[Note: the following is primarily about U.S. Government policies, but I believe several points can be generalized to other countries.]

I was editing a section of my website, when I ran across a link to a paper I had forgotten that I wrote. I'm unsure how many people actually saw it then or since. I know it faded from my memory! Other than CERIAS WWW sites and the AAAS itself, a Google search reveals almost no references to it.

As background, in early April of 2002, I was asked, somewhat at the last moment, to prepare a paper and some remarks on the state of information security for a forum, Technology in a Vulnerable World, held on science in the wake of 9/11. The forum was sponsored by the AAAS, and held later that month. There were interesting papers on public health, risk communication, the role of universities, and more, and all of them are available for download.

My paper in the forum wasn't one of my better ones, in that it was somewhat rushed in preparing it. Also, I couldn't find good background literature for some of what I was writing. As I reread what I wrote, many of the points I raised still don't have carefully documented sources in the open literature. However, I probably could have found some published backup for items such as the counts of computer viruses had I spent a little more time and effort on it. Mea culpa; this is something I teach my students about. Despite that, I think I did capture most of the issues that were involved at the time of the forum, and I don't believe there is anything in the paper that was incorrect at that time.

Why am I posting something here about that paper, One View of Protecting the National Information Infrastructure, written seven years ago? Well, as I reread it, I couldn't help but notice that it expressed some of the same themes later presented in the PITAC report, Cyber Security: A Crisis of Prioritization (2005), the NRC report Towards a Safer and More Secure Cyberspace (2007), and my recent Senate testimony (2009). Of course, many of the issues were known before I wrote my paper -- including coverage in the NRC studies Computers at Risk: Safe Computing in the Information Age (1991), Trust in Cyberspace (1999) and Cybersecurity Today and Tomorrow (2002) (among others I should have referenced). I can find bits and pieces of the same topics going further back in time. These issues seem to be deeply ingrained.

I wasn't involved in all of those cited efforts, so I'm not responsible for the repetition of the issues. Anyone with enough background who looks at the situation without a particular self-interest is going to come up with approximately the same conclusions -- including that market forces aren't solving the problem, there aren't enough resources devoted to long-term research, we don't have enough invested in education and training, we aren't doing enough in law enforcement and active defense, and we continue to spend massive amounts trying to defend legacy systems that were never designed to be secure.

Given these repeated warnings, it is troubling that we have not seen any meaningful action by government to date. However, that is probably preferable to government action that makes things worse: consider DHS as one notable example (or several).

Compounding the problem, too many leaders in industry are unwilling to make necessary, radical changes either, because such actions might disrupt their businesses, even if such actions are in the public good. It is one of those "tragedy of the commons" situations. Market forces have been shown to be ineffective in fixing the problems, and will actually lead to attempts to influence government against addressing urgent needs. Holding companies liable for their bad designs and mistakes, or restricting spending on items with known vulnerabilities and weaknesses would be in the public interest, but too many vendors affected would rather lobby against change than to really address the underlying problems.

Those of us who have been observing this problem for so long are therefore hoping that the administration's 60 day review provides strong impetus for meaningful changes that are actually adopted by the government. Somewhat selfishly, it would be nice to know that my efforts in this direction have not been totally in vain. But even if nothing happens, there is a certain sense of purpose in continuing to play the role of Don Quixote.

Sancho! Where did I leave my horse?

Why is it that Demotivators® seem so appropriate when talking about cyber security or government? If you are unfamiliar with Despair.com, let me encourage you to explore the site and view the wonderfully twisted items they have for sale. In the interest of full disclosure, I have no financial interest or ties to the company, other than as a satisfied and cynical customer.

On a more academic note, you can read or purchase the NRC reports cited above online via the National Academies Press website.

On March 19, I had an opportunity to testify before the Senate Committee on on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. The hearing was entitled Cybersecurity -- Assessing Our Vulnerabilities and Developing An Effective Defense.

I was asked to include information on research problems, educational initiatives, and issues regarding the current state of cyber security in the nation.   As is usual for such things, the time between the invitation and the due date for written testimony was short. Thus, I didn't have the time to delve deeply into the topic areas, but could only address the things that I already had on hand -- including some posts from this blog that I had written before. The result was a little longer than the other statements, but I think I covered more ground.

One hint for people testifying before Congress on such things: you can't depend on how long you will have for spoken remarks, so be sure any points you want to make are in your written testimony. In this case, the hearing was limited to about 75 minutes because there were several votes scheduled on the Senate floor, and the committee needed to adjourn to allow the Senators to attend the votes. And, as is common for too many hearings, there weren't many of the committee members present; I believe the hearing began with only two of the 25 members present, and some movement of members in and out to reach a maximum of four seated at any one time. In this case, the chair (Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia) apologized to us several times for the low turnout. However, many (all?) of the staff and aides were present, so I'm certain the gist of the testimony presented will be considered.

The Senator made a nice introductory statement.

My written testimony is available on my website as well as the committee site. My oral statement was from rough notes that I modified on the fly as I listened to the other testimony (by Jim Lewis, Eric Weiss and Ed Amoroso). That statement, and the whole hearing, are available via the archived hearing webcast (my remarks start at about 46:30 into the webcast). If I get a transcribed version of those remarks, I will post them along with my written testimony on my website in the "US government" section.

Comments by the other speakers were good overall and I think we collectively covered a lot of ground. The questions from the Senators present indicated that they were listening and knew some of the problems in the area. The comments from Senator Nelson about the intrusions into his systems were surprising: several Senate security staff were present at the hearing and indicated to me that his remarks were the first they had heard of the incidents! So, the hearing apparently set off an incident-response exercise -- separate from responding to my presence in the building, that is.

Will this hearing make a difference? I don't know. I've been testifying and saying the same things for over a dozen years (this was my 8th Congressional hearing testimony) and things haven't gotten that much better...and may even be worse. Senator Rockefeller has indicated he intends to introduce legislation supporting more funding for students studying cyber security issues. There was some good news coverage of all this (e.g., FCW and CNet).

I am told that there will be more hearings by this committee. Some House committees have been holding hearings too, and the President's 60 day review continues apace. The added attention is great, but with the sudden interest by so many, the result may be more confusion rather than resolution.

Stay tuned.

As a reminder, if you want to know about my occasional postings such as this but don't want to subscribe to the RSS feed,  you can subscribe to the mailing list.

Also as a reminder, there is my tumble blog on security issues, with links to items on the news and WWW of possible interest to those who find my ramblings and rants of interest.

The Report

Over the last few months, CERIAS faculty members Jackie Rees and Karthik Kannan have been busy analyzing data collected from IT executives around the world, and have been interviewing a variety of experts in cybercrime and corporate strategy. The results of their labors were published yesterday by the McAfee Corporation (a CERIAS Tier II partner) as the report Unsecured Economies: Protecting Vital Information.

The conclusions of the report are somewhat pessimistic about prospects for cyber security in the coming few years. The combination of economic pressures, weak efforts at law enforcement, international differences in perceptions of privacy and security, and the continuing challenges of providing secured computing are combining to place vast amounts of valuable intellectual property (IP) at risk. The report presents estimates that IP worth billions of dollars (US) was stolen or damaged last year, and we can only expect the losses to increase.

Additionally, the report details five general conclusions derived from the data:

• The recession will put intellectual property at risk
• There is considerable international variation in the commitment (management and resources) to protect cyber
• Intellectual property is now an "international currency" that is as much a target as actual currency
• Employees steal intellectual property for financial gain and competitive advantage
• Geopolitical aspects present differing risk profiles for information stored "offshore" from "home" countries.

None of these should be a big surprise to anyone who has been watching the field or listening to those of us who are working in it. What is interesting about the report is the presented magnitude and distribution of the issues. This is the first truely global study of these issues, and thus provides an important step forward in understanding the scope of these issues.

I will repeat here some of what I wrote for the conclusion of the report; I have been saying these same things for many years, and the report simply underscores the importance of this advice:

“Information security has transformed from simply ’preventing bad things from happening ’into a fundamental business component.' C-level executives must recognize this change. This includes viewing cybersecurity as a critical business enabler rather than as a simple cost center that can be trimmed without obvious impact on the corporate bottom line; not all of the impact will be immediately and directly noticeable. In some cases, the only impact of degraded cybersecurity will be going from ‘Doing okay’ to ‘Completely ruined’ with no warning before the change.

Cybersecurity fills multiple roles in a company, and all are important for organizational health.

• First, cybersecurity provides positive control over resources that provide the company a competitive advantage: intellectual property, customer information, trends and projections,financial and personnel records and so on. Poor security puts these resources at risk.
• Second, good security provides executives with confidence that the data they are seeing is accurate and true, thus leading to sound decisions and appropriate compliance with regulation and policy
• Third, strong cybersecurity supports businesses taking new risks and entering new markets with confidence in their ability to respond appropriately to change
• And fourth, good cybersecurity is necessary to build and maintain a reputation for reliability and sound behavior, which in turn are necessary to attract and retain customers and partners.

• This study clearly shows that some customers are unwilling to do business with entities they consider poorly secured. Given massive market failures, significant fraud and increasing threats of government oversight and regulation, companies with strong controls, transparent recordkeeping, agile infrastructures and sterling reputations are clearly at an advantage -- and strong cybersecurity is a fundamental component of all four. Executives who understand this will be able to employ cybersecurity as an organic element of company (and government) survival -- and growth.“

We are grateful to McAfee, Inc. for their support and assistance in putting this report together.

Getting the Report

Update: You can now download the report sans-registration from CERIAS.

The report is available at no charge and the PDF can be downloaded (click on the image of the report cover to the left, or here). Note that to download the report requires registration.

Some of you may be opposed to providing your contact information to obtain the report, especially as that information may be used in marketing. Personally, I believe that the registration should be optional. However, the McAfee corporation paid for the report, and they control the distribution.

As such, those of us at CERIAS will honor their decision.

However, I will observe that many other people object to these kinds of registration requirements (the NY Times is another notable example of a registration-required site). As a result, they have developed WWW applications, such as BugMeNot, which are freely available for others to use to bypass these requirements. Others respond to these requests by identifying company personnel from information on corporate sites and then using that information to register -- both to avoid giving out their own information and to add some noise to the data being collected.

None of us here at CERIAS are suggesting that you use one of the above-described methods. We do, however, encourage you to get the report, and to do so in an appropriate manner. We hope you will find it informative.

Over the last few years, I have been involved in issues related to the use of computerization in voting. This has come about because of my concerns about computer security, privacy and reliability, and from my role as chair of the ACM U.S. Public Policy Committee (USACM). USACM has taken a strong position as regards use of computers as voting stations and voting over the internet.

Two recent items address the issue of voting over the Internet.

The first is a study released by NIST about the threats posed by internet voting. This is a well-written document describing problems that would be encountered with any online voting system. Their conclusion is that, for public elections, distribution of blank ballots (on paper) is the only reasonable improvement that we can make with current technology.

The second is a note from my colleague, Yvo Desmedt, one of the senior leaders in information security He has asked that I circulate this to a wider audience:

  IACR (the International Association for Cryptologic Research) has changed its bylaws to allow e-voting over the internet to elect its board members and other purposes. IACR will likely move towards internet e-voting. The IACR Board of Directors subcommittee on internet e-voting has published a list of requirements for such a system at: http://www.iacr.org/elections/eVoting/requirements.html This is evidently a first step and the question remains whether the system the International Association for Cryptologic Research will choose will be easy to hack or not. So, security experts should follow this development.

The problems that need to be addressed by any voting technology are mostly obvious: impersonation of the voter, impersonation of the voting system, disclosure of the ballot, multiple voting, loss of votes, denial of access, and a number of other issues. The problems are complicated by the requirements of a fair voting system, one of which is that of vote deniability—that the voter is able to deny (or claim) that her/his vote was cast a particular way. This is important to prevent vote buying, or more importantly, retribution against voters who do not cast ballots in a particular way. It isn’t difficult to find stories where voters have been beaten or killed because of how they voted (or were presumed to have intended to vote). Thus, the tried-and-true concept of providing a receipt (ala ATM machines) is not a workable solution.

My intent in making this post isn’t to discuss all the issues behind e-voting—that is well beyond the scope of a single posting, and is covered well many other places. My main goal is to give some wider circulation to Yvo’s statement. However, in light of the recent problem with certificate issuance, it is also worth noting that schemes requiring encryption to secure voting may have hidden vulnerabilities that could lead to compromise and/or failures in the future.   

In the end, it comes down to a tradeoff of risk/reward (as do all security choices): can we accurately quantify the risks with a particular approach, and are we willing to assume them? Do we have appropriate mechanisms to eliminate, mitigate or shift the risks? Are we willing to accept the risks associated with adopting a particular form of e-voting in return for the potential benefit of better access for remote voters? Or are accurate (fair) results all the time more important than complete results?

Note that one objection often raised to USACM as we argue these points is “There is no evidence there has ever been a failure or tampering with a vote.” In addition to being incorrect (there are numerous cases of computer-based voting failures), this misses two key issues:

 
• How do you tell if there is tampering if there are no safeguards that definitively disclose such tampering? That you have not detected something does not mean it has not occurred.
 
• The past does not predict the future in such a case. That no failure (accidental or otherwise) has occurred does not mean it will not occur in the future. Worse, a string of occurrences without a failure may help cloud a future discovered discrepancy!

In the case of IACR, it is obvious why this group of cryptography professionals would wish to adopt techniques that show confidence in cryptography. However, the example they set could be very damaging for other groups—and populations—if their confidence is misplaced. Given the long history of spectacular failures in cryptography—often going unannounced while being exploited—it is somewhat surprising that the IACR is not more explicit in their statement about the risks of technological failures.

Yesterday, I posted a long entry on the recent news about how some researchers obtained a “rogue” certificate from one of the Internet Certificate Authorities. There are some points I missed in the original post that should be noted.

 
• The authors of the exploit have a very readable, interesting description of what they did and why it worked. I should have included a link to it in the original posting, but forgot to edit it in. The interested reader should definitely see that article online, include the animations.
 
• There are other ways this attack can be defeated, certainly, but they are stop-gap measures. I didn’t explain them because I don’t view them as other than quick patches. However, if you are forced to continue to use MD5 and you issue certificates, then it is important to randomize the certificate serial number that is issued, and to insert a random delay interval in the validity time field. Both will introduce enough random bits so as to make this particular attack against the CA infeasible given current technology.
 
• I suggested that vendors use another hash algorithm, and have SHA-1 as an example. SHA-2 would be better, as SHA-1 has been shown to have a theoretical weakness similar to MD5, although it has proven more resistant to attack to date. Use of SHA-1 could possible result in a similar problem within a few years (or, as suggested in the final part of my post, within a few weeks if a breakthrough occurs). However, use of SHA-1 would be preferable to MD5!
 
• MD5 is not “broken” in a complete way. There are several properties of a message digest that are valuable, including collision resistance: that it is infeasible to end up with two inputs giving the same hash value. To the best of my knowledge, MD5 has only been shown to be susceptible to “weak collisions”—instances where the attacker can pick one or both inputs so as to produce identical hash values. The stronger form of preimage resistance, where there is an arbitrary hash output H and an attacker cannot form an input that also produces H, still holds for MD5. Thus, applications that depend on this property (including many signing applications and integrity tools) are apparently still okay.
 
• One of our recent PhD grads, William Speirs, worked on defining hash functions for his PhD dissertation. His dissertation, Dynamic Cryptographic Hash Functions, is available online for those interested in seeing it.

I want to reiterate that there are more fundamental issues of trust involved than what hash function is used. The whole nature of certificates is based around how much we trust the certificate authorities that issue the certificates, and the correctness of the software that verifies those certificates then shows us the results. If an authority is careless or rogue, then the certificates may be technically valid but not match our expectations for validity. If our local software (such as a WWW browser) incorrectly validates a certificate, or presents the results incorrectly, we may trust a certificate we shouldn’t. Even such mundane issues as having one’s system at the correct time/date can be important: the authors of this particular hack demonstrated that by backdating their rogue certificate.

My continuing message to the community is to not lose sight of those things we assume. Sometimes, changes in the world around us render those assumptions invalid, and everything built on them becomes open to question. If we forget those assumptions—and our chains of trust built on them—we will continue to be surprised by the outcomes.

That is perhaps fitting to state (again) on the last day of the year. Let me observe that as human beings we sometimes take things for granted in our lives. Spend a few moments today (and frequently, thereafter) to pause and think about the things in your life that you may be taking for granted: family, friends, love, health, and the wonder of the world around you. Then as is your wont, celebrate what you have.

Best wishes for a happy, prosperous, safe—and secure—2009.

[12/31/08 Addition]: Steve Bellovin has noted that transition to the SHA-2 hash algorithm in certificates (and other uses) would not be simple or quick. He has written a paper describing the difficulties and that paper is online.

There are several news stories now appearing (e.g., Security News) about a serious flaw in how certificates used in online authentication are validated. Ed Felten gives a nice summary of how this affects online WWW site authentication in his Freedom to Tinker blog posting. Brian Krebs also has his usual readable coverage of the problem in his Washington Post article. Steve Bellovin has some interesting commentary, too, about the legal climate.

Is there cause to be concerned? Yes, but not necessarily about what is being covered in the media. There are other lessons to be learned from this.

Short tutorial

First, for the non-geek reader, I’ll briefly explain certificates.

Think about how, online, I can assure myself that the party at the other end of a link is really who they claim to be. What proof can they offer, considering that I don’t have a direct link? Remember that an attacker can send any bits down the wire to me and may access to faster computers than I do.

I can’t base my decision on how the WWW pages appear, or embedded images. Phishing, for instance, succeeds because the phishers set up sites with names and graphics that look like the real banks and merchants, and users trust the visual appearance. This is a standard difficulty for people—understanding the difference between identity (claiming who I am) and authentication (proving who I am).

In the physical world, we do this by using identity tokens that are issued by trusted third parties. Drivers licenses and passports are two of the most common examples. To get one, we need to produce sufficient proof of identity to a third party to meet its standards of proof. Then, the third party issues a document that is very difficult to forge (almost nothing constructed is impossible to forge or duplicate—but some things require so much time and expenditure it isn’t worthwhile). Because the criteria for proof of identity and strength of construction of the document are known, various other parties will accept the document as “proof” of identity. Of course, other problems occur that I’m not going to address—this USACM whitepaper (of which I was principal author) touches on many of them.

Now, in the online world we cannot issue or see physical documents. Instead, we use certificates. We do this by putting together an electronic document that gives the information we want some entity to certify as true about us. The format of this certificate is generally fixed by standards, the most common one being the X.509 suite. This document is sent to an organization known as a Certificate Authority (CA), usually along with a fee. The certificate authority is presumably well-known, and performs a check (to their own standards) that the information in the document is correct, and it has the right form. The CA then calculate a digital hash value of the data, and creates a digital signature of that hash value. This is then added to the certificate and sent back to the user. This is the equivalent of putting a signature on a license and then sealing it in plastic. Any alteration of the data will change the digital hash, and a third party will find that the new hash and the hash value signed with the key of the CA don’t match. The reason this works is that the hash function and encryption algorithm used are presumed to be so computationally difficult to forge that it is basically not possible.

As an example of a certificate , if you visit “https://www.cerias.purdue.edu” you can click on the little padlock icon that appears somewhere in the browser window frame (this is browser dependent) to view details of the CERIAS SSL certificate.

You can get more details on all this by reading the referenced Wikipedia pages, and by reading chapters 5 & 7 in Web Security, Privacy and Commerce.

Back to the hack

In summary, some CAs have been negligent about updating their certificate signing mechanisms in the wake of news that MD5 is weak, published back in 2004. The result is that malicious parties can generate and obtain a certificate “authenticating” them as someone else. What makes it worse is that the root certificate of most of these CAs are “built in” to browser and application trust lists to simplify look-up of new certificates. Thus, most people using standard WWW browsers can be fooled into thinking they have connected to real, valid sites—even through they are connecting to rogue sites.

The approach is simple enough: a party constructs two certificates. One is for the false identity she wishes to claim, and the other is real. She crafts the contents of the certificate so that the MD5 hash of the two, in canonical format, is the same. She submits the real identity certificate to the authority, which verifies her bona fides, and returns the certificate with the MD5 hash signed with the CA private key. Our protagonist then copies that signature to the false certificate, which has the same MD5 hash value and thus the same digital signature, and proceeds with her impersonation!

What makes this worse is that the false key she crafts is for a secondary certificate authority. She can publish this in appropriate places, and is now able to mint as many false keys as she wishes—and they will all have signatures that verify in the chain of trust back to the issuer! She can even issue these new certificates using a stronger hash algorithm than MD5!

What makes this even worse is that it has been known for years that MD5 is weak, yet some CAs have continued to use it! Particularly unfortunate is the realization that Lenstra, Wang and de Weger described how this could be done back in 2005. Methinks that may be grounds for some negligence lawsuits if anyone gets really burned by this….

And adding to the complexity of all this is the issue of certificates in use for other purposes. For example, certificates are used with encrypted S/MIME email to digitally sign messages. Certificates are used to sign ActiveX controls for Microsoft software. Certificates are used to verify the information on many identity cards, including (I believe) government-issued Common Access Cards (CAC). Certificates also provide identification for secured instant messaging sessions (e.g., iChat). There may be many other sensitive uses because certificates are a “known” mechanism. Cloud computing services , software updates, and more may be based on these same assumptions. Some of these services may accept and/or use certificates issued by these deficient CAs.

Fixes

Fixing this is not trivial. Certainly, all CAs need to start issuing certificates based on other message digests, such as SHA-1. However, this will take time and effort, and may not take effect before this problem can be exploited by attackers. Responsible vendors will cease to issue certificates until they get this fixed, but that has an economic impact some many not wish to incur.

We can try to educate end-users about this, but the problem is so complicated with technical details, the average person won’t know how to actually make a determination about valid certificates. It might even cause more harm by leading people to distrust valid certificates by mistake!

It is not possible to simply say that all existing applications will no longer accept certificates rooted at those CAs, or will not accept certificates based on MD5: there are too many extant, valid certificates in place to do that. Eventually, those certificates will expire, and be replaced. That will eventually take care of the problem—perhaps within the space of the next 18 months or so (most certificates are issued for only a year at a time, in part for reasons such as this).

Vendors of applications, and especially WWW browsers, need to give careful thought about updates to their software to flag MD5-based certificates as deserving of special attention. This may or may not be a worthwhile approach, for the reason given above: even with a warning, too few people will be able to know what to do.

Bigger issue

We base a huge amount of trust on certificates and encryption. History has shown how easy it is to get implementations and details wrong. History has also shown how quickly things can be destabilized with advances in technology.

In particular, too many people and organizations take for granted the assumptions on which this vast certificate system is based. For instance, we assume that the hash/digest functions in use are computationally difficult to reverse or cause collisions. We also assume that certain mathematical functions underlying public/private key encryption are too difficult to reverse or “brute force.” However, all it takes is some new insight or analysis, or maybe new, affordable technology (e.g., practical quantum computing, or massively parallel computing) to violate those assumptions.

If you look at the way our systems are constructed, too little thought is given to what happens to existing infrastructure when something breaks. Designs can include compensating and recovery code, but doing so requires some cost in space or time. However, all too often people are willing to avoid the investment by putting off the danger to “if and when that happens.” Thus, we instance such as the Y2K problems and the issues here with potentially rogue CAs.

(I’ll note as an aside, that when I designed the original version of Tripwire and what became the Signacert product, I specifically included simultaneous use of several different message digest functions in different families for this very reason. I knew it was a matter of time before one or two were broken. I still believe that it is beyond reason to find files that will match multiple, different algorithms simultaneously.)

Another issue is the whole question of who we trust, and for what. As noted in the USACM whitepaper, authentication is always relative to a third party. How much do we trust those third parties? How much trust have we invested in the companies and agencies issuing certificates? Are they properly verifying identities? How good is there internal security? How do we know, and how much is at risk from our trust in those entities?

Let me leave you with a final thought. How do we know that this problem has not already been quietly exploited? The basic concept has been in the open literature for years. The general nature of this attack on certificates has been known for well over a decade, if not two. Given the technical and infrastructure resources available to national agencies and organized criminals, and given the motivation to use this hack selectively and quietly, how can we know that it is not already being used?

[Added 12/31/2008]: A follow-up post to this one is available in the blog.

[tags]interview,certification[/tags]I was recently interviewed by Gary McGraw for his Silver Bullet interview series.  He elicited my comments on a number of topics, including security testing, ethical hacking, and why security is difficult.If you like any of my blog postings, you might find the interview of some interest.  But if not, you might some of the other interviews of interest – mine was #18 in the series.

[tags]security failures, infosecurity statistics, cybercrime, best practices[/tags]
Back in May, I commented here on a blog posting about the failings of current information security practices.  Well, after several months, the author, Noam Eppel, has written a comprehensive and thoughtful response based on all the feedback and comments he received to that first article.  That response is a bit long, but worth reading.

Basically, Noam’s essays capture some of what I (and others) have been saying for a while—many people are in denial about how bad things are, in part because they may not really be seeing the “big picture.”  I talk with hundreds of people in government, academic, and industry around the world every few months, and the picture that emerges is as bad—or worse—than Noam has outlined.

Underneath it all, people seem to believe that putting up barriers and patches on fundamentally bad designs will lead to secure systems.  It has been shown again and again (and not only in IT) that this is mistaken.  It requires rigorous design and testing, careful constraints on features and operation, and planned segregation and limitation of services to get close to secure operation.  You can’t depend on best practices and people doing the right thing all the time.  You can’t stay ahead of the bad guys by deploying patches to yesterday’s problems.  Unfortunately, managers don’t want to make the hard decisions and pay the costs necessary to really get secure operations, and it is in the interests of almost all the vendors to encourage them down the path of third-party patching.

I may expand on some of those issues in later blog postings, depending on how worked up I get, and how the arthritis/RSI in my hands is doing (which is why I don’t write much for journals & magazines, either).  In the meantime, go take a look at Noam’s response piece.  And if you’re in the US, have a happy Thanksgiving.

[posted with ecto]