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Category Archives for "Security"

Future Thinking: Niel Harper on Cyber Threats

In 2017, the Internet Society unveiled the 2017 Global Internet Report: Paths to Our Digital Future. The interactive report identifies the drivers affecting tomorrow’s Internet and their impact on Media & Society, Digital Divides, and Personal Rights & Freedoms. In February 2018, we interviewed two stakeholders – Cyrating, a cybersecurity ratings agency, and Niel Harper, Senior Manager, Next Generation Leaders at the Internet Society – to hear their different perspectives on the forces shaping the Internet.

Niel Harper is a Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum. He has more than 20 years of experience in the areas of telecoms management, cybersecurity, IT governance and strategy, ICT policy research and advisory services, and program management. (You can read Cyrating’s interview here).

The Internet Society: Experts predict an increase of frequency and impact of cyberattacks. What form are they likely to take in the future?

Niel Harper: In the foreseeable future, attackers are likely to fall under three categories: organized criminals seeking to profit from malicious online activities, online protesters (also known as hacktivists), and governments who target their own citizens or target other governments, whether for cyberespionage or cyberwarfare.

Criminals will continue to become more organized, selling Continue reading

Future Thinking: Cyrating on Cyber Threats

In 2017, the Internet Society unveiled the 2017 Global Internet Report: Paths to Our Digital Future. The interactive report identifies the drivers affecting tomorrow’s Internet and their impact on Media & Society, Digital Divides, and Personal Rights & Freedoms. In February 2018, we interviewed two stakeholders – Cyrating, a cybersecurity ratings agency, and Niel Harper, Senior Manager, Next Generation Leaders at the Internet Society – to hear their different perspectives on the forces shaping the Internet’s future.

Cyrating is the first cybersecurity ratings agency anchored in Europe, and helps forward-thinking organizations maximize their cybersecurity performance and investments. It identifies potential for improvement, benchmarks it against industry best practices, and provides standardized cybersecurity metrics. We spoke to François Gratiolet, one of Cyrating’s founders, about the future of a secure and trusted Internet.

(You can read Niel Harper’s interview here).

The Internet Society: Experts predict an increase of frequency and impact of cyberattacks. What form are they likely to take in the next three to five years?

François Gratiolet: We believe cyberattacks will intensify in the next three to five years; targeting both Internet users and the Internet’s underlying infrastructure. User attacks will move from phishing to social media, with Continue reading

Validating Leaked Passwords with k-Anonymity

Validating Leaked Passwords with k-Anonymity

Validating Leaked Passwords with k-Anonymity

Today, v2 of Pwned Passwords was released as part of the Have I Been Pwned service offered by Troy Hunt. Containing over half a billion real world leaked passwords, this database provides a vital tool for correcting the course of how the industry combats modern threats against password security.

I have written about how we need to rethink password security and Pwned Passwords v2 in the following post: How Developers Got Password Security So Wrong. Instead, in this post I want to discuss one of the technical contributions Cloudflare has made towards protecting user information when using this tool.

Cloudflare continues to support Pwned Passwords by providing CDN and security functionality such that the data can easily be made available for download in raw form to organisations to protect their customers. Further; as part of the second iteration of this project, I have also worked with Troy on designing and implementing API endpoints that support anonymised range queries to function as an additional layer of security for those consuming the API, that is visible to the client.

This contribution allows for Pwned Passwords clients to use range queries to search for breached passwords, without having to disclose a complete unsalted Continue reading

How Developers got Password Security so Wrong

How Developers got Password Security so Wrong

How Developers got Password Security so Wrong

Both in our real lives, and online, there are times where we need to authenticate ourselves - where we need to confirm we are who we say we are. This can be done using three things:

  • Something you know
  • Something you have
  • Something you are

Passwords are an example of something you know; they were introduced in 1961 for computer authentication for a time-share computer in MIT. Shortly afterwards, a PhD researcher breached this system (by being able to simply download a list of unencrypted passwords) and used the time allocated to others on the computer.

As time has gone on; developers have continued to store passwords insecurely, and users have continued to set them weakly. Despite this, no viable alternative has been created for password security. To date, no system has been created that retains all the benefits that passwords offer as researchers have rarely considered real world constraints[1]. For example; when using fingerprints for authentication, engineers often forget that there is a sizable percentage of the population that do not have usable fingerprints or hardware upgrade costs.

Cracking Passwords

In the 1970s, people started thinking about how to better store passwords and cryptographic hashing started to Continue reading

Episode 22 – Securing BGP

In part 3 of our deep dive into BGP operations, Nick Russo and Russ White join us again on Network Collective to talk about securing BGP. In this episode we cover topics like authentication, advertisement filtering, best practices, origin security, path security, and remotely triggered black holes.

 

 

We would like to thank Cumulus Networks for sponsoring this episode of Network Collective. Cumulus is offering you, our listeners, a completely free O’Reilly ebook on the topic of BGP in the data center. You can get your copy of this excellent technical resource here: http://cumulusnetworks.com/networkcollectivebgp

 

 

Show Notes:

  • Authentication
    1. Classic MD5
    2. Enhanced Authentication extensions (EA). Supported by IOS XR and allows for SHA1 as well, along with key-chain rotations. Doesn’t appear commonly used
    3. GTSM, and how it can be better than the previous option in some cases
  • Basic prefix filtering:
    1. From your customers: allow any number of their own AS prepended
    2. From the Internet: block bogons (RFC1918, class D/E, etc)
    3. To your peers: only your local space (ie, your customers)
    4. From your peers: only routes originating from their AS (any # of prepends)
  • BCP38
    1. Techniques for spoofing prevention
    2. Describe with a simple snail mail analogy
    3. Usually uRPF strict Continue reading

Ready for Take-Off with Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, and vSphere

A complex and diverse world

Singapore. Etihad. Wow. I always found it impressive when airlines were able to build a business and a brand without a significant domestic customer base to start off from. They instead focus on the global market, which is much more challenging. There is a competitive landscape of many players. There is the complexity of interconnecting a world of disparate lands and diverse customer cultures and preferences. An impressive feat.

The world of networking is becoming quite similar. From private, hybrid, and public cloud models, to increased use of SaaS, to the way SaaS and other apps are built using microservices architectures and containers, the landscape of islands to connect in an inherently secure and automated fashion is increasingly diverse and complex.

An app built to demonstrate this diversity

If the airline to networking analogy is lost on you, or you think it’s too much of a stretch, let me pull up the second reason I used planes in my symbolism. My brilliant colleague Yves Fauser built an app to demonstrate how NSX is connecting and securing this variety of new app frameworks, and it happens to be a “plane spotter” app. You may have already Continue reading

FIRST/TF-CSIRT: The Changing Face of Cybersecurity

The Internet Society was recently approved as a Liaison Member of TF-CSIRT, the European Forum for Computer Security Incident Response Teams, and therefore took the opportunity to participate in the FIRST/TF-CSIRT Symposium that was held 5-7 February 2018 in Hamburg, Germany.

The Internet Society continues to support organisations and activities concerned with maintaining the safety, stability and security of the Internet, and our colleague Kevin Meynell is already known within the TF-CSIRT community having run the forum between 2008 and 2012 and overseen its transition from a grouping of primarily academic CSIRTs to a wider industry body encompassing more than 160 National, Government, Military and Commercial CSIRTs, as well as those in academia.

TF-CSIRT meets three times per year, but starting in 2008 the first meeting of the year has always been held jointly with FIRST, the global Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams. This provides an opportunity for the European CSIRTs to meet with their counterparts around the world to exchange information, and develop the networks of trust that are critical to effective cooperation in handling cyber incidents when they occur, but also in development of early warning and prevention techniques.

And a number of the presentations had particular Continue reading

How Useful Is Microsegmentation?

Got an interesting microsegmentation-focused email from one of my readers. He started with:

Since every SDDC vendor is bragging about need for microsegmentation in order to protect East West traffic and how their specific products are better compared to competition, I’d like to ask your opinion on a few quick questions.

First one: does it even make sense?

Read more ...

NDSS 2018: Automating the Process of Vulnerability Discovery

NDSS 2018 is in full swing in San Diego this week and a couple of papers that really grabbed my attention were both in the same session on Network Security and Cellular Networks yesterday.

Samuel Jero, a PhD student at Purdue University and past IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize Winner, presented a fascinating paper on “Automated Attack Discovery in TCP Congestion Control Using a Model-guided Approach”. Of the many protocols and algorithms that are in daily use on the Internet, some are more fundamental and important than others and it doesn’t get much more fundamental and important than TCP congestion control.

TCP congestion control is what makes it possible for millions of autonomous devices and networks to seamlessly, and more-or-less fairly, share available bandwidth. Without it the network would literally collapse.

Attacks against congestion control to manipulate senders’ or receivers’ understanding of the state of the network have been known for some time. Jero and his co-authors Endadul Hoque, David Choffnes, Alan Mislove and Cristina Nita-Rotaru developed an approach using model-based testing to address the scalability challenges of previous work to automate the discovery of manipulation attacks against congestion control algorithms.

By building abstract models of several congestion Continue reading

On the ‘net: Spectre, Meltdown, and Flexible Scaleout

The recent Meltdown and Spectre attacks illustrate the problematic nature of modern computing systems. While the earlier Rowhammer attack could read or attack one process running in a virtual environment from another process running on the same processor, the Meltdown and Spectre attacks are of a completely different class, enabling a process to read large amounts of information from another process’ memory space. @GestaltIT

Context-Aware Micro-segmentation – Remote Desktop Session Host Enhancements for Citrix

In a previous post by my colleague, Stijn, discussed the new changes to how NSX for vSphere 6.4 handles Remote Desktop Session Host, RDSH, systems with the Identity-based Firewall and context-aware micro-segmentation.

RDSH is an underlying technology from Microsoft that many vendors take advantage of to provide overlay management and application deployment technologies for.  In this post, we’re going to discuss how NSX 6.4 and the new changes to support RDSH hosts works with Citrix XenApp systems.

Citrix XenApp can provide multiple users the ability to connect to a single system to access their applications using the RDSH technology.  These users can be of the same type, for example all HR users, or of multiple types, HR and Engineering users.  NSX has supported User Identity based firewalling for Virtual Desktops since the 6.0 release, but it did not address RDSH in which multiple user sessions are connecting to the same host  This meant less flexibility in controlling what users could access data center application servers without isolating one set of users to one RDSH server.  This model created a very rigid architecture for XenApp customers to follow, which brought about the use of Continue reading

Report: Distributed IoT Security and Standards Workshop at NDSS 2018

Network and Distributed Systems Security (NDSS) Symposium is in full swing for its 25th anniversary year. As usual the NDSS program includes a really impressive array of great content on a wide range of topics. Prior to the main event there were four one-day workshops on themes related to the topic of NDSS: Binary Analysis Research, DNS Privacy, Usable Security, and the workshop I’d like to delve into here, Distributed IoT Security and Standards (DISS).

The DISS workshop received 29 submissions and accepted 12 papers. In an interesting twist on the usual scientific workshop format, the presented papers were all still in draft form and will now be revised based on the Q&A and offline discussions that took place as a result of the workshop. Revised papers will be published by the Internet Society in due course.

Introducing proceedings, co-chair Dirk Kutscher explained that it has become evident that the success of the Internet of Things (IoT) depends on sound and usable security and privacy. Device constraints, intermittent network connectivity, the scale of deployments, economic issues all combine to create an interesting and challenging environment for the research community to address.

A decentralised approach to IoT security Continue reading

Busy Week for MANRS, Routing Security, and More at APRICOT 2018

APRICOT 2018 is underway in in Kathmandu, Nepal, and as usual the Internet Society is an active participant in many areas of Asia Pacific’s largest international Internet conference. The workshops are taking place this week, with the conference happening next week. Here are some of the conference activities where we’ll be.

Routing Security BoF

On Sunday, 25 February, from 18:00 to 19:00 (UTC +05:45), Aftab Siddiqui and Andrei Robachevsky will moderate a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session on routing security. From the abstract, the session will provide a space where “…operators can share their approach in securing their own infrastructure and keeping the internet routing table clean as well. Also, this will provide a platform to review and highlight various BCOP documents to address routing security.” The Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) initiative is a key piece of the routing security puzzle.

Tech Girls Social

On Monday, 26 February, from 13:00 to 14:00 (UTC +05:45), Salam Yamout will be speaking at the Tech Girls Social. This session provides a space for APRICOT participants to talk and network in an open, friendly environment. The event is open to ANYONE who is interested and is not restricted to Continue reading

Starting Today: NDSS Highlights the Best in Internet Security Research

You’ve undoubtedly heard about all sorts of Internet security vulnerabilities and incidents causing harm around the world, but the flip side of all that doom and gloom is all the promising efforts underway to create a more secure, private, and trusted Internet. Starting today and going through Wednesday (18-21 February), the Network and Distributed Systems Security (NDSS) Symposium takes place to present groundbreaking research in the world of Internet security.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of NDSS, and the Internet Society is proud to have been associated with it for over 20 years now. A key focus of the Internet Society has long been improving trust in the global open Internet. In order to promote this trust, we need new and innovative ideas and research on the security and privacy of our connected devices and the Internet that brings them together. NDSS is a top tier forum for highlighting this research.

NDSS 2018 is four full days featuring:

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