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An interview on security challenges of organizations deploying IoT

On July 12th, I was interviewed on Security challenges of organizations deploying IoT. The recorded (and transcribed) video interview can be found here. For those who prefer a written abstract, here is the outline of what I said in reply to a short set of questions about the security challenges with IoT deployment, and the approach followed at Pelion to overcome them.

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COVID vaccination certificates done almost right

Israel is probably the most advanced to date in terms of COVID19 vaccination. With more than one third of the residents fully inoculated, life can almost get back to pseudo-normal. This, however, requires being able to tell the vaccinated people apart from those who are not. The green pass, or vaccination certificate, is made to achieve precisely that. Technically, this government-issued certificate is not substantially different than a driver’s license, just that it’s shorter lived, can be stored in a phone app, and most importantly: was designed in a hurry.

For something that was launched so quickly, it seems to be decently architected, but slightly better work could still be done to protect that piece of attestation that is so critical to public health.

What do we require of a vaccination certificate? Not much, really. It obviously needs to be as secure as it could be made under the strict cost and distribution constraints. The certificate has to also be easily renewable (it currently expires every six months), and it has to be verifiable by a wide range of checkpoints with varying capabilities. Finally, verification has to be both reliable and fast; entry into a shopping mall cannot resemble passport control, and people cannot arbitrarily be locked out of key facilities just because of simple IT downtime.

The certificate itself is sent to its holder by e-mail (or via a web-site), to be printed at home. There are no measures that could be taken to prevent anyone with Microsoft Paint from crafting fake such certificates. The digital part of the vaccination certificate, i.e., the QR Code printed on it, is the only part of the certificate that can practically be used against forgery.

See the following write-up as a quick guide to cheap-but-secure attestation certificates; for COVID or otherwise.

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Machine Learning Security: a new crop of technologies

Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML) specifically, are now at the stage in which we start caring about their security implications. Why now? Because that’s the point at which we usually start caring about the security considerations of new technologies we’ve started using. Looking at previous cases, such as of desktop computing, the Internet, car networks, and IoT (Internet of Things), those technologies first gained fast momentum by the urge to capitalize on their novel use-cases. They were deployed as fast as they could possibly be, by stakeholders rushing to secure their share of the emerging revenue pie. Once the systems started operating en masse, it was finally time to realize that where there is value – there is also malice, and every technology that processes an asset (valuable data that can be traded, the ability to display content to a user and grab her attention, potential for extortion money, etc.) will inevitably lure threat actors who demonstrate impressive creativity when attempting to divert or exploit those assets.

This flow of events is barely surprising, and we were not really shocked to learn that the Internet does not provide much security out of the box, that cars could be hacked remotely through their wireless interfaces, or that cheap home automation gear doesn’t bother to encrypt its traffic. This is economy, and unless there is an immediate public safety issue causing the regulator to intervene (often later than it should), we act upon security considerations only once the new technology is deployed, and the security risks are manifested in a way that they can no longer be ignored.

It happened with desktop computing in the 80’s, with the Internet in the 90’s, with car networks about a decade ago, and with mass IoT about half a decade ago. (In those approximate dates I am not referring to when the first security advocate indicated that there are threats, this usually happened right away if not before, but to when enough security awareness was built for the industry to commit resources towards mitigating some of those threats.) Finally, it’s now the turn of Machine Learning.

When we decide that a new technology “needs security” we look at the threats and see how we can address them. At this point, we usually divide into two camps:

  • Some players, such as those heavily invested in securing the new technology, and consultants keen on capitalizing on the new class of fear that the industry just brought on itself, assert that “this is something different”; everything we knew about security has to be re-learned, and all tools and methodologies that we’ve built no longer suffice. In short, the sky is falling and we’re for the rescue.

  • Older security folks will point at the similarities, concluding that it’s the same security, just with different assets, requirements, and constraints that need to be accounted for. IoT Security is the same security just with resource constrained devices, physical assets, long device lifetime, and harsh network conditions; car security is the same security with a different type of network, different latency requirements, and devastating kinetic effects in case of failure, and so forth.

I usually associate with the second camp. Each new area of security introduces a lot of engineering work, but the basic paradigms remain intact. It’s all about securing computer systems, just with different properties. Those different properties make tremendous differences, and call for different specializations, but the principles of security governance, and even the nature of the high-level objectives, are largely reusable.

With Machine Learning the situation is different. This is a new flavor of security that calls for a new crop of technologies and startups that deploy a different mindset towards solving a new set of security challenges; including challenges that are not at focus in other domains. The remainder of this post will delve into why ML Security is different (unlike the previous examples), and what our next steps could look like when investing in mitigation technologies.

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Product Security Governance: Why and How

The term “security governance” is not widely used in the product security context. When web-searching for a decent definition, among the first results is a definition by Gartner that addresses cyber security rather than product security. Other sources I looked at also focus on IT and cyber security.

But product security governance does exist in practice, and where it doesn’t – it often should. Companies that develop products that have security considerations do engage in some sort of product security activities: code reviews, pen-tests, etc.; just the “governance” part is often missing.

Product security is science; treat it as such.

This post describes what I think “security governance” means in the context of product security. It presents a simple definition, a discussion on why it is an insanely important part of product security, and a short list of what “security governance” should consist of in practice.

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Addressing the shortcoming of machine-learning for security

In a previous post I wrote about cases in which machine-learning adds little to the reliability of security tools, because it often does not react well to novel threats. In this post I will share a thought about overcoming the limitation of machine-learning, by properly augmenting it with other methods. The challenge we tackle is not that of finding additional methods of detection, as we assume such are already known and deployed in other systems. The challenge we tackle is of how to combine traditional detection methods with those based on machine-learning, in a way that yields the best overall results. As promising as machine-learning (and artificial intelligence) is, it is less effective when deployed in silo (not in combination with existing technologies), and hence the significance of properly marrying the two.

I propose to augment the data used in machine-learning with tags that come from other, i.e., traditional, classification algorithms. More importantly, I suggest distinguishing between the machine-learning-based assessment component and the decision component, and using the tagging in both components, independently.

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SDL and Agile

One of the challenges that agile development methodologies brought with them is some level of perceived incompatibility with security governance methodologies and SDLs. No matter how you used to integrate security assurance activities with the rest of your engineering efforts, it is likely that Agile messed it up. It almost feels as if agile engineering methodologies had as a primary design goal the disruption of security processes.

But we often want Agile, and we want security too, so the gap has to be bridged. To this end, we need to first understand where the source of the conflict really is, and this also requires understanding where it is not. Understanding the non-issues is important, because there are some elements of agile engineering that are sometimes considered to be contradicting security interests where they really are not; and we would like to focus our efforts where it matters.

We will start by highlighting a few minor issues that are easy to overcome, and then discuss the more fundamental change that may in some cases be required to marry security governance with Agile.

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An obvious limitation of machine-learning for security

I recently came across this study titled “Unknown Threats are The Achilles Heel of Email Security”. It concludes that traditional e-mail scanning tools, that also utilize machine-learning to cope with emerging threats, are still not reacting fast enough to new threats. This is probably true, but I think this conclusion should be considered even more widely, beyond e-mail.

Threats are dynamic. Threat actors are creative and well-motivated enough to make threat mitigation an endlessly moving target. So aren’t we fortunate to have this new term, “machine learning”, recently join our tech jargon? Just like many other buzzwords, the term is newer than what it denotes, but nonetheless, a machine that learns the job autonomously seems to be precisely what we need for mitigating ever-changing threats.

All in all, machine-learning is good for security, but yet in some cases it is a less significant addition to our defense arsenal. Why? – Because while you learn, you often don’t do the job well enough; and a machine is no different. Eventually, the merits of learning-while-doing are to be determined by the price of the resulting temporary imperfectness.

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Blockchains: useful or not?

One of the biggest technological controversies of the decade are blockchains. There is no debate on how brilliant the technology is. It is very clever, if not genius. The only debate is on how useful it really is. Crypto currencies like Bitcoin are a strong use-case for blockchains, but how many other real use-cases are there? Some people claim that blockchains will change the Internet for good, while others consider it as a clever solution still seeking a problem. Reality is probably somewhere in between, as it usually is.

Blockchains often appear to be more useful than they really are, because their proponents bring up uses for blockchains which could also be facilitated using other, simpler and traditional techniques. Most of those uses, which could also be attained without blockchains, are indeed better off without them. As clever as blockchains are, they always add complexity where they are deployed. In other words, I have not yet seen a single problem that could be solved by either blockchains or other technical means, and where the blockchain-based approach was the simpler one. It follows that if we want to discuss the true merits of blockchains, then we shall identify those problems that could be solved using blockchains, and which could not be solved by simpler existing technologies.

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Useful threat modelling

Do you know what all security documents have in common? — they all were at some time called “threat model”… A joke indeed, and not the funniest one, but here to make a point. There is no one approach to threat modelling, and not even a single definition of what a threat model really is. So what is it? It is most often considered to be a document that introduces the security needs of a system, using any one of dozens of possible approaches. Whatever the modelling approach is, the threat model really has just one strong requirement: it needs to be useful for whatever purpose it is made to serve. Let us try to describe what we often try to get from a threat model, and how to achieve it.

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Time to reclaim the Internet

We grow increasingly reliant on quite a few Internet-based services: social networks, messaging, photo sharing, and the rest. The challenges we face with privacy, data ownership enforcement, surveillance, and other aspects of digital abuse could all be substantially reduced if those data sharing needs were addressed by the Internet as it was originally architected: decentralized and open. We have waited very long, and so remediation would take more than just new standards, but it is doable.

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