Awesome debate on fear and security

Bruce Schneier has a great piece on fear and logic and the nuclear industry.

The best part is the comments. In the comments, you can really see some of the interplay between fears based on facts and logical reasoning and fear based on raw emotions.

It is interesting to see how some commenters compare the risks to other things that we accept as "normal" or "reasonable" VS those commenters who try to support their comments with gut feeling and fear-mongering.

Awesome!

Metasploit Tutorials...

Offensive Security is hosting a series of tutorials related to using the Metasploit framework.

I haven't had the chance to take a look yet...but they sound promising.

These are being released in support of the Hackers for Charity project that Johnny Long is associated with...from the tutorial homepage:

"This free information security training is brought to you in a community effort to promote awareness and raise funds for underprivileged children in East Africa. Through a heart-warming effort by several security professionals, we are proud to present the most complete and in-depth open course about the Metasploit Framework."

chalmer

Most common passwords

Good article on Wired.com about the results of an analysis of passwords used by Hotmail users...
Out of about 10,000 passwords that were studied, the most common was:
123456
Some of the others showed signs of cultural bias, that reveal potential geolocational evidence...i.e. the large number of Spanish names.

chalmer

Battle against the dark side...

One of my students made a very interesting comment the other day...about wanting to engage in battle against the dark side.

So what does it mean to engage in battle against the dark side? There are very direct and flamboyants ways to do so. Presuming you work for the government, you may have these exciting jobs:

• hack the computers of the enemy to steal info and plant malware in case of cyber-warfare
• monitor the behavior of the enemy as they attempt to hack your systems and find ways to shut them out

Presume you don't work for the government? There are other ways to combat the enemy and even though they do not sound as glamorous, they are none-the-less critically important to the safety and well-being of the nation.

• keep your own systems safe from the bad guys so they can't be used as a springboard to launch other attacks
• improve the tools and training used by others in the field so that collectively there is a greater impact on the infrastructure as a whole
• educate the computer illiterate on safe computing

One interesting issue about the dark side...that all depends on your perspective:

When sponsored by a government, the exact same behaviors go from being illegal to being completely legal. For example: if a U.S. civilian hacks the U.S. Department of Defense, it is a crime. If a U.S. soldier, while under orders, hacks the Russian Ministry of Defence, it is simply good military strategy and perfectly legal in the eyes of the U.S. Government. But...the Russians might not find it so entertaining...

Learn something new every day: NEAT

Recently read an article on Multiple Independent Levels of Security (MILS) which used an acronym whose concepts I was familiar with, but that I had not heard before: NEAT. It stands for:

1. Non-bypassable
2. Evaluatable
3. Always-invoked
4. Tamperproof

In a recent class, I commented on applying three of these to reference monitors and trusted computing bases:

1. tamper proof
2. non-bypassable
3. small enough/simple enough that it can be thoroughly tested for correctness

In retrospect, I probably should have mentioned to them the idea of "always-invoked" (note to self: include that in next class revision) and I probably could have saved some bandwidth by substituting in the much shorter word "evaluatable".

Well...you learn something new all the time, and for me, that is NEAT!

chalmer

P.S. NEAT gets mentions on page two of the four page article.

Lies, damn lies and statistics...

The following linked article from ComputerWorld UK has some interesting quotes about the growth of Windows operating systems in running a number of supercomputers. Apparently Windows has increased their market share by 400%, while in the same period, Linux only increased its market share by only 51%. This sounds pretty impressive, until you take the time to look at the numbers behind the numbers.

Read the article to see what I mean!

One of the principles I share with my students is to try to look at things with a critical eye. This is a great example of how numbers can be misleading.

chalmer

More secure workstations in the federal government?

The new Federal Desktop Core Configuration standard just kicked in. This standardized configuration for government computers should help to limit some of the crazy misconfigurations we see in many government computers. For more info on the FDCC and the sister project Security Content Automated Protocol (SCAP) you can go to these web-sites:
* FDCC
* SCAP

Logical vs Emotional Fears...

Disregarding the fact that fear is emotional by nature, I recently engaged my students in a discussion of whether our fears are based on:

• something logical, reasonable and quantifiable OR
• something rooted in emotion or gut reaction

Shortly after we had that discussion, I came across this article in Psychology Today and wanted to share it with you...
Ten Ways We Get the Odds Wrong

There is a quiz at the end of the article. Good luck.

Chalmer

DHS funding something worthwhile?

Bruce Schneier linked to an interesting factoid about the Department of Homeland Security.  Seems they are funding scans of a number of open source software project codebases to check for flaws and defects.  Coverity is providing the scanner and the software packages include some big ticket items...including a number of items that form the backbone of the Internet (Apache, Linux, etc).  Because of the scans, over 7,000 flaws have been fixed to date.  The comments by the readers are pretty insightful.  I posted my own comment in the mix, just for good measure.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/02/a_good_security.html