Thursday, March 28, 2013

Plans Wrecked by Internet Drama

My plans for the day were wrecked by Internet Drama. A DDoS attack on Spamhaus made it to the New York Times. Various providers jumped into the discussion with Words of Marketing, etc. This is all fairly typical, with one proviso.

Toward the end of last year, I gave a series of brown-bag lunch talks in Portland. These people didn't have a huge budget, but they were great to work with. They paid drive time (I'm pretty busy, and not willing to write off the opportunity cost) gave me a white board, and didn't limit the discussion to the announced topic.

I got to yack, and the discussions covered a lot of ground. Here are two points, both related to that client, who will remain nameless, for what should be obvious reasons.

You keep saying complexity is the enemy of security. Why?

Because I screwed up. I didn't really say that correctly. Complex is not the same thing as complicated.  This is the third time this topic has come up. Think of this in terms of reliability engineering. If you have two components, both which are 90% reliable, what is the reliability of the composite system?

0.9 x 0.9 = .81

And we are on our way to FAIL. This isn't limited to software. Read up on the Challenger disaster, and the systemic failure of internal NASA mechanisms to provide even remotely accurate risk analysis.

What does this have to do with DNS?


One of the branches that those discussions took was about DNS, in the context of things I immediately look for when doing an audit or pen-test. I've done work for a couple of orgs that stuck a DNS server on the DMZ, and pointed everything, including internal desktops, at it.

This is not the best of all possible plans.
  • A publicly-accessible server controls your entire infrastructure.
  • You surrender the ability to mitigate a large percentage of targeted email attacks.
  • You surrender the ability to do important real-time threat analysis.
  • You enable distributed attacks against anyone.
  • You are probably a long way way from being able to roll out DNSSEC, should that be in your plans.
If you have an Internet-facing DNS server, it should only provide authoritative resolution. If it isn't your domain, don't answer queries.

It turns out that while this was covered in one of brown-bag lunches, it was never fixed. It was going to go into the Q1 budget, but that didn't happen.  Here we are at the end of Q1, and it bit them. An innocent mistake. Happens all the time.

That doesn't mean that there is no cost involved with what was essentially an unforced error. They have a capex they had forgotten about, and an opex that they had mostly paid for (my brown-bag talks) but didn't use. Now they will be paying me a bit more to set everything up, write a couple of scripts, document everything, and train it. And create a reporting system so that mangers have some assurance that there is no recurrence.

This is probably going to triple their outlay, not including hardware costs. Another loss, which is hard to evaluate, is the opportunity cost of not having their own people create the solution.

It is obviously useful to have a third party provide a sanity check of your security posture; that is much of the value of an audit. But the training value of building a competent in-house security team is large, and it costs little to capture it.

Monday, March 18, 2013

Attribution: On the Shoulders of Giants

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
--  Isaac Newton, 1676

Attribution is a vital thing. One of the more fubar things about 'security researchers' is that they do not always rigorously credit people that laid the foundation that they are building upon.

If we have attribution, we can trace the evolution of thought in all of science and mathematics. The knowledge that we would impart to others gains context. This isn't a corporate, marketing thing, or the current round of patent fights; it's more about how your children will lead better lives.  Attribution is important. because it is the scaffold upon which we build, and can trace, the most important advances the human race has ever achieved.

No, I am not writing about the development of brewing. Yes, beer is important. But I'm not going there right now. It's more important that I say something that should probably determine whether this thing is worth the time it takes you to read it.

I have a couple of rules about how I will post, the first of which is that I don't name people or clients without permission and attribution, and I don't believe in failing in either.

I have permission to admit I worked a gig at Fiserv. I negotiated that going in, as it was obviously going to be a fairly long-term thing, and I was once an employee there, doing a lot of security-related things related to Linux, HP-UX, cloud-facing servers, etc.

Where I can do proper attribution, I will. In some cases, I have permission from Fiserv. In other cases, I was on other gigs, and absolutely do not have permission to do any traceable attribution. That was also understood from the start, and anything related to that work can only be discussed in theoretical terms. I wish it were otherwise, but this is the fubar world we live in.

Bye for now. There is yard work to be done, this is the Northwest, and the weather forecast (fubar that it is) says rain for the next few days.

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Hello, and welcome to fubarnorthwest

Hello, and welcome to fubarnorthwest. If you don't get the title, that's because it's fubar; a term anyone who has any business here already understands. The northwest bit got tacked on because that's where I live, I love it, and all the cool names were already taken.

I want to talk about a lot of things, mostly related to how we should fix the huge problems in computer-related security. I don't know if this venue will meet my needs. In one sense, I know it won't: personal privacy is security personalized, and Google is dedicated to invading privacy. It's a big piece of their business model.

I am a big fan (as much as I am a fan of anything in a fubar world) of irony.

If we lay aside the marketing, and attempt to get to the truth of things, there is little in this world that isn't fubar. Not operating systems, the smartphone you favor, your best-loved camera or programming language, your software repository or your system of government.

It's all fubar to most of us, because we all have different priorities.