There is another reason why the article got my attention; my manager, Steve Lipner, is one of the few people to have designed and built a TCSEC A1 assured system and lived to tell the tale. None were sold, but they built one!

The NSA-directed project, the Tokeneer ID Station (TIS), involved building a low-defect system that conforms "to the Common Criteria requirements for Evaluation Assurance Level 5 (EAL5)" in a "cost effective manner." I'm all for this, because building high-assurance solutions is not cheap.

There's a paper with more technical detail about the project that is worth a read.

In my opinion, the project is only a science project, an experiment, for the following reasons:

• It's tiny. Weighing in at a little under 10 KLOC.
• It's only a very small portion of a much larger solution which has not been developed using the same rigor. This bit of context makes the solution as a whole moot. Call me cynical, but my question is "can the entire solution be built with same rigor in a ‘cost effective manner'?" Perhaps it can, but that is not what is presented.
• It sits on top of many operating systems (Windows, Mac OS X and Linux) that are not EAL5 certified. So it would be a little like having an EAL5 certified CharMap application running on EAL4 Windows Vista.
• It's written in a subset of Ada called SPARK, and SPARK skills are not common in the marketplace. Interestingly, SPARK makes use of annotations to help drive the static analysis process. While not a total analog, we also recommend Microsoft development teams use annotations (SAL) to help drive the required static analysis process.
• The application has a large number of dependencies that are not part of the project:

In the SDL we call these files ‘giblets' because they are components needed for your application to operate, but they do not belong to your team. Some of the files look old and highly vulnerable, such as libpng-3.dll from 2001! OSVDB lists 23 vulnerabilities since 2002 in libpng!

In summary, the TIS project is very interesting to a small number of important but specialized customers, such as the NSA, for whom this kind of research is critical. I too found it interesting, but the process is far from a set of "secrets to writing secure code" and the tools are certainly not within reach of day-to-day applications and not applicable to developing complete solutions.

Last month I was interviewed for a podcast with SearchSoftwareQuality.com.

We talked about some of the advantages Cloud Computing could bring to software development and testing.  Notice I say ‘could’ - I continue to see great potential benefits but some of these require us to rethink how we do things as ‘end-users’ and depend on the Cloud Computing ecosystem maturing enough to deliver them (e.g. security monitoring of Cloud API calls).

This was recorded prior to the Microsoft Azure announcement hence the “software + services” model wasn’t covered.

Anyway, the podcast is broken into 3 x 8 minute segments (I think I broke the spoken word count ;-):

• General benefits of cloud computing for software development
• Cloud computing’s impact on agile development practices, software testing, and e-commerce
• Security elements surrounding cloud computing, such as software monitoring, implementing security patches, and the reduction of data leakage.

You can access the podcast segments here.

My thanks to Michelle and Erick over at TechTarget for the opportunity.

What About You?

Apart from general feedback on whether the podcast was helpful or not, I’m interested to hear if you’ve started any Cloud based development projects - please share in the comments.

1. “A Gartnergate?” What happened after Mr Pescatore uttered his now famous 12 words: “The best security program is at the business with the happiest customers.” This (complete with Gunnar’s famous “firewalls+SSL” chart), this – will add more as this snowballs.
2. Do you have an “ignorable” security policy? If yours is BOTH “ignorable” and “unfair”, then fuggedaboutit. Cisco survey kinda proves it. A few fun comments are here (“If people can't get their jobs done without having to find a way to circumvent policy then the policy is wrong.”)
3. Risk and clouds – here, here, here and here in poetic form (!). Fun reading, but you know what? For many, many organization, what they have today is LESS secure than any future cloud computing advance…
4. Richard Bejtlich drop-kicks SIEM too, then kicks it in the balls. Then kicks the dead horse (1,2,3)
5. Excellent reminder about why people don’t care about security with a fabled quote from MJR (yes, it is my fave too!) Overall, Rich “reassures” with: “Don’t worry. When things get bad enough, we’ll get the call. If you’ve kept your documentation and communications up, you won’t get shafted with the proverbial short end.”
6. A few essays on risk, from ANSI, from Schneier and from BlogInfoSec (part 1 and part 2, especially read part 2)
7. So, what do CTOs really do every day? Interesting summary here and here.
8. Fun exploration of security x privacy x compliance.
9. Burton Group opines on which security technologies will fare better/worse during "The crisis”
10. A really fun interview with our CEO Philippe Courtot here.
11. More on IT vs IT security, this time from Richard.
12. Do you want people like that doing “security”? A normal call center employee recognizes fraud, but their so-called “outsource security dept” authorizes the scam. Niiice.
13. Finally, “Robots Hunt 'Non-Cooperative Humans' in Army Plan” No comment :-)

Enjoy!

[Q] I have been collecting accounts of your meeting with David Petraeus in Baghdad. And you had [inaudible] after he had made a really strong pitch [inaudible] for maximum flexibility. A lot of politicians at that moment would have said [inaudible] but from what I hear, you pushed back.

[BO] I did. I remember the conversation, pretty precisely. He made the case for maximum flexibility and I said you know what if I were in your shoes I would be making the exact same argument because your job right now is to succeed in Iraq on as favorable terms as we can get. My job as a potential commander in chief is to view your counsel and your interests through the prism of our overall national security which includes what is happening in Afghanistan, which includes the costs to our image in the middle east, to the continued occupation, which includes the financial costs of our occupation, which includes what it is doing to our military. So I said look, I described in my mind at list an analogous situation where I am sure he has to deal with situations where the commanding officer in [inaudible] says I need more troops here now because I really think I can make progress doing x y and z. That commanding officer is doing his job in Ramadi, but Petraeus's job is to step back and see how does it impact Iraq as a whole. My argument was I have got to do the same thing here. And based on my strong assessment particularly having just come from Afghanistan were going to have to make a different decision. But the point is that hopefully I communicated to the press my complete respect and gratitude to him and Proder who was in the meeting for their outstanding work. Our differences don't necessarily derive from differences in sort of, or my differences with him don't derive from tactical objections to his approach. But rather from a strategic framework that is trying to take into account the challenges to our national security and the fact that we've got finite resources.

I have made this general point again and again -- about airline security, about terrorism, about a lot of things -- that the person in charge of the security system can't be the person who decides what resources to devote to that security system. The analogy I like to use is a company: the VP of marketing wants all the money for marketing, the VP of engineering wants all the money for engineering, and so on; and the CEO has to balance all of those needs and do what's right for the company. So of course the TSA wants to spend all this money on new airplane security systems; that's their job. Someone above the TSA has to balance the risks to airlines with the other risks our country faces and allocate budget accordingly. Security is a trade-off, and that trade-off has to be made by someone with responsibility over all aspects of that trade-off.

I don't think I've ever heard a politician make this point so explicitly.

He is urging young entrepreneurs and engineers to stop making some of  the sillier software that lets Facebook users throw virtual sheep at  their friends or download virtual beer on iPhones, and instead start  making a real difference in the world.

He says it's not just the right thing to do, but also the smart thing  to do -- especially as the credit crunch spreads to Silicon Valley,  venture financing becomes scarce and start-ups have to retrench.

When this grizzled, 54-year-old tech-industry veteran talks, Silicon  Valley tends to listen, if only to argue with him.

He is urging young entrepreneurs and engineers to stop making some of  
the sillier software that lets Facebook users throw virtual sheep at  
their friends or download virtual beer on iPhones, and instead start  
making a real difference in the world.

He says it's not just the right thing to do, but also the smart thing  
to do -- especially as the credit crunch spreads to Silicon Valley,  
venture financing becomes scarce and start-ups have to retrench.

When this grizzled, 54-year-old tech-industry veteran talks, Silicon  
Valley tends to listen, if only to argue with him.