Let’s talk about TIC today, dear readers, for I smell a conspiracy theory brewing.

For those of you who missed the quick brief, TIC is short for “Trusted Internet Connections” and is an architecture model/mandate/$foo to take all of the Internet connections in the Government (srsly, nobody knows how many of them really exist, but it’s somewhere in the 2,000-10,000 range) and consolidate them into 50.  These connections will then be monitored by DHS’s Einstein program.

No, Not That Kind of TIC photo by m.prinke.

Bringing you all up to date, you’ll need to do some homework:

• OMB Memo 08-05, “Implementation of Trusted Internet Connections (TIC)”
• Planning Guidance for Trusted Internet Connections (TIC)
• Final Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) Initiative Statement of Capability Evaluation Report, dated June 4, 2008
• OMB Memo 08-27 Guidance for Trusted Internet Connection (TIC) Compliance

Now having read all of this, some things become fairly obvious:

• If you have the following people needing connections:
  • 24 agencies, plus
  • DoD with 2 points of presence, plus
  • Intelligence agencies with a handful of Internet connections, means that:
• That basically, everybody gets one Internet connection.  This is not good, it’s all single point-of-DOS.
• Agencies have been designated as Internet providers for other agencies.  Sounds like LoB in action.
• Given the amount of traffic going through the TIC access points, it most likely is going to take a significant amount of hardware to monitor all these connections–maybe you saved 50% of the monitoring hardware by reducing the footprint, but it’s still hardware-intensive.
• TIC is closely tied with the Networx contract.
• In order to share Internet connections, there needs to be a network core between all of the agencies so that an agency without a TIC access point can route through multiple TIC service provider agencies.

And this is where my conspiracy theory comes in:  TIC is more about making a grand unified Government network than it is monitoring events–Einstein is just an intermediate goal.   If you think about it, this is where the Government is headed.

We were headed this way back in ought-two with a wonderful name: GovNet.  To be honest, the groundwork wasn’t there and the idea was way ahead of its time and died a horrible death, but it’s gradually starting to happen, thanks to TIC, FDCC, and Einstein. 

More fun links:

• Wired GovNet Article
• FCW GovNet Article
• Gartner Email Analysis on GOVNET (Note this gem: “Enterprises and government agencies should assume that a long-term solution to Internet security will arise elsewhere and should proceed to buy denial-of-service protection and other managed security services from commercial providers.”)

If you want to get a reaction out of the OMB folks, mention GovNet and watch them backpedal and cringe,–I think the pain factor was very high for them on GovNet. So I think that we should, as a cadre of information security folks, start calling TIC what it really is:  Govnet 2.0!  =)

• Comments on SCAP 2008
• The 10 CAG-egorically Wrong Ways to Introduce Standards
• In Response to “Cyber Security Coming to a Boil” Comments….
• Federated Vulnerability Management
• How I Became the Owner of Two Rogue WiFi APs

There is another challenge that SCAP addresses without it being officially on the SCAP program’s agenda.  With the advent of SCAP we now have a common reporting criteria by which we can now judge SCAP certified products.  If you have ever used an automated vulnerability scanner as part of a penetration test or security audit, you know that not all vulnerability scanners are created equal.  Some have much lower false positive alert and reporting rates than others.  Likewise, it is known that false negative alert and reporting rates vary.  And, because of the various technical approaches taken by the scanners, some provide much more consistent results. The challenge has been that without a common criteria to test against, it is difficult for a small or even fairly large security organization to find the resources to effectively test these products in a fair apples to apples test.

This is where NIST has a real opportunity on its hands.  With the release of the SCAP protocol, we have the criteria by which performance comparisons can be made.  What we are lacking is a common test environment.

Benchmark photo by bzo.

Let me veer off-topic for a moment to provide some background.  In the last few years the Linux community has created various “live distributions” for various specialized requirements.  What live distributions are, are CD, DVD or Flash-media-based operating systems that are executed upon boot.  That is to say that they boot and run directly from CD or DVD.  So, by using a Linux live distribution, you can run Linux off of you home Windows-based laptop without ever installing Linux to your hard disk.  This has opened up a world of specialized possibilities for this community.  One of them is the standardized training environment.  For example, security testers have created DVL (damn vulnerable Linux http://www.damnvulnerablelinux.org/).  DVL is a live distribution that with well documented security vulnerabilities, this distribution is used as a training aid for teaching vulnerability assessment and mitigation. There are other similar efforts created with the same intent such as the excellent DE-ICE training targets (http://de-ice.net/hackerpedia/index.php/De-ICE.net_PenTest_Disks).

NIST could follow-up on the release of the SCAP protocol by also building and releasing a common testing environment based perhaps on live distribution technology. Such an environment with well documented vulnerabilities would allow for the creation of objective benchmarks to be created to rate the accuracy, reproducibility, completeness of the results of SCAP certified vulnerability testing and reporting products.  This would aid government agencies, businesses and even individuals in their purchasing decisions.  It would also allow provide vendors with an objective and common test environment in which they can test and improve their products.  I admit this would be a significant undertaking for NIST.  However, I would suggest that such a test environment could be designed in such a manner that it could be built and released as a series of inter-operable modules based on live distribution technology.  The initial release might only offer a relatively modest set of tests but with the release of each module building on the results of previous releases, a highly demanding and sophisticated test environment could soon be realized.  Because of the importance and utility of such a project, industry and outside security experts might want to participate in and contribute to such an endeavor.

• NIST and SCAP; Busting a cap on intruders Part 1
• Ed Bellis’s Little SCAP Project
• Comments on SCAP 2008
• Federated Vulnerability Management
• How to Not Let FISMA Become a Paperwork Exercise

No big surprise by now, I work for an accounting firm.  Oh, what’s that?  Oh yes, that’s right, it’s a consulting firm with a high percentage of accountants, including a plethora of CPAs.  “Accounting firm” is so 1950s-ish. =)

It’s my secret theory (well, not so much of a secret now, just between the Internet and me) that the primary problem we have in information security is that as a field we have borrowed heavily from public accounting.  The only problem is that public accounting is different from what we do.

Goals for public accounting run something like this:

• Eliminate fraud through oversight
• Protect the company’s money from rogue agents
• Protect the shareholders of public companies
• Ensure accountability of actions

Accounting for Non-Accountants photo by happyeclair.

As a result of their goals, accountants have an interesting set of values:

• Signatures are sacred
• Separation of duties is sacrosanct
• Auditing is designed to act as a deterrent to fraud
• “Professional Skepticism” is a much-valued trait
• Zero-Defects is a good condition

In other words, accountants live in a panopticon of tranparency, the concept being that through oversight and transparency, people will not become evildoers and those that do will be caught.  Pretty simple idea, makes me think about IDS in an entirely new light.

Words that accountants use that mean something entirely different from the way you or I use them:

• Fraud, Waste, and Abuse: They’re talking about spending money, I’m usually talking about people doing something ethically wrong.
• Investigation: They’re looking at the numbers to see how a particular number was created.  Me, I bring the nice people with guns when I do an investigation.
• Incident: Their version is what I would call an event.  When I call something an incident, we’re headed towards an investigation.
• Security test and evaluation: To them, it’s a compliance audit.  To me, it’s determining the frequency that the system will fail and if we have a way to fix it once it does.  Remember this, it’s a critical difference.
• Control: I think their version has something to do with having oversight and separation of duties.  Me, when I see this word, I think “countermeasure to a specific threat and vulnerability”.
• Audit: An activity designed to prove that fraud has not happened.  Usually we don’t use the word unless we absolutely have to.
• Technical: They’re talking about the highly-detailed accounting rules.  I’m talking about if you know how to build your own server and OS using lumps of raw silicon and a soldering iron.
• Checklist: They’re talking about a sacred list that condenses all the rules into an easily-auditable format.  Me, I’m thinking that a checklist is something that will fail because my threats and their capabilities don’t fit into nice little lists.
• Forensics: Their version is what I would call “research to find out where the money went to” and involves looking at a bunch of numbers.  My version has something to do with logs, memory dumps, and hard drive images.
• Risk Management: This has something to do with higher interest rates for high-risk loans.  For me, it’s looking for countermeasures and knowing what things to skimp on even though the catalog of controls says you have to have it.

In short, pretty much anything they could say about our line of work has a different meaning.  This is why I believe it’s a problem if we adopt too much of their methodology and management models because they are doing similar activities to what security people do, only for different purposes.

In order to understand the mentality that we’re working with, let’s give you a couple of scenarios:

After-Work Optional Training Session: The accountants not only make you put your name on the attendance roster but you have to sign it as well.  Are they worried that you’re committing fraud by showing up at training that you were not supposed to, so they need some sort of signature nonrepudiation to prove that you were there?  No!  They just make you sign it because they believe in the power of the signature and that’s just how they do things, no matter how trivial.

The Role of Security: To an accountant, the role of security in an organization is to reduce fraud by “hack-proof” configurations and monitoring.  This is a problem in that since security is economics, we’re somehow subordinate to the finance people.

Let’s look at the world of the typical security practitioner:

• The guidance that security professionals have is very contradictory, missing, or non-relevant.
• Really what we do comes down to risk management, which means that sometimes it makes more sense to break the rules (even though there is a rule that says break the rules, which should freak your brain out by now if you’re an accountant).
• We have a constantly changing environment that rules cannot keep up with.

Now this whole blog post, although rambling on about accountants, is aimed at getting a message across.  In the US Federal Government, we use a process called certification and accreditation (C&A).  The certification part is pretty easy to understand–it’s like compliance, do you have it and does it work.  CPAs will readily understand that as a controls assessment.  That’s very much a transferable concept.

But in accreditation, you give the risks to a senior manager/executive and they accept the risks associated with operating the system.  The CPA’s zero-defects world comes through and they lie on the ground doing the cockroach.  Their skills aren’t transferable when dealing with risk management, only compliance with a set of rules.

Once again, the problem with security in Government is that it’s cultural.

And don’t get me wrong, I like accountants and they do what I do not have neither the skills nor the desire to do.  I just think that there aren’t as many transferable skills between our jobs as there might seem on the surface.

• White Professional Male Turned CISSP Seeks Mega-Sized Security Management Model
• An Open Letter to NIST About SP 800-30
• How to Not Let FISMA Become a Paperwork Exercise
• Security Assessment Economics
• Split-Horizon Assessments and the Oversight Effect

FAR: it’s the Federal Acquisition Regulation, and it covers all the buying that the government does.  For contractors, the FAR is a big deal–violate it and you end up blackballed from Government contracts or having to pay back money to your customer, either of which is a very bad thing.

In early August, OMB issued Memo 08-22 (standard .pdf caveat blah blah blah) which gave some of the administratrivia about how they want to manage FDCC–how to report it in your FISMA report, what is and isn’t a desktop, and a rough outline on how to validate your level of compliance.

Now I have mixed feelings about FDCC, you all should know that by now, but I think the Government actually did a decent thing here–they added FDCC (and any other NIST secure configuration checklists) to the FAR.

Check this section of 800-22 out:

On February 28, 2008, revised Part 39 of the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) was published which reads:
PART 39-ACQUISITION OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
1. The authority citation for 48 CFR part 39 continues to read as follows: Authority: 40 U.S.C. 121(c); 10U.S.C. chapter 137; and 42 U.S.C. 2473(c).
2. Amend section 39.101 by revising paragraph (d) to read as follows:
39.101 Policy.
* * * * *

(d) In acquiring information technology, agencies shall include the appropriate IT security policies and requirements, including use of common security configurations available from the NIST’s website at http://checklists.nist.gov. Agency contracting officers should consult with the requiring official to ensure the appropriate standards are incorporated.

Translated into English, what this means is that the NIST configurations checklists are coded into law for Government IT purchases.

This carries a HUGE impact to both the Government and contractors.  For the Government, they just outsourced part of their security to Dell and HP, whether they know it or not.  For the desktop manufacturers, they just signed up to learn how FDCC works if they want some of the Government’s money. 

Remember back in the halcyon days of FDCC when I predicted that one of the critical keys to success for FDCC was to be able to buy OEM desktops with the FDCC images on them.  It’s slowly becoming a reality.

Oh what’s that, you don’t sell desktops?  Well, this applies to all NIST configuration checklists, so as NIST adds to the intellectual property in the checklists program, you get to play too.  Looking at the DISA STIGs as a model, you might end up with a checklist for literally everything.

So as somebody who has no relation to the US Federal Government, you must be asking by now how you can ride the FDCC wave?  Here’s Rybolov’s plan for secure desktop world domination:

• Wait for the government to attain 60-80% FDCC implementation
• Wait for desktops to have an FDCC option for installed OS
• Review your core applications on the FDCC compatibility list
• Adopt FDCC as your desktop hardening standard
• Buy your desktop hardware with the image pre-loaded
• The FDCC configuration rolls uphill to be the default OS that they sell
• ?????
• Profit!

And the Government security trickle-down effect keeps rolling on….

Cynically, you could say that the OMB memos as of late (FDCC, DNSSEC) are very well coached and that OMB doesn’t know anything about IT, much less IT security.  You probably would be right, but seriously, OMB doesn’t get paid to know IT, they get paid to manage and budget, and in this case I see some sound public policy by asking the people who do know what they’re talking about.

While we have on our cynical hats, we might as well give a nod to those FISMA naysayers who have been complaining for years that the law wasn’t technical/specific enough.   Now we have very static checklists and the power to decide what a secure configuration should be has been taken out of the hands of the techies who would know and given to research organizations and bureaucratic organizations who have no vested interest in making your gear work.

Lighthouse From AFAR photo by Kamoteus.

• Comments on SCAP 2008
• No, FISMA Doesn’t Require That, Silly Product Pushers
• Federated Vulnerability Management
• Current Government Security Initiatives
• When the News Breaks, We Fix it…

I toyed for several years about making an infosec hall of shame.  Like seriously, I already had some candidates, you know who most of them are, it’s the same as the Washington Post Front-Page Metric.

Hall of Fame, Hall of Shame photo by leafar.

And my friends and I had some other nummy tidbits from our travels out and about, doing this stuff in the place where theory meets the realities of implementation.

Now if you look around on The Guerilla CISO, you’ll find that I don’t have a Hall of Shame.  I eventually decided not to have one after much deliberation, and the reason is this:  If you have key decision-makers that are removed or abstracted from the impacts of the decisions that they make, it is not fair to publicly humiliate the people who have to live with the implementation of the decisions.

And for better or worse, that’s the way the Government’s security model (and many other things) works.

• An Informal Study on the Literacy Level of Security Blogs–We All Get Pwned by Amrit
• It’s a Blogiversary
• In Which Our Protagonist Discovers We Need More Good Public Policy People Who Understand Security
• Working with Interpreters, a Risk Manager’s Guide
• Federal CIO Council’s Guidelines on Security and Social Media

I’ve sat in on too many presentations lately.  After a couple of them, you start to think “Hey, I can do way better than that!”  And so I’ve been collecting my thoughts to get some presentations down and rehearsed.

Anyway, some sample topics I’ve thought up, hope you like them:

• Security curmudgeon 101:  It all starts with electric shock and goes downhill rapidly
• Contractors Never Go for Broke: how I learned to stop fearing unclear guidance and made a ton of moolah in the process
• Who Moved My InfoSec Cheese:  What to do when the great big SOX cow in the sky dries up
• Leadership Secrets of Attila the CISO: throwing dead bodies and the problem does create a solution!
• $Racial_Slur in the Wire:  why your perimeter is massive pwnage once they get past it
• The “S” in “SIEM” stands for “Suck”: learning how to deal with the limitations of security tools
• Lessons from Language School: how I embraced the language and culture of our sworn enemies so that we could more effectively kill them in a bout of mutually assured destruction and why it seems so quaint in the new millenium
• DAM Solutions: more than just the punch-line to analyst jokes
• Data Reduction for Dummies: since the classification follows the data, if we get rid of it all, we don’t need to secure it
• Physical and Environmental Protection for Packet Monkeys: learning why there’s a big red button on the wall of the data center next to the switches and what really happens when you push it

And, lo and behold, I am available to speak, always have been.  If you like an idea that I’ve put out there, put 3 squirrels on a park bench and I’ll give them a presentation.

• Caught on Tape!
• A Short History of Cyberwar Lookalikes
• Barcode Hacking
• Beware the Cyber-Katrina!
• DojoCon DDoS Video