Entries Tagged "US-CERT"
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Back Door in Battery Charger
The United States Computer Emergency Response Team (US-CERT) has warned that the software included in the Energizer DUO USB battery charger contains a backdoor that allows unauthorized remote system access.
That’s actually misleading. Even though the charger is an USB device, it does not contain the harmful installer described in the article—it has no storage capacity. The software has to be downloaded from the Energizer website, and the software is only used to monitor the progress of the charge. The software is not needed for the device to function properly.
Here are details.
Energizer has announced it will pull the software from its website, and also will stop selling the device.
EDITED TO ADD (3/23): Additional news here.
Security ROI
Return on investment, or ROI, is a big deal in business. Any business venture needs to demonstrate a positive return on investment, and a good one at that, in order to be viable.
It’s become a big deal in IT security, too. Many corporate customers are demanding ROI models to demonstrate that a particular security investment pays off. And in response, vendors are providing ROI models that demonstrate how their particular security solution provides the best return on investment.
It’s a good idea in theory, but it’s mostly bunk in practice.
Before I get into the details, there’s one point I have to make. “ROI” as used in a security context is inaccurate. Security is not an investment that provides a return, like a new factory or a financial instrument. It’s an expense that, hopefully, pays for itself in cost savings. Security is about loss prevention, not about earnings. The term just doesn’t make sense in this context.
But as anyone who has lived through a company’s vicious end-of-year budget-slashing exercises knows, when you’re trying to make your numbers, cutting costs is the same as increasing revenues. So while security can’t produce ROI, loss prevention most certainly affects a company’s bottom line.
And a company should implement only security countermeasures that affect its bottom line positively. It shouldn’t spend more on a security problem than the problem is worth. Conversely, it shouldn’t ignore problems that are costing it money when there are cheaper mitigation alternatives. A smart company needs to approach security as it would any other business decision: costs versus benefits.
The classic methodology is called annualized loss expectancy (ALE), and it’s straightforward. Calculate the cost of a security incident in both tangibles like time and money, and intangibles like reputation and competitive advantage. Multiply that by the chance the incident will occur in a year. That tells you how much you should spend to mitigate the risk. So, for example, if your store has a 10 percent chance of getting robbed and the cost of being robbed is $10,000, then you should spend $1,000 a year on security. Spend more than that, and you’re wasting money. Spend less than that, and you’re also wasting money.
Of course, that $1,000 has to reduce the chance of being robbed to zero in order to be cost-effective. If a security measure cuts the chance of robbery by 40 percent—to 6 percent a year—then you should spend no more than $400 on it. If another security measure reduces it by 80 percent, it’s worth $800. And if two security measures both reduce the chance of being robbed by 50 percent and one costs $300 and the other $700, the first one is worth it and the second isn’t.
The Data Imperative
The key to making this work is good data; the term of art is “actuarial tail.” If you’re doing an ALE analysis of a security camera at a convenience store, you need to know the crime rate in the store’s neighborhood and maybe have some idea of how much cameras improve the odds of convincing criminals to rob another store instead. You need to know how much a robbery costs: in merchandise, in time and annoyance, in lost sales due to spooked patrons, in employee morale. You need to know how much not having the cameras costs in terms of employee morale; maybe you’re having trouble hiring salespeople to work the night shift. With all that data, you can figure out if the cost of the camera is cheaper than the loss of revenue if you close the store at night—assuming that the closed store won’t get robbed as well. And then you can decide whether to install one.
Cybersecurity is considerably harder, because there just isn’t enough good data. There aren’t good crime rates for cyberspace, and we have a lot less data about how individual security countermeasures—or specific configurations of countermeasures—mitigate those risks. We don’t even have data on incident costs.
One problem is that the threat moves too quickly. The characteristics of the things we’re trying to prevent change so quickly that we can’t accumulate data fast enough. By the time we get some data, there’s a new threat model for which we don’t have enough data. So we can’t create ALE models.
But there’s another problem, and it’s that the math quickly falls apart when it comes to rare and expensive events. Imagine you calculate the cost—reputational costs, loss of customers, etc.—of having your company’s name in the newspaper after an embarrassing cybersecurity event to be $20 million. Also assume that the odds are 1 in 10,000 of that happening in any one year. ALE says you should spend no more than $2,000 mitigating that risk.
So far, so good. But maybe your CFO thinks an incident would cost only $10 million. You can’t argue, since we’re just estimating. But he just cut your security budget in half. A vendor trying to sell you a product finds a Web analysis claiming that the odds of this happening are actually 1 in 1,000. Accept this new number, and suddenly a product costing 10 times as much is still a good investment.
It gets worse when you deal with even more rare and expensive events. Imagine you’re in charge of terrorism mitigation at a chlorine plant. What’s the cost to your company, in money and reputation, of a large and very deadly explosion? $100 million? $1 billion? $10 billion? And the odds: 1 in a hundred thousand, 1 in a million, 1 in 10 million? Depending on how you answer those two questions—and any answer is really just a guess—you can justify spending anywhere from $10 to $100,000 annually to mitigate that risk.
Or take another example: airport security. Assume that all the new airport security measures increase the waiting time at airports by—and I’m making this up—30 minutes per passenger. There were 760 million passenger boardings in the United States in 2007. This means that the extra waiting time at airports has cost us a collective 43,000 years of extra waiting time. Assume a 70-year life expectancy, and the increased waiting time has “killed” 620 people per year—930 if you calculate the numbers based on 16 hours of awake time per day. So the question is: If we did away with increased airport security, would the result be more people dead from terrorism or fewer?
Caveat Emptor
This kind of thing is why most ROI models you get from security vendors are nonsense. Of course their model demonstrates that their product or service makes financial sense: They’ve jiggered the numbers so that they do.
This doesn’t mean that ALE is useless, but it does mean you should 1) mistrust any analyses that come from people with an agenda and 2) use any results as a general guideline only. So when you get an ROI model from your vendor, take its framework and plug in your own numbers. Don’t even show the vendor your improvements; it won’t consider any changes that make its product or service less cost-effective to be an “improvement.” And use those results as a general guide, along with risk management and compliance analyses, when you’re deciding what security products and services to buy.
This essay previously appeared in CSO Magazine.
Assurance
Over the past several months, the state of California conducted the most comprehensive security review yet of electronic voting machines. People I consider to be security experts analyzed machines from three different manufacturers, performing both a red-team attack analysis and a detailed source code review. Serious flaws were discovered in all machines and, as a result, the machines were all decertified for use in California elections.
The reports are worth reading, as is much of the blog commentary on the topic. The reviewers were given an unrealistic timetable and had trouble getting needed documentation. The fact that major security vulnerabilities were found in all machines is a testament to how poorly they were designed, not to the thoroughness of the analysis. Yet California Secretary of State Debra Bowen has conditionally recertified the machines for use, as long as the makers fix the discovered vulnerabilities and adhere to a lengthy list of security requirements designed to limit future security breaches and failures.
While this is a good effort, it has security completely backward. It begins with a presumption of security: If there are no known vulnerabilities, the system must be secure. If there is a vulnerability, then once it’s fixed, the system is again secure. How anyone comes to this presumption is a mystery to me. Is there any version of any operating system anywhere where the last security bug was found and fixed? Is there a major piece of software anywhere that has been, and continues to be, vulnerability-free?
Yet again and again we react with surprise when a system has a vulnerability. Last weekend at the hacker convention DefCon, I saw new attacks against supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems—those are embedded control systems found in infrastructure systems like fuel pipelines and power transmission facilities—electronic badge-entry systems, MySpace, and the high-security locks used in places like the White House. I will guarantee you that the manufacturers of these systems all claimed they were secure, and that their customers believed them.
Earlier this month, the government disclosed that the computer system of the US-Visit border control system is full of security holes. Weaknesses existed in all control areas and computing device types reviewed, the report said. How exactly is this different from any large government database? I’m not surprised that the system is so insecure; I’m surprised that anyone is surprised.
We’ve been assured again and again that RFID passports are secure. When researcher Lukas Grunwald successfully cloned one last year at DefCon, we were told there was little risk. This year, Grunwald revealed that he could use a cloned passport chip to sabotage passport readers. Government officials are again downplaying the significance of this result, although Grunwald speculates that this or another similar vulnerability could be used to take over passport readers and force them to accept fraudulent passports. Anyone care to guess who’s more likely to be right?
It’s all backward. Insecurity is the norm. If any system—whether a voting machine, operating system, database, badge-entry system, RFID passport system, etc.—is ever built completely vulnerability-free, it’ll be the first time in the history of mankind. It’s not a good bet.
Once you stop thinking about security backward, you immediately understand why the current software security paradigm of patching doesn’t make us any more secure. If vulnerabilities are so common, finding a few doesn’t materially reduce the quantity remaining. A system with 100 patched vulnerabilities isn’t more secure than a system with 10, nor is it less secure. A patched buffer overflow doesn’t mean that there’s one less way attackers can get into your system; it means that your design process was so lousy that it permitted buffer overflows, and there are probably thousands more lurking in your code.
Diebold Election Systems has patched a certain vulnerability in its voting-machine software twice, and each patch contained another vulnerability. Don’t tell me it’s my job to find another vulnerability in the third patch; it’s Diebold’s job to convince me it has finally learned how to patch vulnerabilities properly.
Several years ago, former National Security Agency technical director Brian Snow began talking about the concept of “assurance” in security. Snow, who spent 35 years at the NSA building systems at security levels far higher than anything the commercial world deals with, told audiences that the agency couldn’t use modern commercial systems with their backward security thinking. Assurance was his antidote:
Assurances are confidence-building activities demonstrating that:
- The system’s security policy is internally consistent and reflects the requirements of the organization,
- There are sufficient security functions to support the security policy,
- The system functions to meet a desired set of properties and only those properties,
- The functions are implemented correctly, and
- The assurances hold up through the manufacturing, delivery and life cycle of the system.
Basically, demonstrate that your system is secure, because I’m just not going to believe you otherwise.
Assurance is less about developing new security techniques than about using the ones we have. It’s all the things described in books like Building Secure Software, Software Security and Writing Secure Code. It’s some of what Microsoft is trying to do with its Security Development Lifecycle (SDL). It’s the Department of Homeland Security’s Build Security In program. It’s what every aircraft manufacturer goes through before it puts a piece of software in a critical role on an aircraft. It’s what the NSA demands before it purchases a piece of security equipment. As an industry, we know how to provide security assurance in software and systems; we just tend not to bother.
And most of the time, we don’t care. Commercial software, as insecure as it is, is good enough for most purposes. And while backward security is more expensive over the life cycle of the software, it’s cheaper where it counts: at the beginning. Most software companies are short-term smart to ignore the cost of never-ending patching, even though it’s long-term dumb.
Assurance is expensive, in terms of money and time for both the process and the documentation. But the NSA needs assurance for critical military systems; Boeing needs it for its avionics. And the government needs it more and more: for voting machines, for databases entrusted with our personal information, for electronic passports, for communications systems, for the computers and systems controlling our critical infrastructure. Assurance requirements should be common in IT contracts, not rare. It’s time we stopped thinking backward and pretending that computers are secure until proven otherwise.
This essay originally appeared on Wired.com.
CME in Practice
CME is “Common Malware Enumeration,” and it’s an initiave by US-CERT to give all worms, viruses, and such uniform names. The problem is that different security vendors use different names for the same thing, and it can be extremely confusing for customers. A uniform naming system is a great idea. (I blogged about this in September.)
Here’s someone talking about how it’s not working very well in practice. Basically, while you can go from a vendor’s site to the CME information, you can’t go from the CME information to a vendor’s site. This essentially makes it worthless: just another name and number without references.
Computer Malware to Have Uniform Names
Starting next month, US-CERT will start issuing uniform names for worms, viruses, and other malware. This is part of a program called the Common Malware Enumeration Initiative, and is great news.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.