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. ...

There’s a story of a toothbrush security advisory making the rounds. This advisory is pretty funny but it matters. The actual issue with the toothbrush isn’t a huge deal, an attacker isn’t going to do anything exciting with the problems. The interesting issue here is we’re at the start of many problems like this we’re going to see. Today some engineers built a clever toothbrush. Tomorrow they’re going to build new things, different things. Security will matter for some of them. It won’t matter for most of them. ...

This tweet https://twitter.com/RichFelker/status/666325066838339584 Led to this thread http://marc.info/?t=144778171800001&r=1&w=2 The short version is there are some developers from Red Hat working on gcc attempting to prevent ROP style attacks. More than one person has accused this work of being pointless and a waste of time. It’s not, the waste of time is arguing about why trying new things is dumb. Here’s the important thing security people always screw up. The only waste of time is if you do nothing and complain about the people who are doing something. ...

Today containers are a bit like how cars used to work a long long long time ago. You couldn’t really buy a car, you had to build it yourself or find someone who could build one for you in their barn. The parts were terrible and things would break all the time. It probably ran on steam or was pulled by a horse. Containers aren’t magic. Well they are for most people. Almost all technology is basically magic for almost everyone. There are some who understand it but generally speaking, it’s complicated. People know enough to get by which is fine, but that also means you have to trust your supplier. Your car is probably magic to you. You put gas in a hole in the back, then you can press buttons, push peddles, and turn wheels to transport you places. I’m sure a lot of people at this point are running through the basics of how cars work in their heads to reassure themselves its’ not magic and they know what’s going on! ...

If you pay any attention to the news, no doubt the story of the Linux ransomware that’s making the rounds. There has been much said about the technical merits of this, but there are two things I keep wondering. Is this a singular incident, or the first of many? ** ** You could argue this either way. It might be a one off blip, it might be the first of more to come. We shouldn’t start to get worked up just yet. If there’s another one of these before the year ends I’m going to stock up on coffee for the impending long nights. ...

Anytime you do anything, no matter how small or big, there will always be three groups of people involved. How we interact with these groups can affect the outcome of our decisions and projects. If you don’t know they exist it can be detrimental to what you’re working on. If you know who they are and how to deal with them, a great deal of pain can be avoided, and you will put yourself in a better position to succeed. ...

How do we talk to the regular people? What’s going to motivate them? What matters to them? You can easily make the case that business is driven by financial rewards, but what can we say or do to get normal people to understand us, to care? Money? Privacy? Donuts? I’m not saying we’re going to turn people into experts, I’m not even suggesting they will reach a point of being slightly competent. Most people can’t fix their car, or wire their house, or fix their pipes. Some can, but most can’t. People don’t need to really know anything about security, they don’t want to, so there’s no point in us even trying. When we do try, they get confused and scared. So really this comes down to: ...

How many times have you tried to get buyin for a security idea at work, or with a client, only to have them say “no”. Even though you knew it was really important, they still made the wrong decision. We’ve all seen this more times than we can count. We usually walk away grumbling about how sorry they’ll be someday. Some of them will be, some won’t. The reason is always the same though: ...

Anytime there’s some sort of vacuum, something will appear to fill the gap. In this context we’re going to look at what’s filling the vacuum in security. There are a lot of smart people, but we’re failing horribly at getting our message out. The answer to this isn’t simple. You have to look at what’s getting attention that doesn’t deserve to get attention. Just because we know a product, service, or idea is hogwash doesn’t mean non security people know this. They have to attempt to find someone to trust, then listen to what they have to say. Unfortunately when you’re talking about extremely complex and technical problems, they listen to whoever they can understand as there’s no way they can determine who is technically more correct. They’re going to follow whoever sounds the smartest. ...