The best security program is at the business with the happiest customers.

There's a fine line between happy customers and playing piano in a bordello.

Sees a lot
Can tell the king he has no clothes
Can tell the king he really is ugly
Does not get killed by the king
Nice to have around but…how much security improvement comes from this ?

Changes happened faster that he was able to move
Did not read the signs
Good intentions went unfulfilled
A brutal way to ending a promising career
Sad to have around but…how much security improvement comes from this ?

Obviously these models of CISOs are not solving our information security problems. Instead Dr. Garigue points us to Charlemagne as a better model

King of the Franks and Holy Roman Emperor; conqueror of the Lombards and Saxons (742-814) - reunited much of Europe after the Dark Ages.

He set up other schools, opening them to peasant boys as well as nobles. Charlemagne never stopped studying. He brought an English monk, Alcuin, and other scholars to his court - encouraging the development of a standard script.

He set up money standards to encourage commerce, tried to build a Rhine-Danube canal, and urged better farming methods. He especially worked to spread education and Christianity in every class of people.

He relied on Counts, Margraves and Missi Domini to help him.

Margraves - Guard the frontier districts of the empire. Margraves retained, within their own jurisdictions, the authority of dukes in the feudal arm of the empire.

Missi Domini - Messengers of the King.

This is the way forward! Find software security champions in the architecture and development groups,help them understand the real security issues. They will find solutions you have not thought of. Same for DBAs, same for business analysts even. Its all about beating the bushes, education, and decentralizing security services. Specifically, he points out this important mandate for IT security

Knowledge of risky things is of strategic value

How to know today tomorrow’s unknown ?
How to structure information security processes in an organization so as to identify and address the NEXT categories of risks ?

To me this is our mandate and measure of effectiveness. Empower our customers, educate, and create business value. If I am a CISO  I don't want 20 people reporting to me who do firewall ruleset changes. I want one champion in 20 different groups - development teams, architects, DBAs, business analysts.

A concrete example, infosec can continue to go along with the herd and follow the "what everyone else is doing architecture" meanwhile developers are connecting every single thing in your business to the Web. I have been doing integration and new technology projects for a long time, and let me tell you - Change does not always create happy customers in the short run. But the chart below shows that information security is maybe more concerned with not causing waves rather than adapting.

The best security program is at the business with sustainable competitive advantage.

During the presentation I mentioned in some depth how to perform fuzz testing, and what parts of an application should be fuzz testing targets. I also introduced an idea (that's not new) to help people who have never performed fuzz testing begin fuzz testing with very little cost and friction. The idea is to add a small layer of code to an application to automatically mutate untrusted data as it comes into an application; I called that code layer "a layer of hurt."

Before I continue, I want to point out that fuzzing is an SDL requirement, but the idea in this blog post is not an SDL requirement, it's just another way to help meet SDL fuzzing requirements.

Adding a layer of hurt, as shown in the picture below, is pretty simple as it involves adding code to an application to tweak data as it comes into an application. You can work out where to place the fuzzing code by looking at your threat models to see where data crosses trust boundaries. You could also simply grep the code looking for APIs that read data, for example:

• Read from files: fread, ReadFile
• Reading from sockets: recv, recvfrom
• For .NET code, any stream.Read

You get the picture.

The fuzzing code should appear right after the API that reads that data.

For example, C or C++ code that reads from a UDP socket and then fuzzes the data before it's consumed by the rest of the application might look like this:

Or, in C#, code that reads from an untrusted file:

In both code examples, Fuzz() mutates the incoming data. In the C++ case, the fuzzing code looks like this:

The sample C# and C++ fuzzing code is available as a ZIP file at the end of this post.

This code is an example of dumb-fuzzing, which is fuzzing with little or no regard for the data structure being manipulated. If you've never performed any kind of fuzz testing in the past, then you will probably find bugs with this simple fuzzing technique. Once you have weeded out the low-hanging bugs, you may need to turn your attention to smarter fuzzers. For example, in theory, this code would find few if any bugs in a PNG parser, because PNG files have a built in check-sum, so if you fuzz a PNG file, you'd have to recalculate the checksum to get decent code coverage.

When I showed this code during my presentation, I urged people to add it to their applications today if they currently don't do fuzz testing, and simply run their applications through their normal testing processes. Within three days of my presentation I received emails from people saying they had found bugs. I have no doubt others did too.

One of the comments I made during the session was,"If you can't spend the time on great fuzzing, fuzz anyway" and adding a "layer of hurt" is a reasonable start.

Please feel free to sound off if you have ideas to help improve the code and let us know what you think, either through email or comments to this post.

Not bad. I actually managed to get a good night sleep.

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And now, the news…

1. Google and Wildcard Domains | GNUCITIZEN
2. Trojan plays anti-China games for hacking | The Economic Times
3. Villains Getting Smarter: Are We, Too? | Korea Times
4. Agency Sees Theft Risk for ID Card in Medicare | NY Times
5. Universities urged to tighten computer security | The Arizona Daily Star
6. Organised e-crime targets students for recruitment | ZDNet UK
7. Time to dismount the hamster security wheel of pain | The Regsiter
8. New security awareness posters aid the battle | Cambridge Network

Tags: News, Daily Links, Security Blog, Information Security, Security News