Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence, AI, is a new user interface to the computer.  Large language models (LLMs) make the computer easier to use.  They permit us to describe the result that we want in natural language. improving productivity and enabling new applications.  AI will improve intellectual productivity as much as the internal combustion did for manual productivity.  In response to internal combustion, and more specifically the tractor,  we shortened the work week from 72 hours to 44 and invented vacations and retirement.  In the process, we killed off two generations of young men and still suffered 25% unemployment.  Said another way, increases in productivity are disruptive.  

The computer, with or without AI, is a tool.  Tools vary in quality, utility, usability, and use.  The user is responsible for the selection of the tool, the purpose to which it is put, and for all the properties of the result.  This is true whether the user is an individual or a group.  An enterprise must be responsible and accountable for everything that results from its application of this powerful technology. We call this security and we forget any part of it at our peril. We must not impute authority or autonomy to the tool; we must not anthropomorphize the tool.  "The craftsman does not blame his tools."  We must hold people accountable for how we use this powerful new tool.  

In the near term we should focus on embedded application specific implementations of AI.  We should follow the example of IBM, a pioneer in the field.  IBM trains the engine, think Watson, on application specific curated data; they build in governance and transparency from the ground up.

Public policy must soften the impact of the disruption.  This will include shortening the work week to spread the work and the leisure.  It should include a guaranteed minimum income to ease transition from old jobs and skills to new ones.  Finally, it should include changes in tax policy from labor to capital, people to robots, and production to consumption, to more securely and equitably finance the social safety net.  

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.

Open Letter to my Congressman

Sir:

In my forty years in information security I have come to have many colleagues in the intelligence community.  I find them to be brilliant and noble.  I have also found them to be myopic, artful, and zealous.  I have watched their testimony before both the House and Senate judiciary committees.  While I have been impressed by their testimony, I have been less impressed by the questioning.   The testimony has been carefully rehearsed and very consistent.  Where the questioning has not been sympathetic, it has been inept.  Even those legislators who recognize that the testimony is misleading are prevented by secrecy and decorum from asking the questions that might really inform the citizens or even saying so when a witness lies under oath. 

·         Here is a short list of questions that I would like put to the administration to answer under oath.

• Does GCHQ target American citizens on behalf of the US government?  What did we get for our $152M? 
• Does the NSA target citizens of the United Kingdom?  Does it do so on behalf of the UK government? 
• What programs, besides the collection of all telephone call records, does the NSA operate under USA Patriot Act, Section 215?  What programs, other than PRISM, does it operate under the FISA, Section 702?  Are we going to be surprised by more revelations?   
• NSA has admitted that a query to the call records database implicates not only those connected directly to the "seed" number but all those associated with it to "three hops."  What is the largest number of phone numbers implicated by any single query?  How many subscribers have been implicated by the hundreds of queries made since the inception of the program?  Is it possible that there is any American citizen  that has not been swept up in this huge drag net?
• Given the density of modern digital storage, e.g., a terabyte in a shirt pocket for $100, what is NSA storing that requires 24 acres of floor space in Utah?  
• What percentage of the e-mail that crosses our borders does NSA collect?  Store?  Analyze?  Disseminate to other agencies of government?  
• Given the demonstrations by Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning as to the breadth and depth of their access, how can we rely upon the assurances of NSA  that they can protect us from abuse of the information they collect?  Doesn't the mere collection of all this information invite, not to say guarantee, abuse?
• Doesn't the mammoth budget ($75B in 2t012?) of NSA justify the conclusion that NSA operates on the premise that "Because we can, we must," and without any regard for efficiency?   Are they not spending far more than doing nothing would cost?
• Does not the Bush "Warrantless Surveillance Program" demonstrate that citizens cannot rely upon bureaucrats and spies to protect us from over-zealous, not to say rogue, politicians?  Are we building capabilities now that will empower politicians of the future? 
• Does the NSA require a warrant before they target US citizens on behalf of the FBI?  Secret Service? DEA?  MI5?  MI6?  
• Does the NSA protect American citizens from surveillance by their peers and colleagues in other nations?  
•  Is information passed to the FBI by NSA ever, usually, sufficient for the issuance of a wiretap warrant?  A National Security Letter?  
•  Do the intelligence agencies selectively share intelligence with legislators in order to curry support?
• 
  

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."

Welcome to "Thinking about Security"

This is the first entry in this blog, Thinking about Security.

A legitimate reaction would be, "Just what I need, one more blog about security." So, how is this blog different? Why should anyone care?

First, unlike most on this subject, this blog is not topical. While I may sometimes use a current report to illustrate an idea, this blog is not about what happened today. Indeed, in part, it is about "today not." It is not about the patch, attack, threat, or vulnerability of the day.

Rather, this blog is about a context and perspective in which to view and respond to the events of the day. It is about:

• Decision Making
• Governance
• Policy
• Strategy
• Priorities
• Management System
• Rules and Tools
  

It responds to my observation that security is a space in which intuition does not serve us well and in which rational thinking is difficult. There are many variables, some of which are un-identified. Even for the identified variables, the range of possible values, much less the exact or current value, may be unknown, or even unknowable. So, this blog will stress making hard decisions in the face of uncertainty.

The tools that we use to make these decisions include the language of risk assessment. We must keep these tools sharp and practice our skill in using them However, few security professionals, much less others, use the terms of this language (e.g., risk, threat, attack, vulnerability) in a consistent and mutually exclusive way. For example, when asked by a reporter to enumerate threats confronting the enterprise in the coming year, a famous security guru (in the literal sense of guru) quickly listed three vulnerabilities, novel, interesting (at least to the two of us) and totally irrelevant to the average enterprise. So in this blog we will practice the use of these tools.

Because this is such a hard subject to talk about, your feeback will be necessary and welcome.