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.

Based in Europe, the Rock Phish group is a criminal collective that has been targeting banks and other financial institutions since 2004. According to RSA, they are responsible for half of the worldwide phishing attacks and have siphoned tens of millions of dollars from individuals' bank accounts. The group got its name from a now discontinued quirk in which the phishers used directory paths that contained the word "rock."

The first sign the group was expanding operations came in April, when it introduced a trojan known alternately as Zeus or WSNPOEM, which steals sensitive financial information in transit from a victim's machine to a bank. Shortly afterward, the gang added more crimeware, including a custom-made botnet client that was spread, among other means, using the Neosploit infection kit.

[...]

Soon, additional signs appeared pointing to a partnership between Rock Phishers and Asprox. Most notably, the command and control server for the custom Rock Phish crimeware had exactly the same directory structure of many of the Asprox servers, leading RSA researchers to believe Rock Phish and Asprox attacks were using at least one common server. (Researchers from Damballa were able to confirm this finding after observing malware samples from each of the respective botnets establish HTTP proxy server connections to a common set of destination IPs.)

ATC is an excellent working example of complex event processing.   Radar and GPS provide the basic sensory information to accurately track and trace the position of each aircraft in the area of responsibility (AOR) of a particular control tower/zone.     Naturally,  sensory information is preprocessed and formatted in such a way that the data can be processed upstream by multiple real-time applications.

Before we look at complex ATC scenarios, such as “potential collision” or “aircraft off approach vector” we must trace and trace individual objects, aircraft-objects, accurately with very high confidence.    In addition to tracking aircraft-objects, there is a database of information about the aircraft (ideally), such as make, model, age, range, passengers and other properties about the aircraft-object.      In addition, there is a state-model for each aircraft, for example the aircraft might be “on the ground”, “approaching the runway”, “cleared for takeoff”, “cruising altitude”, “approaching runway”, “final decent” etc.  

Tracking and tracing individual aircraft is what is generally referred to as “object refinement” in our CEP/EP reference architecture.   The reason we call this function “object refinement” is that system engineers are focused on optimizing the situational knowledge about individual objects.     Sometimes we refer to this function as “track and trace” because that is what we are doing to  each object in the model.  In Marc Adler’s recent shoplifting scenario, Marc was interested in tracking and tracing people in a store using imaging processing techniques to estimate their behavioral patterns.  In the same way, before we can process for scenarios such as “potential shoplifter” or “suspicious criminal gang activity” we must be able to accurately process (track and trace) individual object, such as people or merchandise.

Back to aircraft and ATC, the “complex event processing” begins when we are looking about object-object relationships, in this model, aircraft-to-aircraft, but this is an overly simplistic model, as we have not yet added (to our model) ground features (towers, buildings, power lines), weather (storm cells, wind) and other flying objects (known migratory bird paths, swarms of insects) to our simple model.  

Complex event processing occurs when we are processing multiple objects in our model looking for threats in real-time.     Practically speaking, all ATC applications are CEP applications.  This means that vendors and integrators who build ATC applications are also CEP vendors.   

Editorial Note: CEP/EP has been around for a long time and was not recently invented in the past decade as some “inventors” would like for us to believe. 

As you can imagine, there is considerable “complex event processing” that goes on “behind the scenes” to provide air traffic controllers and pilots situational knowledge into the “friendly skies”.   As you might further imagine, the situation is more complex when the skies are “not so friendly”, for example, in air combat situations.   

Processing myriad objects is not the end of the processing “chain”.  For example, decisions are being made constantly about potential damage, alternative airports, and more.    In our reference model, we refer to this, generally speaking, as “impact assessment” because we must take an estimated detected complex event, for example “aircraft collision,” and estimate potential damage based on numerous factors such as, the amount of jet fuel in the aircrafts and the location of the aircrafts (over a large city or rural area, near a hospital and emergency services).   Regardless of the scenario, an impact assessment is normally required before optimal decisions can be made.

This is true, by the way, for our shoplifting example (the impact is different if a piece of gum is stolen versus a $1,000,000 diamond necklace or weapons-grade nuclear material) and other scenarios and models.  Static data (information about objects) is required for accurate decision processing.  

Impact assessment is not the end of the “knowledge chain”.    Decisions are constantly being made that effect resources.  For example, suggestion an alternative route for an aircraft is a resource management decision.    Turning on and off radar or switching to alternative tracking devices is a resource management function.  In our CEP/EP reference model (based on the JDL data fusion model), we call this “resource management”.   This function includes contacting emergency services and directing them to a potential crash location or sending out a message to instruct all aircraft to stay off a certain radio frequency.  Resource management is critical.

Our simple ATC model today is by no means complete, it just scratches the surface.  In fact, I have a very close friend, Mark Secrist, who is a former Marine fighter pilot and currently a senior captain for American Airlines.   I have asked Mark to read this post and help me further refine this crude “laymans” ATC model (Thanks Mark!).

In a tale rich with incongruities, the Communist-run government of West Bengal State invited the Tata Group, a symbol of Indian capitalism, to set up its plant in an area called Singur. It acquired 1,000 acres from farmers on the company’s behalf.
As the project advanced, some farmers who had sold their land demanded it back. The main state-level opposition party, the Trinamool Congress, led protests demanding that the land be returned. Most people sympathetic to Tata accused the opposition of inducing the farmers to protest, while Tata’s critics said the farmers had legitimate grievances.

The issue simmered for months. But in recent days, protesters began surrounding the plant, blocking roads and preventing Tata workers from reaching the plant. “The existing environment of obstruction, intimidation and confrontation has begun to impact the ability of the company to convince several of its experienced managers to relocate and work in the plant,” Tata said in a statement on Tuesday.

The halt to the plant has caused many Indian business people to warn of a chilling effect on investment in the country. It is also unclear how Tata will be able to keep the Nano’s cost so low, since part of the affordable price reflects the company’s savings on the land in Singur.

There is a fundamental asymmetry between state and markets. It is easier to create markets than it is to create state capacity or to prevent its deterioration. Creating markets is a lot about letting go, establishing a reasonable policy framework, and allowing the natural hustling instinct to take over. In other words, hustling is the natural state. Building state capacity, on the other hand, is quite different. It involves overcoming collective action problems, mediating conflict, creating accountability mechanisms where outputs are multiple and fuzzy and links between inputs and outputs murky, and contending with the deep imprints of history. In Weber’s memorable words, building public institutions is like the “slow boring of hard boards”.

In that light, China’s task of improving its private sector seems easier to accomplish than India’s task of arresting institutional decline. So, while China and India can probably both count on more years of high growth, the odds still favour China pulling off that feat than India. That, and not just the meagre medal tally, should be what India mulls over after the Beijing Olympics.

It's easier to liberalise a functional state than it is to functionalise a dysfunctional one, of any ideological stripe.

Howard Schmidt, who was once the CSO of Microsoft, knows a thing or two about vendors shipping insecure software.  He offers this advice relating to his iPhone, “Just because a piece of software was distributed through Apple’s App Store, don’t assume that it is vulnerability free.”  I think that sums up the problem pretty well.  Customers assume the software they are getting is vulnerability free until it is proved otherwise.

If it’s distributed by the Apple Store it is coming from a trusted brand. “It must be secure”, many think.  The same thinking is used by people who install social networking applets and give them access to their personal data.  Someone, somewhere is taking care of the software security so I don’t have to.  It must be the platform provider, the store, some industry body, my antivirus provider, or maybe even the government.

You can see how this thinking pervades the consumer space because there are regulatory bodies governing all other aspects of safety and security in our personal lives.  I’m safe in a plane or car because the government is looking out for me with standards and testing requirements.  I am safe in the mall parking lot because the men in the white SUV are patrolling.

This thinking also pervaded the b2b space.  I talk to companies which are outsourcing critical applications to offshore development companies and they assume that security testing is taking place as part of the development process.  I ask them if they have made security quality part of the requirements of the project and they say no.  Then I ask them what evidence does the offshore developer provide to demonstrate they have a certain level of security quality in the software they are producing and they tell me they have never asked.

I can tell you what would happen if they did ask because I have also spoken with the offshore developers.  They have no evidence.  Their concern is getting the software functionality done on time and on budget. They consider fixing security vulnerabilities, once discovered, rework which the customer pays for.  So not only are they not looking for vulnerabilities and relying on the customer to find them, they are charging the customer to fix the problems.  The customer has to this date accepted this model.

The same goes for commercial off the shelf software and open source.  Surely the developers writing the software are trained in secure software engineering.  Surely commercial software companies are using 3rd parties to test their software just like the banks have the big 4 audit their accounting or auto manufacturers submit to testing by the NHTSA. And of course open source has “many eyes” reviewing the code for security defects and informing the developers.  The customer has accepted a model where this is almost never true.

But times are changing and it is partially due to the availability of software that can automate the process of looking for security vulnerabilities. David Rice, the author of “Geekanomics: The Real Cost of Insecure Software” was interviewed recently by Drazin Drazic his Beast or Buddha blog.  He said the trend is toward a future of secure software and automated security analysis is one of the sparks:

BorB: I recently wrote in a post that little is changing. We are not learning from the lessons of the past. There are few, if any new technologies that exist today, that we have great faith and trust in as being secure now, and expecting them to continue to be secure in the future. Any solutions to even basic security issues need a starting point and a significant change to current thinking, and even then, it will takes years to see the impacts of this. What are your thoughts on this? Are we seeing anything at present to make us more confident of the future?

DR: It is true that it takes years to see the positive impacts of a change of mindset. And we are in the unfortunate position of repeating many old lessons.

At base, human history is a collection of exhaustive, expensive, and protracted engagements; only the relentless survive and have a chance at succeeding (notice no guarantee here). Confronting some of our most complex problems like highway safety, nuclear proliferation, or insecure software is painful, difficult, complicated, and troublesome. Human endeavors of any significance are like this. But we must do it. The inertia of culture and status quo is difficult to overcome, but overcome it we can; otherwise, we would not have the better parts of the world we enjoy today.

I believe the technology space is no different. We are just a little dazed and bewildered by all the changes technology has introduced so quickly and on such a grand scale. For every change we react to, another two or three rapidly appear.

I do see sparks of hope emerging. In the United States some members of government are beginning to understand the problem and are willing to start discussing how to approach insecure software from a policy perspective. On the technology front, companies like Ounce, Fortify, and Veracode are beginning to give software buyers an automated method of evaluating assurance levels of software. While not complete in and of themselves, these solutions are, as I stated, “sparks” that can help us progress down paths that were once not easily open to us.

As for the larger issue of cyber security, which software assurance is only a part of, society has a lot of adjusting to do. The Internet is a new environment for many still, and many more to come. There is a learning curve that must be confronted. It took the United States almost 80 years to develop the highway system we know and enjoy today. Nearly $400 billion was spent on this endeavor with hundreds of thousands of lives lost. As this shows, learning how to govern and navigate a new environment is expensive. Failing to learn even more so.

Independent, automated, and repeatable software security testing is an essential component of a safe and secure online environment.  Without it we are stuck with the assumption of vendors perfoming software security as our imaginary security blanket that allows us to operate in the current online world.

Howard Schmidt, who was once the CSO of Microsoft, knows a thing or two about vendors shipping insecure software. He offers this advice relating to his iPhone, “Just because a piece of software was distributed through Apple’s App Store, don’t assume that it is vulnerability free.” I think that sums up the problem pretty well. Customers assume the software they are getting is vulnerability free until it is proved otherwise.

If it’s distributed by the Apple Store it is coming from a trusted brand. “It must be secure”, many think. The same thinking is used by people who install social networking applets and give them access to their personal data. Someone, somewhere is taking care of the software security so I don’t have to. It must be the platform provider, the store, some industry body, my antivirus provider, or maybe even the government.

You can see how this thinking pervades the consumer space because there are regulatory bodies governing all other aspects of safety and security in our personal lives. I’m safe in a plane or car because the government is looking out for me with standards and testing requirements. I am safe in the mall parking lot because the men in the white SUV are patrolling.

This thinking also pervaded the b2b space. I talk to companies which are outsourcing critical applications to offshore development companies and they assume that security testing is taking place as part of the development process. I ask them if they have made security quality part of the requirements of the project and they say no. Then I ask them what evidence does the offshore developer provide to demonstrate they have a certain level of security quality in the software they are producing and they tell me they have never asked.

I can tell you what would happen if they did ask because I have also spoken with the offshore developers. They have no evidence. Their concern is getting the software functionality done on time and on budget. They consider fixing security vulnerabilities, once discovered, rework which the customer pays for. So not only are they not looking for vulnerabilities and relying on the customer to find them, they are charging the customer to fix the problems. The customer has to this date accepted this model.

The same goes for commercial off the shelf software and open source. Surely the developers writing the software are trained in secure software engineering. Surely commercial software companies are using 3rd parties to test their software just like the banks have the big 4 audit their accounting or auto manufacturers submit to testing by the NHTSA. And of course open source has “many eyes” reviewing the code for security defects and informing the developers. The customer has accepted a model where this is almost never true.

But times are changing and it is partially due to the availability of software that can automate the process of looking for security vulnerabilities. David Rice, the author of “Geekanomics: The Real Cost of Insecure Software” was interviewed recently by Drazin Drazic his Beast or Buddha blog. He said the trend is toward a future of secure software and automated security analysis is one of the sparks:

BorB: I recently wrote in a post that little is changing. We are not learning from the lessons of the past. There are few, if any new technologies that exist today, that we have great faith and trust in as being secure now, and expecting them to continue to be secure in the future. Any solutions to even basic security issues need a starting point and a significant change to current thinking, and even then, it will takes years to see the impacts of this. What are your thoughts on this? Are we seeing anything at present to make us more confident of the future?

DR: It is true that it takes years to see the positive impacts of a change of mindset. And we are in the unfortunate position of repeating many old lessons.

At base, human history is a collection of exhaustive, expensive, and protracted engagements; only the relentless survive and have a chance at succeeding (notice no guarantee here). Confronting some of our most complex problems like highway safety, nuclear proliferation, or insecure software is painful, difficult, complicated, and troublesome. Human endeavors of any significance are like this. But we must do it. The inertia of culture and status quo is difficult to overcome, but overcome it we can; otherwise, we would not have the better parts of the world we enjoy today.

I believe the technology space is no different. We are just a little dazed and bewildered by all the changes technology has introduced so quickly and on such a grand scale. For every change we react to, another two or three rapidly appear.

I do see sparks of hope emerging. In the United States some members of government are beginning to understand the problem and are willing to start discussing how to approach insecure software from a policy perspective. On the technology front, companies like Ounce, Fortify, and Veracode are beginning to give software buyers an automated method of evaluating assurance levels of software. While not complete in and of themselves, these solutions are, as I stated, “sparks” that can help us progress down paths that were once not easily open to us.

As for the larger issue of cyber security, which software assurance is only a part of, society has a lot of adjusting to do. The Internet is a new environment for many still, and many more to come. There is a learning curve that must be confronted. It took the United States almost 80 years to develop the highway system we know and enjoy today. Nearly $400 billion was spent on this endeavor with hundreds of thousands of lives lost. As this shows, learning how to govern and navigate a new environment is expensive. Failing to learn even more so.

Independent, automated, and repeatable software security testing is an essential component of a safe and secure online environment. Without it we are stuck with the assumption of vendors perfoming software security as our imaginary security blanket that allows us to operate in the current online world.

First, a quick clarification. I noticed that some of the readers who commented on that first post wanted to talk about improving security through the use of various development methodologies or coding frameworks. Those are interesting tangents (and ones that I may write about in the future), but my intention with this post is to discuss a very specific problem related to how people integrate third-party code — that is, the stuff you import or link in but didn’t write yourself.

As I mentioned previously, developers have a tendency to “bolt on” third-party components to applications without understanding the security implications. Often, these components are glossed over or ignored completely during threat modeling discussions. I attempted to illustrate this with my fictitious WhizBang library example in Part 1.

When integrating a third-party component, developers familiarize themselves with the API but generally don’t care how it’s implemented. Granted, that’s how an API is supposed to work; you don’t have to futz around with code beyond the API boundary, and you can blissfully ignore parts of the library that you don’t need. In past consulting gigs, I’ve sat in threat modeling discussions where nobody knew whether a particular library generated network traffic. “We just use the API,” they say. The fact that it works is good enough; nobody seems to care how it works.

That mindset is ideal for rapid development but problematic for security. Failing to understand the complete application, as opposed to just the part you wrote, prevents you from accurately assessing its security posture.

It’s also no coincidence that web app pen testers love third-party components — we get excited when we see “bolted on” interfaces, because we know that developers tend to leave extraneous functionality exposed. The resulting findings usually generate reactions such as “I didn’t even know that servlet had an upload function.”

An Example

Here’s a close-to-home example related to my post about DWR 2.0.5 from the other day. DWR is an Ajax framework that has a variety of operating modes. In-house, we use a subset of DWR’s full functionality — specifically, we interact with it using the “plaincall” method only, so we made sure that the features we didn’t need were disabled via the configuration file. As it turned out, there were vulnerable code paths prior to the “do you have this thing disabled” check. In hindsight, if we had taken more time to understand the exposed interfaces, we could have reduced the attack surface by filtering out unneeded request patterns before they even touched the third-party code.

But wait, you say. What about maintainability? If I whitelist using a point-in-time application profile, doesn’t this create the same maintenance headache as the reviled WAF? It doesn’t have to. Certainly, one option would be to whitelist each and every unique URL that references the DWR framework, e.g.

/dwr/call/plaincall/myMethod1
/dwr/call/plaincall/myMethod2
/dwr/call/plaincall/myMethod3

But then you’d have to update the whitelist every time you added or removed functionality from your application. Also, don’t lose sight of the security goal, which is to minimize the amount of exposed third-party code. If I add or remove URLs that list, provided they are still using the “plaincall” method, I’m hitting the same DWR dispatcher every time. So I’ve increased maintenance cost without any security benefit.

A better option is to simply tighten the URL pattern a bit in the J2EE container. Here’s the default configuration:

<servlet-mapping>
  <servlet-name>dwr-invoker</servlet-name>
  <url-pattern>/dwr/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

Now, instead of allowing every URL starting with /dwr/ to be processed by the DWR library, you could be a little more restrictive:

<servlet-mapping>
  <servlet-name>dwr-invoker</servlet-name>
  <url-pattern>/dwr/call/plaincall/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

In this configuration, you don’t have to worry about /dwr/call/someothercodepath any more. There is less third-party code exposed, thereby reducing the overall attack surface of the application. (NB: DWR also serves up a couple of Javascript files, so those URL patterns will have to be whitelisted too)

A Logical Extension

Even if you’re not a developer, you should still be thinking about attack surfaces. People download and install blogging platforms such as WordPress, Movable Type, etc. all the time, but how many take additional steps to harden their installations? The concept is the same as the OS hardening analogy I brought up at the very beginning of this discussion.

Similarly, people install third-party WordPress plugins or Joomla components without considering that most of them are written by some random programmer who is a whiz with the plugin API but knows nothing about security?

At the risk of sounding trite, always remember that security is only as strong as the weakest link.