Security

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard about the latest glibc issue. CVE-2015-7547 - glibc stack-based buffer overflow in getaddrinfo() It’s always hard to understand some of these issues, so I’m going to do my best to explain it using simple language. Making security easy to understand is something I’ve been talking about for a long time now, it’s time to do something about it. What is it? The fundamental problem here is that glibc has a bug that could allow a DNS response from an attacker to run the command of that attacker’s choosing on your system. The final goal of course would be to become the root user. ...

I had some discussions this week about security and the market. When I say the market I speak of what sort of products will people or won’t people buy based on some requirements centered around security. This usually ends up at a discussion about regulation. That got me wondering if there are any industries that are unregulated, have high safety requirements, and aren’t completely unsafe? After a little research, it seems SCUBA is the industry I was looking for. If you read the linked article (which you should, it’s great) the SCUBA story is an important lesson for the security industry. Our industry moves fast, too fast to regulate. Regulation would either hurt innovation or be useless due to too much change. Either way it would be very expensive. SCUBA is a place where the lack of regulation has allowed for dramatic innovation over the past 50 years. The article compares the personal aircraft industry which has substantial regulation and very little innovation (but the experimental aircraft industry is innovating due to lax regulation). ...

I’ve noted a few times in the past the whole security industry is run by magicians. I don’t mean this in a bad way, it’s just how things work. Long term will will have to change, but it’s not going to be an easy path. When I say everything is run by magicians I speak of extremely smart people who are so smart they don’t need or have process (they probably don’t want it either so there’s no incentive). They can do whatever needs to be done whenever it needs doing. The folks in the center are incredibly smart but they learned their skills on their own and don’t know how to pass on knowledge. We have no way to pass knowledge on to others, many don’t even know this is a problem. Magicians can be awesome if you have one, until they quit. New industries are created by magicians but no industry succeeds with magicians. There are a finite number of these people and an infinite number of problems. ...

If you pay attention at all, this week you heard about a security flaw in OpenSSH. Link to scary security flaw Of course nothing is going to change because of this. We didn’t make any real changes after Heartbleed or Shellshock, this isn’t nearly as bad, it’s business as usual. Trying to force change isn’t the important part though. The important thing to think about is the context this bug exists in. The folks who work on OpenSSH are some of the brightest security minds in the world. We’re talking well above average here, not just bright. If they can’t avoid security mistakes, is there any hope for the normal people? ...

If you live in the US you can’t escape the news about the Powerball lottery. The jackpot has grown to $1.3 Billion (with a capital B). Everyone is buying tickets and talking about what they’ll do when they win enough money to ruin their life. This made me realize the unfortunate truth about security we like to ignore. Humans are bad at reality. Here is how most of my conversations go. ...

Over the holiday break I spent a lot of time reading and thinking about what the security problem really is. It’s really hard to describe, no analogies work, and things just seem to keep getting worse. Until now! Maybe. Well, things will probably keep getting worse, but I think I’ve found a way to describe this almost anyone can understand. We can’t really talk about our problems today, which makes it impossible to fix anything. ...

If you have any sort of gym membership you dread the month of January. Every year, there are countless people who make a resolution to get in shape, so the gym is flooded with people for much of January. I’m in favor of everyone staying in shape and having a gym membership, my point isn’t to claim how annoying the n00bs are. The point of this story is how few people stick around, and most give up because doing nothing is often easier than doing something. ...

Mallory was dead: to begin with. Bob knew he was dead, and nobody liked Bob, he was the security guy, nobody likes the security guy. “Merry Christmas Bob!” said Alice. “Bah humbug!” was the reply. Bob had to work over Christmas protecting the network, he had no reason to be merry. As Bob opened the door to the server room he noticed the door knocker looked like Mallory, which was odd as the server room door didn’t have a knocker. A closer inspection led Bob to believe his mind was playing tricks on him. ...

If you’re old enough, you remember reading a lot about the coming “paperless office”. It never came, but I realized there are parallels we can draw in the context of our current security problems. Back in the 90’s, everyone wanted a paperless office. It sounded neat and with the future coming, who would need paper with all the flying cars and hoverboards! It turns out paper didn’t go away. Everyone keeps talking about how security is the most important thing ever, investing in the paperless office was once the most important thing ever. ...

I had a meeting with some non security people to discuss some of the challenges around security. It’s a rather popular topic these days but nobody knows what that means (remember 5 years ago when everyone talked about cloud but nobody knew what that meant?). The details are irrelevant, the most important thing that came out of this meeting was when someone pointed out as a group we are impatient. ...