Effects of the 2011 DigiNotar Attack
Nice article on the 2011 DigiNotar attack and how it changed security practices in the CA industry.
Entries Tagged "security standards"
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How Different Stakeholders Frame Security
Josephine Wolff examines different Internet governance stakeholders and how they frame security debates.
Her conclusion:
The tensions that arise around issues of security among different groups of internet governance stakeholders speak to the many tangled notions of what online security is and whom it is meant to protect that are espoused by the participants in multistakeholder governance forums. What makes these debates significant and unique in the context of internet governance is not that the different stakeholders often disagree (indeed, that is a common occurrence), but rather that they disagree while all using the same vocabulary of security to support their respective stances. Government stakeholders advocate for limitations on WHOIS privacy/proxy services in order to aid law enforcement and protect their citizens from crime and fraud. Civil society stakeholders advocate against those limitations in order to aid activists and minorities and protect those online users from harassment. Both sides would claim that their position promotes a more secure internet and a more secure society—and in a sense, both would be right, except that each promotes a differently secure internet and society, protecting different classes of people and behaviour from different threats.
While vague notions of security may be sufficiently universally accepted as to appear in official documents and treaties, the specific details of individual decisions—such as the implementation of dotless domains, changes to the WHOIS database privacy policy, and proposals to grant government greater authority over how their internet traffic is routed—require stakeholders to disentangle the many different ideas embedded in that language. For the idea of security to truly foster cooperation and collaboration as a boundary object in internet governance circles, the participating stakeholders will have to more concretely agree on what their vision of a secure internet is and how it will balance the different ideas of security espoused by different groups. Alternatively, internet governance stakeholders may find it more useful to limit their discussions on security, as a whole, and try to force their discussions to focus on more specific threats and issues within that space as a means of preventing themselves from succumbing to a façade of agreement without grappling with the sources of disagreement that linger just below the surface.
The intersection of multistakeholder internet governance and definitional issues of security is striking because of the way that the multistakeholder model both reinforces and takes advantage of the ambiguity surrounding the idea of security explored in the security studies literature. That ambiguity is a crucial component of maintaining a functional multistakeholder model of governance because it lends itself well to high-level agreements and discussions, contributing to the sense of consensus building across stakeholders. At the same time, gathering those different stakeholders together to decide specific issues related to the internet and its infrastructure brings to a fore the vast variety of definitions of security they employ and forces them to engage in security-versus-security fights, with each trying to promote their own particular notion of security. Security has long been a contested concept, but rarely do these contestations play out as directly and dramatically as in the multistakeholder arena of internet governance, where all parties are able to face off on what really constitutes security in a digital world.
We certainly saw this in the “going dark” debate: e.g. the FBI vs. Apple and their iPhone security.
The Cost of Cyberattacks Is Less than You Might Think
Interesting research from Sasha Romanosky at RAND:
Abstract: In 2013, the US President signed an executive order designed to help secure the nation’s critical infrastructure from cyberattacks. As part of that order, he directed the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop a framework that would become an authoritative source for information security best practices. Because adoption of the framework is voluntary, it faces the challenge of incentivizing firms to follow along. Will frameworks such as that proposed by NIST really induce firms to adopt better security controls? And if not, why? This research seeks to examine the composition and costs of cyber events, and attempts to address whether or not there exist incentives for firms to improve their security practices and reduce the risk of attack. Specifically, we examine a sample of over 12 000 cyber events that include data breaches, security incidents, privacy violations, and phishing crimes. First, we analyze the characteristics of these breaches (such as causes and types of information compromised). We then examine the breach and litigation rate, by industry, and identify the industries that incur the greatest costs from cyber events. We then compare these costs to bad debts and fraud within other industries. The findings suggest that public concerns regarding the increasing rates of breaches and legal actions may be excessive compared to the relatively modest financial impact to firms that suffer these events. Public concerns regarding the increasing rates of breaches and legal actions, conflict, however, with our findings that show a much smaller financial impact to firms that suffer these events. Specifically, we find that the cost of a typical cyber incident in our sample is less than $200 000 (about the same as the firm’s annual IT security budget), and that this represents only 0.4% of their estimated annual revenues.
The result is that it often makes business sense to underspend on cybersecurity and just pay the costs of breaches:
Romanosky analyzed 12,000 incident reports and found that typically they only account for 0.4 per cent of a company’s annual revenues. That compares to billing fraud, which averages at 5 per cent, or retail shrinkage (ie, shoplifting and insider theft), which accounts for 1.3 per cent of revenues.
As for reputational damage, Romanosky found that it was almost impossible to quantify. He spoke to many executives and none of them could give a reliable metric for how to measure the PR cost of a public failure of IT security systems.
He also noted that the effects of a data incident typically don’t have many ramifications on the stock price of a company in the long term. Under the circumstances, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to invest too much in cyber security.
What’s being left out of these costs are the externalities. Yes, the costs to a company of a cyberattack are low to them, but there are often substantial additional costs borne by other people. The way to look at this is not to conclude that cybersecurity isn’t really a problem, but instead that there is a significant market failure that governments need to address.
Security of the SHA Family of Hash Functions
Good article on the insecurity of SHA-1 and the need to replace it sooner rather than later.
How NIST Develops Cryptographic Standards
This document gives a good overview of how NIST develops cryptographic standards and guidelines. It’s still in draft, and comments are appreciated.
Given that NIST has been tainted by the NSA’s actions to subvert cryptographic standards and protocols, more transparency in this process is appreciated. I think NIST is doing a fine job and that it’s not shilling for the NSA, but it needs to do more to convince the world of that.
Will Keccak = SHA-3?
Last year, NIST selected Keccak as the winner of the SHA-3 hash function competition. Yes, I would have rather my own Skein had won, but it was a good choice.
But last August, John Kelsey announced some changes to Keccak in a talk (slides 44-48 are relevant). Basically, the security levels were reduced and some internal changes to the algorithm were made, all in the name of software performance.
Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal. But in light of the Snowden documents that reveal that the NSA has attempted to intentionally weaken cryptographic standards, this is a huge deal. There is too much mistrust in the air. NIST risks publishing an algorithm that no one will trust and no one (except those forced) will use.
At this point, they simply have to standardize on Keccak as submitted and as selected.
CDT has a great post about this.
Also this Slashdot thread.
EDITED TO ADD (10/5): It’s worth reading the response from the Keccak team on this issue.
I misspoke when I wrote that NIST made “internal changes” to the algorithm. That was sloppy of me. The Keccak permutation remains unchanged. What NIST proposed was reducing the hash function’s capacity in the name of performance. One of Keccak’s nice features is that it’s highly tunable.
I do not believe that the NIST changes were suggested by the NSA. Nor do I believe that the changes make the algorithm easier to break by the NSA. I believe NIST made the changes in good faith, and the result is a better security/performance trade-off. My problem with the changes isn’t cryptographic, it’s perceptual. There is so little trust in the NSA right now, and that mistrust is reflecting on NIST. I worry that the changed algorithm won’t be accepted by an understandably skeptical security community, and that no one will use SHA-3 as a result.
This is a lousy outcome. NIST has done a great job with cryptographic competitions: both a decade ago with AES and now with SHA-3. This is just another effect of the NSA’s actions draining the trust out of the Internet.
Good Summary of Potential NSA Involvement in a NIST RNG Standard
Kim Zetter has written the definitive story—at least so far—of the possible backdoor in the Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator that’s part of the NIST SP800-90 standard.
Ed Felten on the NSA Disclosures
Ed Felten has an excellent essay on the damage caused by the NSA secretly breaking the security of Internet systems:
In security, the worst case—the thing you most want to avoid—is thinking you are secure when you’re not. And that’s exactly what the NSA seems to be trying to perpetuate.
Suppose you’re driving a car that has no brakes. If you know you have no brakes, then you can drive very slowly, or just get out and walk. What is deadly is thinking you have the ability to stop, until you stomp on the brake pedal and nothing happens. It’s the same way with security: if you know your communications aren’t secure, you can be careful about what you say; but if you think mistakenly that you’re safe, you’re sure to get in trouble.
So the problem is not (only) that we’re unsafe. It’s that “the N.S.A. wants to keep it that way.” The NSA wants to make sure we remain vulnerable.
PCI Lawsuit
This is a first:
…the McCombs allege that the bank, and the payment card industry (PCI) in general, force merchants to sign one-sided contracts that are based on information that arbitrarily changes without notice, and that they impose random fines on merchants without providing proof of a breach or of fraudulent losses and without allowing merchants a meaningful opportunity to dispute claims before money is seized.
It’s the first known case to challenge the heart of the self-regulated PCI security standards a system that requires businesses accepting credit and debit card payments to implement a series of technological steps to secure data. The controversial system, imposed on merchants by credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard, has been called a “near scam” by a spokesman for the National Retail Federation and others who say it’s designed less to secure card data than to profit credit card companies while giving them executive powers of punishment through a mandated compliance system that has no oversight.
The PCI standards are probably the biggest non-government security standard. It’ll be interesting to see how this turns out.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.