And by “we” I mean humanity, at least the part of humanity that uses computers to create, store and share information. This is my main take from this year’s kiwicon 8. And this is the story of how I got there.
Disclaimer: I’m just gonna assume that presenters knew what they were talking about and use what they said shamelessly, and then give details in the further blog posts (or for now you can probably look at the posts of other attendees).
According to Rich Smith, Computer Security appears where Technology intersects with People. Makes sense. So lets look at the technology and at people separately.
1. Technology.
Just at this two-days conference vulnerabilities have been demonstrated in the very software that we rely on in keeping us safe: turns out well established Cisco firewall and most of the anti viruses are pretty easy to hack (for people who do that professionally). That’s like a wall with many holes. You get relaxed because wow wall, and next thing you know is all your sheep are stolen.
Firewalls and anti viruses are software, but the problem runs deeper. Protocols and languages! Internet has not been designed for security, and looks like all the crutches we built for it since don’t help as much as you would hope. JavaScript with its modern capabilities is always a ticking bomb in your living room, and now there is also WebRTC that was designed for peer-to-peer browser communications, and that helps tools like BeEF hide themselves. BeEF is stealth as it is, so maybe it doesn’t make an awful lot of difference, but you can see the potential: where earlier BeEF server would control a bunch of browsers directly, now it can also make browsers control other browsers. Thank you, WebRTC. You would think that technologies arising these days would try to be secure by design, but oh well…
Wanna go even deeper? Ian “MCP” Latter presented proof of concept for new protocol that allows to transfer information through screen and through programmable keyboard. He also demonstrated how exploitation framework built on top of these protocols allows perpetrator to steal information bypassing all the secure infrastructure around the target. The idea is you are not passing files, you are showing temporary pictures on the monitor screen, you capture this stream of pictures, and you decipher information from those pictures. Sounds like something out of “Chuck”, yet this is a very real technology. As its creator said, “By the nature of the component protocols, TCXf remains undetected and unmitigated by existing enterprise security architectures.”
Then there are also internet-spread vulnerabilities that got known in the last year, that for me as a bystander sound mostly like: a lot of people build their products on top of some third-party libraries. When those libraries get compromised, half of the internet is compromised. And they do get compromised.
Then there is also the encryption problem, where random numbers aren’t really as random as people using them think. But compared to all above it sounds like the least of our problems.
Okay, so technology isn’t as secure as we want, what about people?
2. People
People are the weakest link. Forget technology, even if we were to make it perfect, people would still get security compromised. And according to many speakers on the kiwicon, so far security area sucks in dealing with people. There is wide-spread default blame culture: when someone falls a victim to social engineering, they are getting blamed and fired. That is hardly how people learn, but that is exactly how you create atmosphere in which no one would go to security team when in doubt because of the fear of getting fired. Moreover, we don’t test people. We don’t measure their “security”, and we don’t know how to train them so that training would stick - because we don’t know what works, and what doesn’t.
So, we have problems with technology and with people. What else is bad?
There are plenty of potential attackers out there. Governments, enforcement agencies, corporations, individuals with various goals from getting money to getting information to personal revenge… they have motivation, they have skills and tools, and it is so much cheaper to attack than it is to defend (so called “Asymmetric defence”).
To make it even easier for attackers, targets don’t talk to each other. They don’t share information when they were attacked, to report such a thing is seen as to compromise yourself. And even when information is willingly shared, we don’t have good mechanisms to do that, so we do it the slowest way: manually. It might be easy enough in simple cases, but as @hypatia and @hashoctothorpe said, complex systems often mean complex problems, which would make them hard to describe and to share.
So, we suck in security. This is quite depressing. To make it a bit less depressing, lets talk about solutions that were also presented on the kiwicon (in some cases).
Most solutions were for the “People” part of the problem. Not one but three speakers talked about that.
The short answer is (in words of Etsy’s Rich Smith): ComSec should be Enabling, Transparent and Blameless.
The slightly longer answer is:
- Build culture that encourages people to seek assistance from the Security specialists and to report breaches (don’t blame people, don’t try to fix people - fix the system).
- Share information between departments and between organizations.
- Proactive reach: for security team to reach to development and help them develop secure products.
- Build trust.
- Recognise that complex system will have complex problems.
- Do realistic drills and training, measure the impact of training and adjust it.
People are reward driven and trustful by default. What makes it a problem is that people are thus highly susceptible to social engineering methods which are many. This can’t be fixed (do we even want it fixed?), but at least we can make it super easy to ask professionals for help without feeling threatened.
Okay, so situation in the People area can be improved (significantly if everyone were to follow Etsy’s culture guidelines) - at least for some organizations. What about the Technology area? Well… this is what I found in the presentations:
- Use good random numbers.
- Compartmentalize (don’t keep all eggs in one basket, don’t use flat networks, don’t give one user permissions to all servers, etc.).
- Make it as expensive as possible for attackers to hack you: anti-kaizen for attackers, put bumps and huge rolling stones in their way, make it not worth the effort.
- Know what you are doing (e.g. don’t just use third-party libraries for your product without verifying how secure they are).
- …?
This is depressing, okay. In fact, I’m gonna stop here and let you feel how depressing it is. And then in the next posts I’ll write about more cheerful things. Kiwicon was really a lot of fun and epicness (I was in a room full of my childhood heroes, yeeey!). And there was a DeLorean. Doesn’t get much more fun than that. :-D
