Entries Tagged "computer security"

Page 17 of 33

Secure Version of Windows Created for the U.S. Air Force

I have long argued that the government should use its massive purchasing power to pressure software vendors to improve security. Seems like the U.S. Air Force has done just that:

The Air Force, on the verge of renegotiating its desktop-software contract with Microsoft, met with Ballmer and asked the company to deliver a secure configuration of Windows XP out of the box. That way, Air Force administrators wouldn’t have to spend time re-configuring, and the department would have uniform software across the board, making it easier to control and maintain patches.

Surprisingly, Microsoft quickly agreed to the plan, and Ballmer got personally involved in the project.

“He has half-a-dozen clients that he personally gets involved with, and he saw that this just made a lot of sense,” Gilligan said. “They had already done preliminary work themselves trying to identify what would be a more secure configuration. So we fine-tuned and added to that.”

The NSA got together with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Defense Information Systems Agency and the Center for Internet Security to decide what to lock down in the Air Force special edition.

Many of the changes were complex and technical, but Gilligan says one of the most important and simplest was an obvious fix to how Windows XP handled passwords. The Air Force insisted the system be configured so administrative passwords were unique, and different from general user passwords, preventing an average user from obtaining administrative privileges. Specifications were added to increase the length and complexity of passwords and expire them every 60 days.

It then took two years for the Air Force to catalog and test all the software applications on its networks against the new configuration to uncover conflicts. In some cases, where internally designed software interacted with Windows XP in an insecure way, they had to change the in-house software.

Now I want Microsoft to offer this configuration to everyone.

EDITED TO ADD (5/6): Microsoft responds:

Thanks for covering this topic, but unfortunately the reporter for the original article got a lot of the major facts, which you relied upon, wrong. For instance, there isn’t a special version of Windows for the Air Force. They use the same SKUs as everyone else. We didn’t deliver a special settings that only the Air Force can access. The Air Force asked us to help them to create a hardened gpos and images, which the AF could use as the standard image. We agreed to assist, as we do with any company that hires us to assist in setting their own security policy as implemented in Windows.

The work from the AF ended up morphing into the Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC) recommendations maintained by NIST. There are differences, but they are essentially the same thing. NIST initially used even more secure settings in the hardening process (many of which have since been relaxed because of operational issues, and is now even closer to what the AF created).

Anyone can download the FDCC settings, documentation, and even complete images. I worked on the FDCC project for little over a year, and Aaron Margosis has been involved for many years, and continues to be involved. He offers all sorts of public knowledge and useful tools. Here, Aaron has written a couple of tools that anyone can use to apply FDCC settings to local group policy. It includes the source code, if anyone wants to customize them.

In the initial article, a lot of the other improvements, such as patching, came from the use of better tools (SCCM, etc.), and were not necessarily solely due to the changes in the base image (although that certainly didn’t hurt). So, it seems the author mixed up some of the different technology pushes and wrapped them up into a single story. He also seem to imply that this is something special and secret, but the truth is there is more openness with the FDCC program and the surrounding security outcomes than anything we’ve ever done before. Even better, there are huge agencies that have already gone first in trying to use these harden settings, and essentially been beta testers for the rest of the world. The FDCC settings may not be the best fit for every company, but it is a good model to compare against.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Roger A. Grimes, Security Architect, ACE Team, Microsoft

EDITED TO ADD (5/12): FDCC policy specs.

Posted on May 6, 2009 at 6:43 AM • View Comments

Who Should be in Charge of U.S. Cybersecurity?

U.S. government cybersecurity is an insecure mess, and fixing it is going to take considerable attention and resources. Trying to make sense of this, President Barack Obama ordered a 60-day review of government cybersecurity initiatives. Meanwhile, the U.S. House Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, Science and Technology is holding hearings on the same topic.

One of the areas of contention is who should be in charge. The FBI, DHS and DoD—specifically, the NSA—all have interests here. Earlier this month, Rod Beckström resigned from his position as director of the DHS’s National Cybersecurity Center, warning of a power grab by the NSA.

Putting national cybersecurity in the hands of the NSA is an incredibly bad idea. An entire parade of people, ranging from former FBI director Louis Freeh to Microsoft’s Trusted Computing Group Vice President and former Justice Department computer crime chief Scott Charney, have told Congress the same thing at this month’s hearings.

Cybersecurity isn’t a military problem, or even a government problem—it’s a universal problem. All networks, military, government, civilian and commercial, use the same computers, the same networking hardware, the same Internet protocols and the same software packages. We all are the targets of the same attack tools and tactics. It’s not even that government targets are somehow more important; these days, most of our nation’s critical IT infrastructure is in commercial hands. Government-sponsored Chinese hackers go after both military and civilian targets.

Some have said that the NSA should be in charge because it has specialized knowledge. Earlier this month, Director of National Intelligence Admiral Dennis Blair made this point, saying “There are some wizards out there at Ft. Meade who can do stuff.” That’s probably not true, but if it is, we’d better get them out of Ft. Meade as soon as possible—they’re doing the nation little good where they are now.

Not that government cybersecurity failings require any specialized wizardry to fix. GAO reports indicate that government problems include insufficient access controls, a lack of encryption where necessary, poor network management, failure to install patches, inadequate audit procedures, and incomplete or ineffective information security programs. These aren’t super-secret NSA-level security issues; these are the same managerial problems that every corporate CIO wrestles with.

We’ve all got the same problems, so solutions must be shared. If the government has any clever ideas to solve its cybersecurity problems, certainly a lot of us could benefit from those solutions. If it has an idea for improving network security, it should tell everyone. The best thing the government can do for cybersecurity world-wide is to use its buying power to improve the security of the IT products everyone uses. If it imposes significant security requirements on its IT vendors, those vendors will modify their products to meet those requirements. And those same products, now with improved security, will become available to all of us as the new standard.

Moreover, the NSA’s dual mission of providing security and conducting surveillance means it has an inherent conflict of interest in cybersecurity. Inside the NSA, this is called the “equities issue.” During the Cold War, it was easy; the NSA used its expertise to protect American military information and communications, and eavesdropped on Soviet information and communications. But what happens when both the good guys the NSA wants to protect, and the bad guys the NSA wants to eavesdrop on, use the same systems? They all use Microsoft Windows, Oracle databases, Internet email, and Skype. When the NSA finds a vulnerability in one of those systems, does it alert the manufacturer and fix it—making both the good guys and the bad guys more secure? Or does it keep quiet about the vulnerability and not tell anyone—making it easier to spy on the bad guys but also keeping the good guys insecure? Programs like the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program have created additional vulnerabilities in our domestic telephone networks.

Testifying before Congress earlier this month, former DHS National Cyber Security division head Amit Yoran said “the intelligence community has always and will always prioritize its own collection efforts over the defensive and protection mission of our government’s and nation’s digital systems.”

Maybe the NSA could convince us that it’s putting cybersecurity first, but its culture of secrecy will mean that any decisions it makes will be suspect. Under current law, extended by the Bush administration’s extravagant invocation of the “state secrets” privilege when charged with statutory and constitutional violations, the NSA’s activities are not subject to any meaningful public oversight. And the NSA’s tradition of military secrecy makes it harder for it to coordinate with other government IT departments, most of which don’t have clearances, let alone coordinate with local law enforcement or the commercial sector.

We need transparent and accountable government processes, using commercial security products. We need government cybersecurity programs that improve security for everyone. The NSA certainly has an advisory and a coordination role in national cybersecurity, and perhaps a more supervisory role in DoD cybersecurity—both offensive and defensive—but it should not be in charge.

A version of this essay appeared on The Wall Street Journal website.

Posted on April 2, 2009 at 6:09 AM • View Comments

Massive Chinese Espionage Network

The story broke in The New York Times yesterday:

In a report to be issued this weekend, the researchers said that the system was being controlled from computers based almost exclusively in China, but that they could not say conclusively that the Chinese government was involved.

[…]

Their sleuthing opened a window into a broader operation that, in less than two years, has infiltrated at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries, including many belonging to embassies, foreign ministries and other government offices, as well as the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan exile centers in India, Brussels, London and New York.

The researchers, who have a record of detecting computer espionage, said they believed that in addition to the spying on the Dalai Lama, the system, which they called GhostNet, was focused on the governments of South Asian and Southeast Asian countries.

The Chinese government denies involvement. It’s probably true; these networks tend to be run by amateur hackers with the tacit approval of the government, not the government itself. I wrote this on the topic last year.

It’s only circumstantial evidence that the hackers are Chinese:

In a report to be issued this weekend, the researchers said that the system was being controlled from computers based almost exclusively in China, but that they could not say conclusively that the Chinese government was involved.

And here’s the report, from the University of Toronto.

Good commentary by James Fallows:

My guess is that the “convenient instruments” hypothesis will eventually prove to be true (versus the “centrally controlled plot” scenario), if the “truth” of the case is ever fully determined. For reasons the Toronto report lays out, the episode looks more like the effort of groups of clever young hackers than a concentrated project of the People Liberation Army cyberwar division. But no one knows for certain, and further information about the case is definitely worth following.

An excellent article on Wired.com, and another on ArsTechnica.

There’s another paper, released at the same time on the same topic, from Cambridge University. It makes more pointed claims about the attackers and their origins, claims I’m not sure can be supported from the evidence.

In this note we described how agents of the Chinese government compromised the computing infrastructure of the Office of His His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

EDITED TO ADD (3/30): More information on the tools the hackers used.

EDITED TO ADD (3/30): An interview with the University of Toronto researchers.

EDITED TO ADD (4/1): The Chinese government denies involvement.

EDITD TO ADD (4/1): My essay from last year on Chinese hacking.

Posted on March 30, 2009 at 12:43 PM • View Comments

IT Security: Blaming the Victim

Blaming the victim is common in IT: users are to blame because they don’t patch their systems, choose lousy passwords, fall for phishing attacks, and so on. But, while users are, and will continue to be, a major source of security problems, focusing on them is an unhelpful way to think.

People regularly don’t do things they are supposed to: changing the oil in their cars, going to the dentist, replacing the batteries in their smoke detectors. Why? Because people learn from experience. If something is immediately harmful, e.g., touching a hot stove or petting a live tiger, they quickly learn not to do it. But if someone skips an oil change, ignores a computer patch, or chooses a lousy password, it’s unlikely to matter. No feedback, no learning.

We’ve tried to solve this in several ways. We give people rules of thumb: oil change every 5,000 miles; secure password guidelines. Or we send notifications: smoke alarms beep at us, dentists send postcards, Google warns us if we are about to visit a website suspected of hosting malware. But, again, the effects of ignoring these aren’t generally felt immediately.

This makes security primarily a hindrance to the user. It’s a recurring obstacle: something that interferes with the seamless performance of the user’s task. And it’s human nature, wired into our reasoning skills, to remove recurring obstacles. So, if the consequences of bypassing security aren’t obvious, then people will naturally do it.

This is the problem with Microsoft‘s User Account Control (UAC). Introduced in Vista, the idea is to improve security by limiting the privileges applications have when they’re running. But the security prompts pop up too frequently, and there’s rarely any ill-effect from ignoring them. So people do ignore them.

This doesn’t mean user education is worthless. On the contrary, user education is an important part of any corporate security program. And at home, the more users understand security threats and hacker tactics, the more secure their systems are likely to be. But we should also recognise the limitations of education.

The solution is to better design security systems that assume uneducated users: to prevent them from changing security settings that would leave them exposed to undue risk, or—even better—to take security out of their hands entirely.

For example, we all know that backups are a good thing. But if you forget to do a backup this week, nothing terrible happens. In fact, nothing terrible happens for years on end when you forget. So, despite what you know, you start believing that backups aren’t really that important. Apple got the solution right with its backup utility Time Machine. Install it, plug in an external hard drive, and you are automatically backed up against hardware failure and human error. It’s easier to use it than not.

For its part, Microsoft has made great strides in securing its operating system, providing default security settings in Windows XP and even more in Windows Vista to ensure that, when a naive user plugs a computer in, it’s not defenceless.

Unfortunately, blaming the user can be good business. Mobile phone companies save money if they can bill their customers when a calling card number is stolen and used fraudulently. British banks save money by blaming users when they are victims of chip-and-pin fraud. This is continuing, with some banks going so far as to accuse the victim of perpetrating the fraud, despite evidence of large-scale fraud by organised crime syndicates.

The legal system needs to fix the business problems, but system designers need to work on the technical problems. They must accept that security systems that require the user to do the right thing are doomed to fail. And then they must design resilient security nevertheless.

This essay originally appeared in The Guardian.

Posted on March 12, 2009 at 12:39 PM • View Comments

Melissa Hathaway Interview

President Obama has tasked Melissa Hathaway with conducting a 60-day review of the nation’s cybersecurity policies.

Who is she?

Hathaway has been working as a cybercoordination executive for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. She chaired a multiagency group called the National Cyber Study Group that was instrumental in developing the Comprehensive National Cyber Security Initiative, which was approved by former President George W. Bush early last year. Since then, she has been in charge of coordinating and monitoring the CNCI’s implementation.

Although, honestly, the best thing to read to get an idea of how she thinks is this interview from IEEE Security & Privacy:

In the technology field, concern to be first to market often does trump the need for security to be built in up front. Most of the nation’s infrastructure is owned, operated, and developed by the commercial sector. We depend on this sector to address the nation’s broader needs, so we’ll need a new information-sharing environment. Private-sector risk models aren’t congruent with the needs for national security. We need to think about a way to do business that meets both sets of needs. The proposed revisions to Federal Information Security Management Act [FISMA] legislation will raise awareness of vulnerabilities within broader-based commercial systems.

Increasingly, we see industry jointly addressing these vulnerabilities, such as with the Industry Consortium for Advancement of Security on the Internet to share common vulnerabilities and response mechanisms. In addition, there’s the Software Assurance Forum for Excellence in Code, an alliance of vendors who seek to improve software security. Industry is beginning to understand that [it has a] shared risk and shared responsibilities and sees the advantage of coordinating and collaborating up front during the development stage, so that we can start to address vulnerabilities from day one. We also need to look for niche partnerships to enhance product development and build trust into components. We need to understand when and how we introduce risk into the system and ask ourselves whether that risk is something we can live with.

The government is using its purchasing power to influence the market toward better security. We’re already seeing results with the Federal Desktop Core Configuration [FDCC] initiative, a mandated security configuration for federal computers set by the OMB. The Department of Commerce is working with several IT vendors on standardizing security settings for a wide variety of IT products and environments. Because a broad population of the government is using Windows XP and Vista, the FDCC imitative worked with Microsoft and others to determine security needs up front.

Posted on February 24, 2009 at 12:36 PM • View Comments

Monster.com Data Breach

Monster.com was hacked, and people’s personal data was stolen. Normally I wouldn’t bother even writing about this—it happens all the time—but an AP reporter called me yesterday to comment. I said:

Monster’s latest breach “shouldn’t have happened,” said Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer for BT Group. “But you can’t understand a company’s network security by looking at public events—that’s a bad metric. All the public events tell you are, these are attacks that were successful enough to steal data, but were unsuccessful in covering their tracks.”

Thinking about it, it’s even more complex than that. To assess an organization’s network security, you need to actually analyze it. You can’t get a lot of information from the list of attacks that were successful enough to steal data but not successful enough to cover their tracks, and which the company’s attorneys couldn’t figure out a reason not to disclose to the public.

Posted on February 9, 2009 at 6:47 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.