“How I can communicate the value of an ISO implementation to non-security management?”

This question came to me after one of the posters on the ISO Google Group asked about KPIs for ISO implementation.  Got great responses in email, blog comments, and on Twitter from current/former CISO folks and consultants and analysts.  Some really great thought and effort, by the way - thank you.  It’s really great to be able to have these sorts of conversations online.

First, I have to point out some resources Brian Honan linked to from Gary Hinson, just because they’re so cool.  Gary has invested gobs of time and effort to become one of the defacto resources on the ISO (you might also want to read or re-read Gary’s web post on the 7 myths of metrics).   Brian links to an implementation guidance document(pdf) and a metrics example(pdf) document.

As full of awesomeness as they are, though, these are simply metrics “mapped” to the ISO (i.e. the ISO isn’t a pre-requisite for generating this information).  They are not KPI’s that express the value of ISO implementation.  Problem is the metrics created here still require some level of “translation” in order to create some value statement that data owners can understand.  As Myrcurial twittered me “27001 is orthoganal to process” meaning (I hope) that metrics have their foundation in events that are generated by processes.  27001 by itself was never meant to create metrics (see above), and so we’re asking a question the ISO can’t answer.  But the desire, the need to measure still exists.  To that extent we can google “ISO compliance” (whatever that means) and if something can be certifiable or deemed “compliant” we can and are “measuring”.  But does that have value? Rybolov (my favorite Guerilla CISO) wrote:

“Whatever you do, don’t start measuring percentage of compliance. Eventually, that’s what all metrics efforts around a framework devolve into.”

I have to agree.  Being ISO “compliant/certified” has little expressive business value prima facia. I find that one KPI that absolutely asserts value when expressed properly is risk - and similarly  Shrdlu wrote:

“I really have no idea. I personally wouldn’t try to justify an ISO implementation by itself. If I could show traceability on how it affected our overall security risk, then that’s what I’d do.”

And that’s a delightful answer.  That “traceability” (geeze-louise Shrdlu - what a word!) is absolutely what I’m after here.  How do I get that?  

If you’re going to do something with corporate budget (time, money - and goodness knows an ISO implementation is time & money) you better be able to communicate the value.  And while the zealotry for ISO implementation differs from person to person, I have yet to come across someone who says that ISO adoption is totally without value.  It’s just not apparent what that value of adoption is and how we can measure (metrics) and express it (KPIs).

Jenean Paschalidis wrote what he thought that value was in a very nice email in which he puts a qualitative name on the value of adoption:

“Transparency and accountability-this is what all executive/senior management (the company) is on the hook for. ISO provides that. If you want to understand and have confidence in your operations as supported by security (because you will know the who, what, where, when, why and how of a system (human, technical etc.) and you want to be able to trace back why a decision (risk-vetted) had been made - then adoption of this best international practice will assist in providing these answers.”

So working with our above thoughts a little here - if we agree with Shrdlu that the only value of an ISO implementation can only be expressed if we can say how said implementation affected our overall security risk - and we agree with Jenean that the primary benefit is an ability to have confidence in operations as supported by security, then….

The value of the ISO should be expressed as a KPI or set of KPIs that cleary explain how the confidence it generates helps us understand (and then reduce) our risk.

If risk is a probability issue,  ISO adoption helps generate confidence in our predictive analytics.  The dollar value the ISO generates (the ultimate KPI) is part of the cost of being able to make wise risk decisions.

So what is that (making wise risk decisions) worth to you?

SOME CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

First, it occurs to me that this is a real shame.  In a sense, an inability to generate a quantitative value statement for ISO use is simply more witch-doctory (“use it because we, the wise men of the tribe say you should”).  In some future version, the ISO should include some mechanism for measuring and expressing the worth of adoption to the organization (a better reason to use the ISO than “because we said so”).

Second, It should be noted that of Jack Jones’ 3 true value statements from which all metrics/KPIs should point to - we’re only talking about one of those value statements - the ability to reduce risk.  Using the ISO in an organization most certainly could create operational efficiencies (help us do more with less) - but the ISO isn’t a standard that creates operational efficiencies as a primary goal, nor does it give implicit direction on how to create operational efficincies.    The ISO folks do, however, play fast and loose with the idea of “risk” and “risk management” so it’s within this context that I interpreted our conversation.

Finally if you’re going to hire someone to help you with ISO adoption in your organization, the deliverables you ask for in your RFP/SOW/what-have-you should include quantitative (probability) statments about risk reduction and the creation of operational efficiencies.  If the firms answering can’t tell you what value their work will be to your company, then drop me a note and I’ll gladly point you to some friends of RMI’s that know FAIR & all our Risk Management frameworks and also do great ISO work.

So I was very interested when I heard that Opus Interactive, a customer of ours, had “joined the VMware vCloud initiative as a VMware Service Provider”. I talked to Eric Hulbert, CTO of Opus Interactive, to get some details directly from the source.

Eric shared our own caution about making “cloud-ready” announcements. There have simply been too many companies talking about cloud solutions that lack any substance – usually based on definitions of cloud computing that are hazy or just too broad. The backlash against the cloud hype is often quite justified. But in Opus’ case, there are real components that if they don’t add up to a “full” cloud computing solution just yet, are well on their way – and enabled by VMware’s program for service providers (VSPP).

Opus Interactive is serious about virtualization, which is an indispensable tool in their stated goal of creating a high-density micro-data center with the smallest footprint possible. They are 100% wind-powered and have already virtualized much of their data center, reducing the amount of hardware necessary to run the business and driving down costs to produce even more competitive advantage in a crowded marketplace.

VSPP for vCloud provides a rental model of VMware licenses – e.g., for Enterprise ESX or VDI. VMware Service Providers report on their customers’ virtual machines (vm) and pay only for what is actually used. This model lets Opus Interactive quickly spin up a vm to get a new customer up and running in about an hour and stay very cost competitive at the same time; Opus offers their vClustr entry-level virtual server for only $99.

Cost-effective, rapidly scalable computing “on-demand” based on shared resources, managed by “expert” third-parties, enabled by virtualization technology and pay-per-use vm licenses. Cloud computing? Instead of thinking about a single definition of cloud computing, perhaps it’s more relevant as the market matures to think about a continuum of cloud computing. And by that definition, Opus Interactive is providing cloud services, enabled by VMware’s VSP program. Next on the schedule, automated provisioning and perhaps in the future, API’s that make it even easier for application developers to test and deploy apps on Opus Interactive’s cloud platform – which, by the way, uses EM7 for its core management solution.

Staff promised to keep the phone safely until [the couple came to retrieve it].

However, after Philip Sherman retrieved the phone, his wife began receiving threatening calls and messages from strangers. This caused the Shermans’ to become suspicious about what had occurred with the phone.

Soon afterward the Shermans’ found the private photos that Tina Sherman had sent to her husband’s phone published on the Internet along with their names, address, and phone numbers. Pictures of Tina Sherman were altered to contain McDonald’s franchise logos, along with slogans such as, “I’m lovin’ it,” and “Hot as McDonald’s coffee.” The photos were located on several different sites online, but have since been removed.

The Shermans are suing for over 3 million dollars in damages, along with relocation costs.

Read the full article here.

Economists have long understood the corollary concept of Coase's ceiling, a point above which organizations collapse under their own weight -- where hiring someone, however competent, means more work for everyone else than the new hire contributes. Software projects often bump their heads against Coase's ceiling: recall Frederick P. Brooks Jr.'s seminal study, The Mythical Man-Month (Addison-Wesley, 1975), which showed how adding another person onto a project can slow progress and increase errors.

What's new is something consultant and social technologist Clay Shirky calls "Coase's Floor," below which we find projects and activities that aren't worth their organizational costs -- things so esoteric, so frivolous, so nonsensical, or just so thoroughly unimportant that no organization, large or small, would ever bother with them. Things that you shake your head at when you see them and think, "That's ridiculous."

Sounds a lot like the Internet, doesn't it? And that's precisely Shirky's point. His new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, explores a world where organizational costs are close to zero and where ad hoc, loosely connected groups of unpaid amateurs can create an encyclopedia larger than the Britannica and a computer operating system to challenge Microsoft's.

Shirky teaches at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, but this is no academic book. Sacrificing rigor for readability, Here Comes Everybody is an entertaining as well as informative romp through some of the Internet's signal moments -- the Howard Dean phenomenon, Belarusian protests organized on LiveJournal, the lost cellphone of a woman named Ivanna, Meetup.com, flash mobs, Twitter, and more -- which Shirky uses to illustrate his points.

The book is filled with bits of insight and common sense, explaining why young people take better advantage of social tools, how the Internet affects social change, and how most Internet discourse falls somewhere between dinnertime conversation and publishing.

Shirky notes that "most user-generated content isn't 'content' at all, in the sense of being created for general consumption, any more than a phone call between you and a sibling is 'family-generated content.' Most of what gets created on any given day is just the ordinary stuff of life -- gossip, little updates, thinking out loud -- but now it's done in the same medium as professionally produced material. Unlike professionally produced material, however, Internet content can be organized after the fact."

No one coordinates Flickr's 6 million to 8 million users. Yet Flickr had the first photos from the 2005 London Transport bombings, beating the traditional news media. Why? People with cellphone cameras uploaded their photos to Flickr. They coordinated themselves using tools that Flickr provides. This is the sort of impromptu organization the Internet is ideally suited for. Shirky explains how these moments are harbingers of a future that can self-organize without formal hierarchies.

These nonorganizations allow for contributions from a wider group of people. A newspaper has to pay someone to take photos; it can't be bothered to hire someone to stand around London underground stations waiting for a major event. Similarly, Microsoft has to pay a programmer full time, and Encyclopedia Britannica has to pay someone to write articles. But Flickr can make use of a person with just one photo to contribute, Linux can harness the work of a programmer with little time, and Wikipedia benefits if someone corrects just a single typo. These aggregations of millions of actions that were previously below the Coasean floor have enormous potential.

But a flash mob is still a mob. In a world where the Coasean floor is at ground level, all sorts of organizations appear, including ones you might not like: violent political organizations, hate groups, Holocaust deniers, and so on. (Shirky's discussion of teen anorexia support groups makes for very disturbing reading.) This has considerable implications for security, both online and off.

We never realized how much our security could be attributed to distance and inconvenience -- how difficult it is to recruit, organize, coordinate, and communicate without formal organizations. That inadvertent measure of security is now gone. Bad guys, from hacker groups to terrorist groups, will use the same ad hoc organizational technologies that the rest of us do. And while there has been some success in closing down individual Web pages, discussion groups, and blogs, these are just stopgap measures.

In the end, a virtual community is still a community, and it needs to be treated as such. And just as the best way to keep a neighborhood safe is for a policeman to walk around it, the best way to keep a virtual community safe is to have a virtual police presence.

Crime isn't the only danger; there is also isolation. If people can segregate themselves in ever-increasingly specialized groups, then they're less likely to be exposed to alternative ideas. We see a mild form of this in the current political trend of rival political parties having their own news sources, their own narratives, and their own facts. Increased radicalization is another danger lurking below the Coasean floor.

There's no going back, though. We've all figured out that the Internet makes freedom of speech a much harder right to take away. As Shirky demonstrates, Web 2.0 is having the same effect on freedom of assembly. The consequences of this won't be fully seen for years.

Here Comes Everybody covers some of the same ground as Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks. But when I had to explain to one of my corporate attorneys how the Internet has changed the nature of public discourse, Shirky's book is the one I recommended.

This essay previously appeared in IEEE Spectrum.

First, here is what my early endorsement for the book said (can be found on the inside cover of the book):

“Amazingly useful (and fun to read!) book that does justice to this  somewhat esoteric subject - and this is coming from a long-time  visualization skeptic! What is most impressive that  this book is  actually 'hands-on-useful," not conceptual, with examples usable by  readers in their daily jobs. Chapter 8 on insiders is my favorite!”

What else do I think of the book, apart from the fact that it is awesome? :-)

First, I have to admit that I used to argue with Raffy about usefulness of visualization. I was burned by having to look at bad “visualization” tools and would take an ugly, meaningful table over an ugly, meaningless picture any day now. Thus, I was a visualization skeptic. Buy you know what? The book does justice to visualization really well, and it explains when to use it and when not to use it.

The book gives just the right amount of visualization theory, which is not onerous to read at all (unlike some other books), as well as other visualization basics. The fun starts at Chapter 4, where he covers  the process from data to useful pictures. This actually explains why some visualization are useful and some are not; if you just jam data into a graphing program, there is a good chance that it would not be too useful. If you follow the ideas from Ch4, it is more likely to be useful.

Ch5 and 6 cover network data analysis: logs, packets, flows. This is what most people usually try to visualize; this book goes beyond “worms and scans” into nice visuals of email traffic, wireless and even vulnerability data (I found the latter slightly confusing). Ch7 covers “compliance”, which, in this case, covers all sorts of fun things, from risk assessment to database log visualization.  As I said, Ch8 is my favorite: I agree that insider tracking MAY be the area where visualization tools and approaches beat others. In Ch9, the book covers a few visualization tools; obviously, including the author’s AfterGlow.

So, to summarize, get the book if you have any connection to security AND data analysis. In fact, it is very likely that if you are doing security, you’d have to do data analysis at some point and so will benefit from reading the book. And, yes, it does come with a CD full of visualization tools (DAVIX).

BTW, I am posting it at Amazon as well.

For one thing, the House Judiciary’s Subcommittee on the Internet, Courts and IP will be losing its control over IP Law, which will be handled at the full House level in the future:

According to a committee aide who spoke with Ars on background, the decision was driven by simple numbers: as interest in IP issues has grown in recent years, so has the SCIIP. Handling them at the full committee level allows all the members to get their fingers in the pie. The swap also recognizes the complexity of legislation affecting IP, and avoids the need to get half the Judiciary Committee caught up with the subcommittee’s discussions.

Instead the Subcommittee will reign over anti-trust issues–some fear that this will be a victory for content holders, while other experts argue the fears are unfounded.

What other changes are in the works, and who will play the largest role in determining the future of technology law? Well, if you have some ideas, you can nominate yourself or other people for Ars Technica’s “People to Watch” list.

Errata: Version 1.1 of the paper, reference, and optimized code corrects an error in which the length of the configuration string was passed in as the size of the internal block (256 bits for Skein-256, 512 for Skein-512, and 1024 for Skein-1024), instead of a constant 256 bits for all three sizes. This error has no cryptographic significance, but affected the test vectors and the initialization values. The revised code also fixes a bug in the MAC mode key processing. This bug does not affect the NIST submission in any way.

NIST has received 64 submissions. (This article interviews one of the submitters, who is fifteen.) Of those, 28 are public and six have been broken. NIST is going through the submissions right now, making sure they are complete and proper. Their goal is to publish the accepted submissions by the end of the month, in advance of the Third Cryptographic Hash Workshop to be held in Belgium right after FSE in February. They expect to quickly make a first cut of algorithms -- hopefully to about a dozen -- and then give the community about a year of cryptanalysis before making a second cut in 2010.

Lastly, this is a really nice article on Skein.

These submissions make some accommodation to the Core 2 processor. They operate in "little-endian" mode (a quirk of the Intel-like processors that reads some bytes in reverse order). They also allow a large file to be broken into chunks to split the work across multiple processors.

However, virtually all of the contest submissions share the performance problem mentioned above. The logic they use won't optimally fit within the constraints of a Intel Core 2 processor. Most will perform as bad or worse than the existing SHA-1 algorithm.

One exception to this is Skein, created by several well-known cryptographers and noted pundit Bruce Schneier. It was designed specifically to exploit all three of the Core 2 execution units and to run at a full 64-bits. This gives it roughly four to 10 times the logic density of competing submissions.

This is what I meant by the Matrix quote above. They didn't bend the spoon; they bent the crypto algorithm. They moved the logic operations around in a way that wouldn't weaken the crypto, but would strengthen its speed on the Intel Core 2.

In their paper (PDF), the authors of Skein express surprise that a custom silicon ASIC implementation is not any faster than the software implementation. They shouldn't be surprised. Every time you can redefine a problem to run optimally in software, you will reach the same speeds you get with optimized ASIC hardware. The reason software has a reputation of being slow is because people don't redefine the original problem.

That's exactly what we were trying to do.

The CISSP is undoubtably one of the most, if not the most, important professional certifications in Information Security. Many organizations and practitioners rely on it as evidence of a solid foundation and track record in Information Security. But the CISSP is only one of the many ways that the (ISC)² attempts to fulfill its mission of developing the Information Security profession.

Board membership is a role of governance, guidance, and passion. Let’s briefly explore how Dan’s track record and past contributions demonstrate his qualification for this post, and possibly your vote.

Passion

Dan is someone who has a passion for promoting and developing the talent needed to continue to grow and mature our profession. Anyone who has seen Dan speak at conferences, local chapter meetings, or in one of his classes knows how passionate Dan is! But anyone who takes the time to approach him knows that he is no ideologue or zealot; Dan is always interested in improving his own understanding, and then sharing that knowledge with others.

Dan has a long track record as a contributor - as a “giver” - to the profession. In addition to teaching over a dozen CISSP review courses, he has also served on multiple (ISC)² committees, is one of the authors of the ISSAP Body of Knowledge (cryptography), and has published primary research on professional certifications. He is also the founder of the monthly Columbus, Ohio Information Security MBA (Masters of Beer Appreciation) meeting - a professional roundtable that attracts practitioners from across the state.

Governance and Guidance 

In addition to past experience serving on (ISC)² committees, which I assume led to the current board’s nomination, Dan has served on numerous Boards of Directors including local and regional community organizations, ISSA chapters,and several Toastmasters clubs. 

Personal Experiences

I have known Dan for almost three yeas. Dan and I have collaborated on a number or projects, including a half-day Cryptographic Controls Seminar and a full-day Identity Management Architecture class. It is my feeling that when you collaborate, work closely, and travel with someone, you really get to know them. You get to do more than hear about their College Sweethearts (which, for Dan, is Rebecca, his wife of 21 years), but you also get to understand their ethics, how they really conduct themselves, how they deal with stress, etc.

Given the entire picture, the understanding that I have of Dan Houser, I can think of no one better suited to representing, guiding and developing the (ISC)². I have voted for Dan, and I hope that you will consider doing the same.

Here is the voting link for (ISC)²: https://webportal.isc2.org/custom/votenow.aspx

Cheers, Erik

CISSPs… Lend me your ears…