNSSEC, I decided that Sweden was the “in” place to be, and to purchase “cloudba.se” and roll out my first DNSSEC signed domain.

The purchase wasn’t as easy as it might have been — when you buy a domain, Sweden insists that people provide their identity numbers (albeit they have absolutely no way of checking if you’re telling the truth) — or if a company they want a VAT or registration number (which are checkable, albeit I suspect they didn’t bother). I also found that they don’t like spaces in the VAT number — which held things up for a while!

However, eventually they sent me a PGP signed email to tell me I was now the proud owner of “cloudba.se”. Unfortunately, this email wasn’t in RFC3156 PGP/MIME format (or any other format that my usually pretty capable email client understood).

The email was signed with key 0xF440EE9B which was reassuring because the .se registry gives the fingerprint for this key on their website here. Rather less reassuringly footnote (*) next to the fingerprint says “.SE signature for outgoing e-mail. (**) June 1 through August 31.” (the (**) is for a second level of footnote, which is absent — and of course it is now September).

They also enable you to fetch the key through a link on this page to their “PGP nyckel-ID” at http://subkeys.pgp.net.

Unfortunately, fetching the key shows that the signature on the email is invalid.

Since the email seems to have originated in the Windows world, but was signed on a Linux box (giving it a mixture of 0D 0A and 0A line endings), then pushed through a three year old copy of MIME-tools I suppose the failure isn’t too surprising. But strictly the invalid signature means that I shouldn’t trust the email’s contents at all — because the contents have definitely been tampered with since the signature was applied.

Since the point of the email was to get me to login for the first time to the registry website and set my password to control the domain, this is a little unfortunate.

Even if the signature had been correct, then should I trust the PGP key?

Well it is pointed to from the registry website which is a Good Thing. However, they do themselves no favours by referencing a version on the public key servers. I checked who had signed the key (which is an alternative way of trusting its provenance — since the email had arrived to a non-DNSSEC secured domain). Turned out there was no-one I knew, and of 4 individual signatures, 2 were from expired keys. The other signature was the IIS root key — which sounds promising. That has 8 signatures, once again not people I know — but only 1 from a non-expired key, so perhaps I can get to know some of the other 7?

Of course, anyone can sign a key on a public key server, so perhaps it makes sense for .se to suggest that people fetch a key with as many signatures as possible — there’s more chance of it being signed by someone they know. Anyway, I have now added my own signature, using an email address at my nice shiny new domain. However, it is possible that I may not have increased the level of trust

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?