Apple Titanium Card

I have been waiting for the delivery of my Titanium Card to be delivered to write this evaluation.  Read it in the context of my last post.  

The card is delivered via FedEx in a large envelope.  There is a return address but it does not say "Apple."  This resists theft of the card in transit.

Inside the FedEx envelope is a tamper evident 4.5" x 6.25" x 0.25" corrugated cardboard package containing the card.  This protects against tampering with or skimming the card in transit.  

While a signature is not required for delivery, one gets a notification of delivery.  This may narrow the window of opportunity for theft from the doorstep.  

Only after receipt does one see the button in the Wallet App to "activate" the card.  This resists any use of the card prior to receipt by the legitimate owner.  

While the owner's name is on the face of the card, the card number, expiration date, and the CVV are not.  While the number is on the magnetic strip, unlike with all other cards, it is different from the number that one would use at an e-commerce site.  Thus, the only way that one might monetize knowledge of the number would be to use it to counterfeit a card.  

Note that any fraudulent use of the number on the stripe will show up immediately on the owner's iPhone so that the transaction can be reported as fraudulent and the number can be reported as compromised.  Skimming the number and counterfeiting a card for one or two uses is a high hurdle.  

The value on the magnetic stripe, provided for backwards compatibility, on a card which will be used sparingly, is a limited vulnerability.  From a security perspective, consumers should prefer Apple Pay (using iPhone of Apple Watch), EMV, manual entry of the number (from the iPhone Wallet App), and swiping the magnetic stripe in that order.  While the magnetic stripe is more convenient than manual entry, many users may never have to use either.  As point of sale devices are modernized, the requirement for any alternative to contactless or "chip" will decline.  

Finally, in the app, one can disable and enable the card.  Thus one can carry the card while mitigating the risk of fraudulent use should it be lost or stolen.  Since I expect the use of the Titanium card to be sparse, mine remains disabled by default.  Others may choose to leave it enabled by default, disabling it only should it be lost or stolen.

The vulnerability of the number on the magnetic stripe is not limited to the Titanium card; so far it is not possible to get any other credit card without this vulnerability.  On the other hand, the Titanium card does not have the vulnerability of having the primary account number, the expiration date, and the CVV on the face.  Therefore, if one is going to carry a credit of debit card with a number in the clear on the magnetic stripe, the Titanium card is the clear favorite.  

(Incidentally, I convinced myself.  I got the Titanium card, intending to put it in the drawer and never carry it.)

Control of Privileged Insiders

On April 23, 2019 the FBI published a Private Industry Notification (20190423-001).  The document was distributed as a pdf only by e-mail.  While marked “TLP-White,” “may be distributed without restriction," I could not find it on the web.

The summary read:

The FBI continues to observe U.S. businesses’ reporting significant losses caused by cyber insider threat actors.  These cases often involve former or disgruntled employees exploiting their enhanced privileges—such as unfettered access to company networks and software, remote login credentials, and administrative permissions— to harm companies. Cyber insider threat actors most often are motivated by revenge, but they also conduct attacks to profit financially from stolen information, gain a competitive edge at a new company, engage in extortion, or commit fraud through unauthorized sales and purchases.

I recommend it to the reader.  (Since I cannot find it on the web, here is a link to a private copy.)

There are two kinds of insider risk, accidental and intentional, and three threat sources, benign, dishonest, and disgruntled employees.  Note that insider threat rate is much lower than the outsider threat but the consequences, and therefore risk, may be much greater.  Outsiders damage the brand while insiders may bring down the business.

Not only is employee error by otherwise well motivated and intended employees perhaps the biggest source of losses ("The dummies have it, hands down, now and forever."  --Robert H. Courtney)  but it contributes to the success of attacks by outsiders. (Think “phishing” and other forms of duping.)  Undetected errors may result in employee temptation and fraud.  The employee makes an error and no one notices.  She repeats and still no one notices.  She finally concludes that she could do it in her own favor and still no one would notice.   We distinguish between dishonest employees, who want to keep their activities secret, and disgruntled employees who want you to know that you have been injured.  

Management supervision is the most effective of all insider controls.  Effective supervision usually requires that the supervisor could do, or at least appreciate, the job being supervised.  This control often breaks down for privileged IT jobs.  The more sensitive or unique the task to be supervised, the more narrow should be the span of control.  While one might be able to supervise a dozen tellers or coders, one might supervise no more than five or six loan officers, system designers, or privileged administrators.  

The limitation of supervision is cost; while it is effective, it is also expensive.  Therefore, other more efficient and complimentary controls are often substituted for all or part supervision.  These might include background checks, training, division of responsibility and privileges (so-called multi-party controls), cross training, job rotation, measurement, mandatory vacations, audit trails and audits, recognition, compensation, and complete and timely separation.  

I had been writing and talking on this subject for a few years before I added “please and thank you” to my list of controls.  While equitable compensation is a powerful control, no amount of it can compensate for inadequate recognition.  Many dishonest and most disgruntled employees feel that their contribution to the enterprise has not been appreciated.  Please and thank you go a long way toward maintaining necessary morale.  

The FBI notification gives special attention to IT personnel and, especially, privileged users such as system administrators.  Management often focuses on lower level employees, like tellers or clerks, doing routine tasks.  Where these engage in fraud they get little and are caught early.  It is professionals, managers, and executives who bring down the business.

It is ironic that these highly privileged actors are often inadequately supervised, under paid, and unaccountable.  We caution against the sharing of user IDs and passwords, but it is privileged IDs and passwords that are most likely to be shared.  Many administrators have so much privilege that they cannot be held accountable, can escalate their privileges, and the privileges, once granted, cannot be effectively withdrawn.  Think about the privileges that Edward Snowden had to have accumulated to gain access to all the information that he exfiltrated.  

One should not grant privileges that one cannot withdraw.  Therefore, privileged users should be required to use hardware token based strong authentication.  One should not grant privileges without accountability for their use.  Therefore, when there is more than one privileged user, i.e., in most large enterprises, Privileged Access Management (PAM) controls should be in place.  These controls will be covered in a later post.

Internet Vulnerability

On March 24, 2017 Gregory Michaelidis wrote in Slate on "Why America’s Current Approach to Cybersecurity Is So Dangerous."

He cited an article by Bruce Schneier.

In response, I observed to a number of colleagues, proteges, and students that "One takeaway from this article and the Schneier article that it points to is that we need to reduce our attack surface.  Dramatically.  Perhaps ninety percent.  Think least privilege access at all layers to include application white-listing, safe dcfaults, end-to-end application layer encryption, and strong authentication."

One colleague responded "I think one reason the cyber attack surface is so large is that the global intel agencies hoard vulnerabilities and exploits..."  Since secret "vulnerabilities and exploits" account for so little of our attack surface, I fear that he missed my point.

While it is true that intelligence agencies enjoy the benefits of our vulnerable systems and are little motivated to reduce the attack surface, the "hoarded vulnerabilities and exploits" are not the attack surface and the intel agencies are not the cause.  

The cause is the IT culture. There is a broad market preference for open networks, systems, and applications. TCP/IP drove the more secure SNA/SDLC from the field. The market prefers Windows and Linux to OS X, Android to iOS, IBM 360 to System 38, MVS to FS, MS-DOS to OS/2, Z Systems to iSeries, Flash to HTML5, von Neumann architecture [Wintel systems] to almost anything else.  

One can get a degree in Computer Science, even in Cyber Security, without ever even hearing about a more secure alternative architecture to von Neumann's [e.g. IBM iSeries. Closed, finite state architecture (operations can take the system only from one valid state to another), limited set of strongly-typed (e.g., data can not be executed, programs cannot be modified) objects, single level store, symbolic only addressing, etc.)]

We prefer to try and stop leakage at the end user device or the perimeter rather than administer access control at the database or file system. We persist in using replayable passwords in preference to strong authentication, even though they are implicated in almost every breach. We terminate encryption on the OS, or even the perimeter, rather than the application. We deploy user programmable systems where application only systems would do.  We enable escape mechanisms and run scripts and macros by default.

We have too many overly privileged users with almost no multi-party controls. We discourage shared UIDs and passwords for end users but default to them for the most privileged users, where we most need accountability. We store our most sensitive information in the clear, as file system objects, on the desktop, rather than encryptied, in document management systems, on servers. We keep our most sensitive data and mission critical apps on the same systems where we run our most vulnerable applications, browsing and e-mail. We talk about defense in depth but operate our enterprise networks flat, any to any connectivity and trust, not structured, not architected. It takes us weeks to months just to detect breaches and more time to fix them.  

I can go on and I am sure you can add examples of your own. Not only is the intelligence community not responsible for this practice, they are guilty of it themselves. It was this practice, not secret vulnerabilities, that was exploited by Snowden. It is this culture, not "hoarded vulnerabilities and exploits," that is implicated in the breaches of the past few years. It defies reason that one person acting alone could collect the data that Snowden did without being detected.  

Nation states do what they do; their targets of choice will yield to their overwhelming force. However, we need not make it so easy. We might not be able to resist dragons but we are yielding to bears and brigands. I admit that the culture is defensive and resistant to change but it will not be changed by blaming the other guy. "We have seen the enemy and he is us."

The Role of Risk Assessment in Digital Security

The very idea of Risk Assessment has always been controversial.  I have been engaged in the controversy for fifty years. My ideas on the subject are well considered if otherwise no better than anyone else's.  I record them here.

I attribute the application of this idea to what was then called Computer Security to my mentors, later colleagues, Robert H. Courtney, Jr. and Robert V. Jacobson.  They did it in an attempt to rationalize decision making, more specifically the allocation of scarce security resources, to the then nascent field.  They did it in response to their observation that many, not to say most, security decisions were being made based upon the intuition of the decision maker and their belief, and a tenet of this blog, that security is a space in which intuition does not serve us well.  They wanted to bring a little reason to the process.

They could not possibly have known that in a mere fifty years that the resources applied to this effort would grow to the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars, that the safety and liberty of the individual, the health of public and private enterprise, the efficiency and resilience of our economy, and the security of the nations would turn on how effectively and efficiently we used those resources.  

So, at its core risk assessment is a decision making tool.  It is a tool that we use to answer the question "where to spend the next dollar of our limited resources?"  Courtney's Second Law says one should "Never spend more mitigating a risk than tolerating it will cost you." We will, do, make this decision, with or without tools.  We make it intuitively or we make it rationally but we do make it.  

At its most elaborate risk assessment is a very expensive tool requiring significant knowledge, skill, ability, and experience to use, more than most of us enjoy.  It should be used only for expensive decisions, decisions that are expensive to reverse if we get them wrong.  At its simplest, it protects us from making decisions based solely upon the threat, attack, vulnerability, or consequence de jour.  It protects us from intuition, from fear.

All that said, few of us are confronting expensive or difficult decisions, decisions requiring sophisticated decision making tools, risk assessment or otherwise..  We have yet to implement all those measures that we know to be so effective and efficient as to require no further justification.  They are what Peter Tippett calls essential practices.  Anyone can do them, with available resources, they are about 0.8 effective but work synergistically to achieve an arbitrary level of security. They fall in that category that we call "no brainers."  All we need is the will.