So, here is my next monthly "Security Warrior" blog round-up of top 5 popular posts and topics.

1. OF COURSE, the news of my “transition” is the item #1, by far. “Change!!!” and “Qualys” posts rule the list.
2. Last month I posted a bunch of my presentations on logs, security, etc on the blog.  “Presentation from GOVCERT.NL 2008: Log Forensics” takes one of the tops spots; and so do “Presentation on Application Logging, Done Wrong or Very Wrong” and “Presentation on Optimizing Your Logging for Insider Attack Tracking.”  BTW, all the presentations are here.
3. Shockingly, AGAIN this month, the "Top 11 Reasons to Secure and Protect Your Logs" came up as #1 most popular post (maybe driven by my poll).  BTW, see my other logging polls and my other “top 11” lists.
4. SIEM bashing reached a new high (eh…“low”? :-)), now that Richard is helping too;  my “11 Signs That Your SIEM Is A Dog or "Raffy, You Killed SIM!" is on the top list. It is both humorous and sadly true (and backed up by other sources and here.)
5. Somewhat predictably, PCI compliance is obviously still all the rage: MUST-DO Logging for PCI? post was again propelled to a place in my monthly Top5 list.

See you in November.

Possibly related posts / past monthly popular blog round-ups:

• Monthly Blog Round-Up - September 2008
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - August 2008
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - July 2008
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - June 2008
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - May 2008  
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - April 2008  
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - March 2008  
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - February 2008  
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - January 2008  
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - December 2007  
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - November 2007  
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - October 2007  
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - September 2007
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - August 2007

Lots being written about the Cloud, most of it quite dark and gloomy.  In fact I’m surprised, that Hoff hasn’t got a preso spooled up called “The Toxic Cloud” or something similarly ominous for his next speaking tour.
That said, the Economist does a great job distilling the issue into a simple statement -

Cloud computing is a trade-off between sovereignty and efficiency.

Let me ask you -  if you had to put your money on one of those horses, considering your average profit-preoccupied business, which would it be?  I’d put my bottom dollar on the thoroughbred named “Cost Center Reduction”, to place.

WHO ARE WE TO STAND IN THE WAY OF “PROGRESS”?

I’m always fond of Jack’s rule that the role of information risk management boils down to three deceptively simple premises:

• Reduce Risk.
• Reduce Loss.
• Create Operational Efficiencies.

So it would seem antithetical to the charter of the Chief Security Officer to stand in the way of progress as embodied by “cloud computing” (not to mention dangerous to long-term job security).  And I think that this presents opportunities to discuss strategies for managing risk, strategies that aren’t too theoretical and have practical application (though actual “cloud” use by enterprises may be rare at this point).

ON RISK REDUCTION IN THE CLOUD (or, How To Learn From the Shortcomings of PCI DSS)

The good news is, there’s already a well-established model for managing the risk around outsourcing the processing of “confidential” information.  The bad news is, that model kinda sucks it.

The Payment Card Industry, known as the “PCI” or “meal ticket” to many in the industry, faced a similar problem with the introduction of GLBA.  As I see it (and I’m not at all close to the PCI, at all, so this is all just abstract soliloquy) the PCI had one of two choices when faced with the prospect of other people managing their sensitive information:

1. Accept the *massive* amount of GLBA risk their business creates and spend a TON of money to build out the infrastructure (both process and IT) to manage the consumer data themselves (in conjunction with the banks, of course) and never have it grace the computing systems of the retailer.  Or,
2. Transfer the GLBA risk down to the retailer and have them bear the majority of the risk (and cost of reducing risk to a level that might be tolerable to the US Government).

(Martin, you may recall our Twittering about PCI a while back.  This is the crux of my view on the subj.)

Now fortunately, the CSO’s of the world are going to be a little more “invested” in protecting the information they are stewards over, and unlike the PCI, will remain primarily responsible for the C, I, & A of the data in the Cloud.  The cool thing is, this actually presents a great opportunity to start building a meaningful model for co-management of risk!  In fact, we can take the PCI model of contractual risk transference but modify where it goes all wrong, and start working to create something better.  And we can start by euthanizing some faulty assumptions.

JUST HOW INFORMATIVE IS PCI DSS?

What might be the.greatest.mistake of the standards compliance mentality is the assumption of value for the past-state measurement.  That is, I believe that the CSO needs more than some “past-state” assurance in order to understand their risk.    If you look at the concept of “PCI compliance” it really is an examination of a past state of nature that is assumed to be relevant to current and future states.   Many people (myself included) are not at all convinced that this past-state is nearly as informative as those who mandate it’s measurement believe it to be.

That’s not to condemn past-state measurements as completely non-informative,  they most certainly are useful.  It’s just that no self-respecting CSO sleeps well because they were deemed “PCI compliant” 10 months ago.  They sleep well because they have good visibility into current-state information and confidence in their strategy concerning future-state (based on that visibility and the outcomes of sound IRM models).

MOVING PAST THE VULNERABILITY SCANNER INTO INTELLIGENCE AND WISDOM

So realizing this new importance (to me, at least) concerning visibility and IRM models, I’m lead to the conclusion that if we are to manage risk in the Cloud, we’ll have to move beyond “PCI Compliance” or the concept that some regular “audit” of controls in place at the host is all we need to understand our ability to manage risk.  No, the CSO must have good information concerning current and probable future states.   This is that “visibility” I spoke of above.  In fact, we’ll need significant amounts of piercing, transparent visibility.  And in order to gain that visibility, our insight into Cloud Risk Management must include significant provisions for understanding a joint ability to Prevent/Detect/Respond as well as provisions for managing the risk that one of the participants won’t provide that visibility or ability via SLA’s and penalties . These SLA’s must be expressed in measurable terms (more visibility), and those metrics must have their roots in the things that help understand how we manage risk (those aforementioned IRM models).

THE CLOUD COMPUTING SECURITY SILVER LINING (sorry couldn’t resist)

As I mentioned earlier, I do see an opportunity to create insight.  The need for visibility and IRM models would allow us to create a “guidance” if you’ll allow me to use the term.  Not a standard or a “best practice” to audit by, but simply a reference document that says “if you’re going to put information on somebody else’s systems and still hold some significant responsibility for that information, here’s the considerations, why they are considerations, and how you might go about collaborating on the management of risk”.

And I think that if we undertake this journey, there is going to be a lot of growth and risk management innovation along the way.  But keen insights into what it means to manage risk will be necessary, and secure and forthright collaboration will be of absolute importance.

I say that last bit because, if these pundits are right about the utility of a hosted computing model - the Cloud will happen regardless of the CSO’s ability or desire to manage it.

No big news -- we've seen stupid things like this regularly since 9/11 -- but this time people responded:

Added Director Tom Radulovich, "If somebody wants to break the law and bring flammable liquids on, they can. It's not like al Qaeda is waiting in their caves for us to have a sippy-cup rule."

Directing his comments to BART administrators, he said, "You know, it's just fearmongering and you should be ashamed."

Around the same time that Professor Luckham and his team was working on CEP applications in network management and security management, I was leading efforts to build network and security management control centers for the United States Air Force.  In the beginning, dating back to 1994, my Internet-related work was for Air Combat Command (ACC), working out of ACC headquarters at Langley Air Force Base.

In 1997, I lead a technical team that developed countermeasures against an actual distributed Internet-based attack on the Langley AFB SMTP email infrastructure.  This attack was documented in a technical paper, E-Mail Bombs and Countermeasures: Cyber Attacks on Availability and Brand Integrity, IEEE Network Magazine, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 10-17, March/April 1998.  In addition, this attackand countermeasures I designed was featured in Popular Science Magazine in an 1998 article, War.Com and other news channels.  I also published a number of related papers on this topic.

Our team used a rule-based approach for countermeasures against massive email bombs attacks on the Langley Air Force Base email infrastructure.   We called this rule-based system, BombShelter. and it was written in PERL.  I developed both the original software architecture and the original working prototype for BombShelter (in two days) and then we turned the software over to our team who used the rule-based approach for daily attack countermeasures.

I watched for days, and then weeks, as my team designed rules, and the attackers wrote new attacks that circumvented the rules.  Some folks in the Pentagon used to say that I “lead the effort to fight the first war in cyberspace”.   It might have have been the first cyberwar, I am not sure, but it was certainly the first publicly documented cyberwar.  There is no doubt about this.

Without getting into all the historical footnotes and significance of this cyberwar that was fought with experts and rule-based systems, I would like to jump to an important conclusion.

Rule-based systems are useful, but have limited functionality and scaleability in most complex event processing applications.

Rule-based systems are human resource intensive because rule-based systems cannot learn and adapt on their own, humans learn and then write new rules.  This is how rule-based systems work.

This is the motivation behind why I spend a lot of time to search for new, more efficient and adaptive methods as alternatives to rule-based systems.   After extensive research, I published a series of papers on the future of intrusion detection in the Internet.  Intrusion Detection Systems & Multisensor Data Fusion - Creating Cyberspace Situational Awareness [1], helped lead an evolution in Internet security, particularly in the area of network-based intrusion detection systems (IDS).

In my published research work, motivated by limitations with rule-based approaches, I used the same mature functional model that is used to process missile attacks, control global air traffic, and other complex event processing applications in physical space; but I applied these concepts to cyberspace.

Around the same time, Professor Luckham and others were working on similar problems, all related to real-time detection and response to threats in cyberspace.  They were also funded by the US government.

Sidebar: Stream processing of transaction- based systems (databases), another area of interest, was focused on a totally different problem, which was the low latency processing of straight-thru processing in databased-oriented systems.   These stream processing systems were, and remain however,  rule-based systems.  The problems we were trying to solve in cyberspace, however, cannot be efficiently and pragmatically solved by rule-based systems alone.  Only relatively simple scenarios can be efficiently detected by rule-based stream processing systems.

The vast majority of complex event processing classes of problems require rules plus advanced algorithms that can learn and adapt in real-time.    I know this, not from reading papers or taking university classes on rule-bases systems, but from working on some very challenging operational problems in real-time.    This is why I remain interested in complex event processing and why I continue to elaborate on why rule-based systems have limitations.

• Network Level Monitoring and Management,
  
• Cyber Security: Network Intrusion Detection,
  
• Enterprise Monitoring and Management,
• Modeling and Simulation of Collaborative Business Processes,
• Business Policy Monitoring, and
• Analysis and Debugging of Distributed Systems.

In each of the CEP application examples above, the amount of event information available to software developers can be staggering; however, despite all the available information, the capability to sense-and-respond to threats and opportunities is crude, at best.

Folks who work in network and security management, for example, are bombarded with event information.  However, this deluge of event information is, for the most part, “noise” that is difficult to understand.   In network management one of the most difficult things to accomplish is to find the root cause of an outage or performance problem.   This is why researchers at Stanford were funded to focused on research topics such as (above), the Analysis and Debugging of Distributed Systems.

These are the classes of asymmetric event processing problems that define complex event processing, or CEP.   Processing events by mediating events, routing events, or running a rule-set against events and making a processing decision are all perfectly valid event processing applications.   However, the core reason to have “complex event processing” is to solve event processing problems where there exists a significant asymmetry between the deluge of “event noise”  (Professor Luckham called this phenomena the “event cloud”) and detecting business-relevant, actionable complex events in an climate of uncertainty and noise.

In my next post on this topic I will briefly the review motivation behind my 1999 ACM paper, Intrusion Detection Systems and Multisensor Data Fusion, where we were working on solving complex distributed security challenges based on real-world experiences with the problems of asymmetric processing capabiilities.  I will discuss why we evolved from an early rule-based expert system model to a more advanced inference model that was not dependent solely on rule-based thinking.   I will also explain why other researchers and developers experienced in complex event detection applications have come to the same conclusion.

So, here is my next monthly "Security Warrior" blog round-up of top 5 popular posts and topics.

1. Shockingly, AGAIN this month, the "Top 11 Reasons to Secure and Protect Your Logs" came up as #1 most popular post (maybe driven by my poll).  BTW, see my other logging polls.
2. Security ROI - and its parent topic "security metrics"/"measuring security" - is definitely an ongoing HOT debate. Indeed, the old post "Security ROI Pile-Up!" takes the #2 spot this month, possibly propelled by a more recent post "Second ROI War."
3. Some say that "short blog posts rule", but, in reality, good, fun content is the best. Here is an example:  "Dumb Luck IS a Strategy!" post makes the top list. In it, I try to explore why people still ignore security concerns even if stare people in the face...
4. Discussion on what you can do to soften the impact of "getting 0wned" ( "What CAN You Do?") made the top list. Good!
5. As before, my post "11 Signs That Your SIEM Is A Dog or "Raffy, You Killed SIM!"". It is both humorous and sadly true (and backed up by other sources)
6. Still burning hot is a post with my irreverent comments on a Terry Childs saga. Namely, "On Doomsaying (Terry Childs case)", "So ... Am I? Maybe I Am!" and "Admins , Good Guys or "I am NOT an Idiot!""

See you in October.

Possibly related posts / past monthly popular blog round-ups:

• Monthly Blog Round-Up - August 2008
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - July 2008
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - June 2008
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - May 2008  
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - April 2008  
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - March 2008  
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - February 2008  
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - January 2008  
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - December 2007  
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - November 2007  
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - October 2007  
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - September 2007
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - August 2007

I used to react to this with "Are you stupid?! PCI being prescriptive is the best thing since sliced cake :-) Finally, there is some specific guidance for people to follow and be more secure!" BTW, in many cases end users who have to comply with PCI DSS still think it is "too fuzzy" and "not specific enough" (e.g. see "MUST-DO Logging for PCI"); and they basically ask for  "a compliance TODO list." (also see this and especially this on compliance checklists)

But every time it happens, I can't stop but think - why do people even utter such utter heresy? :-) And you know what?  I think I got it!

When people say "PCI is too prescriptive," they actually mean that it engenders "checklist mentality" and leads to following the letter of the mandate blindly, without thinking about WHY it was put in place (to protect cardholder data, share risk/responsibility, etc). For example, it says "use a firewall" and so they deploy a shiny firewall with a simple "ALLOW ALL<->ALL" rule (an obvious exaggeration - but you get the point!) Or they have a firewall with a default password unchanged... In addition, the proponents of "PCI is too prescriptive" tend to think that fuzzier guidance (and, especially, prescribing the desired end state AND not the tools to be installed) will lead to people actually thinking about the best way to do it.

So the choices are:

1. Mandate the tools (e.g. "must use a firewall") - and risk "checklist mentality", resulting in BOTH insecurity and "false sense" of security.
2. Mandate the results (e.g. "must be secure") -  and risk people saying "eh, but I dunno how" - and then not acting at all, again leading to insecurity.

Take your poison now?! Isn't compliance fun? What is the practical solution to this? I personally would take the pill #1 over pill #2 (and that is why I like PCI that much), but with some pause to think, for sure.  I think organizations with less mature security programs will benefit at least a bit from #1, while those with more mature programs might "enjoy" #2 more...

BTW, this post was originally called "Isn't Compliance Fun?!"  I had a few fierce debates with some friends and all of them  piled on me to convince me that "compliance is boring, while security is fun!" The above does illustrate that there are worthy and exciting intellectual challenges in the domain of regulatory compliance. It is not [only] a domain of minimalists (who just "want the auditor to go away") and mediocrity, as some think. What makes security fun - the people aspect, the ever-changing threat landscape, cool technology, high uncertainty, even risk - also apply to compliance ...

So, need a cool marketing slogan BUT hate "making compliance easy"?  Go for "Making Compliance Fun!" :-)

All posts on PCI - some are fun:-)