A Wicked Web We Weave

How do you get in the middle of plans or actions of a knowledgeable employee who intends to inflict damage to your company? 

It’s very difficult to control the flow of information within today’s work-place. In any normal “business” day there could be foreign national interaction, USB key exchanges, work from home, contractors –all greatly increasing opportunity for espionage and data theft. There is plenty of room for mischief and the amount of harm done by a well-informed saboteur is non-trivial. It is an order of magnitude more damaging than a stranger.

Definition of an insider by CERT: A current or former employee, contractor, or business partner who

• Has or had authorized access to an organization’s network, system, or data and

• Intentionally exceeded or misused that access in a manner that negatively affected the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of the organization’s information or information systems 

Trouble with an "insider" is they have legitimate access. They are working within regulation, aware of policy and  unlikely to break rules. So access control won't work nor will "intrusion detection". There is no intrusion.

Most of the time an employee will be reported for unusual behavior by a co-worker or an audit. There are also personnel screening processes that have to be in place before hiring. Training and awareness helps employee's notice unusual activity.

That's old-school stuff - and it works and is crucial. In addition there are technical approaches that have gained a rightful place in the "must-have" list. Most companies should turn on network and application activity logging, file integrity checks and data loss monitoring. Stitching together the alerts that are generated by "big brother" helps spot things that are "out of the norm".  For example if a file changes, or an email is sent with a sensitive attachment, a user or behavior can be marked as "bad" and declared suitable for further surveillance.

Unfortunately there is still plenty of noise obstructing an accurate and clear reading of what is good, bad or ugly behavior. We hop on and off social networks, plug and unplug cables, head to work late, forget to submit expense reports, make travel arrangements out of policy, skip virus updates and get overly zealous downloading information. The list goes on. Human behavior can seem hopelessly impossible to predict. 

Statistics brings the magic of mathematics to make sense of data and tell us "what's up". It is a science that fills in blanks in our memory, keeps us honest about the present and paints a rough approximation of our future. There is good research literature on the topic of user behavior analysis. We are working to take tried and true algorithms such as root cause analysis, propensity analysis, link analysis and econometric forecasts - and then rigoursly apply them to hard to solve cyber security prolems.

If you are interested in assessing threats across transactions, individuals and groups that are unobservable to the naked human eye, please contact me. While tackling the problem of employee betrayal can be hard, we can turn to “big data” and analytics to help trip up the enemy within. 

At the NIST Cloud Computing Forum it was Baby Steps for Baby Feet, or so it Seems

I attended the Cloud Computing Forum & Workshops hosted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Venue: United States Department of Commerce, Washington DC. NIST’s mission in life is to work collaboratively with the public and private sector on standards and technology. Vivek Kundra, United States Chief Information Officer, was the key note speaker.

The workshop atmosphere (it was really just one long day of presentations and panels) was naturally US government centric. Patrick Gallagher, Director of NIST, peged the event as a launch pad for a “robust dialogue” to define how the US government will procure and use cloud computing.

Here is a snippet of NIST’s widely circulated a definition of Cloud Computing:

“Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g. networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction”

As the day unfolded it became clear that NIST is faced with a catch 22. Agencies need standards to move forward. At the same time NIST is shying away from standards lest they get it wrong too soon.

History, markets and economics tells us that buyers and sellers alike benefit when there are global norms that remove ambiguity, build confidence, establish best practices and clarify legal ramifications. It’s like a traffic signs and speed limits.

As the world’s largest purchaser of information technology – with 10,679 IT systems (lots of duplication) the US government spends $76+ billion annual budget. These impressive stats are a small indication of the high stakes that are being cast around. [The government serves on a daily basis over 300 million “customers” (students, employees etc.) and 1.9+ million federal employees.]

Vivek, while a big fan of cloud computing, reiteratted that the initiative that he launched last September 2009 is still mostly about “rethinking investments in IT budgets” through data center consolidation across agencies.  A report on the state of the union was just released here.

There is meaningful progress towards cloud computing within state and federal agencies and some of the  illustrative use-cases can be found on page 12/38 in the report. Here are a few examples:

• The SEC uses Salesforce to shorten the time to handle investor advocacy cases. It took 30 days to close a case. Now it takes less than 7 days.

• For the 2010 count, 2010census.com was launched by US Census. It is very media rich and there was no means to evaluate the traffic volume. The US Census did not want to stand up a litany of servers for the 2010 count. Instead they used Akamai to delivery content “from the edge”.. The census also selected Everbridge used for mass notifications to the 1+ million temporary census employees.

• Recovery.gov moved to the Amazon Cloud. Recovery.gov is a tool that “shines light into Federal spending that must handle million of visitors”. The shift to Amazon EC2 led to a savings of $750,000 – redirected funding to help identify fraud, waste and abuse.

• State of Utah is moving to a “hybrid cloud” (70% complete) going from 1800 physical servers to 400 virtual servers – with a $4 million annual savings out of a $140 million IT budget. The cloud solution includes Salesforce, Google Earth and Wikispaces.

• The city of Los Angeles moved to Gmail from an antiquated communications system. They calculate a savings of $5.5 million in direct costs and an ROI of 20-30 million.

• The US Department of Interior is in mid-stream of a consolidation effort of multiple email systems with 80,000mail-boxes users into a cloud model. It was not unusual to have a single email server to manage only 6 email accounts.

• NASA is re-evaluating a $1.5 billion data center effort in the context of “cloud first” strategy.

A promising initiative was “revealed” so to speak by Katie Lewin, Director of the GSA Cloud Computing PMO. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRamp) is the official name for what Microsoft and Google are involved in to get their cloud “FISMA-compliant”. The program is still in formation phase.

What I gleamed about the spirit and purpose of FedRamp:

• The program lives under the Federal CIO and seeks to ease tough questions of security controls, authorization procedures and continuous monitoring for large outsourced and multi-agency systems. It would work in the context of the NIST Risk Management Framework (NIST 800-37 revision 1).

• Instead of working with each vendor independently to ensure compliance, an agency would depend upon stamps of approval that would be given to a cloud provider.

• An agency would review the authorization given to a vendor and if convinced with safe-guard assurances, they tie the knot with the vendor

• It is unclear what sort of base-lines are going to be published and applicability across international borders and strict (high sensitivity) agency requirements. The agency would still hold the responsibility to determine suitability

• FedRamp will follow-up with participating cloud vendors to ensure “continuous monitoring” and flag any drift from the original certification.

All  told the tone in the hallways of the US federal government is one of optimism about the future of cloud computing. There is a "cloud first" mind-set. It will be a long-haul though. John J. Shea Director in the DoD, Office of the CIO reminded us that cloud is a 2-10 technology. 2 years of hype and 10 years of adoption. Plenty of time to get rid of the "sins of the past".

General Hayden - Words of Wisdom

I was privileged to listen to one of my all-time favorite presentations by retired General Michael Hayden, former director of NSA and CIA. The venue: TTI / Vanguard Conference on CyberInsecurity in Washington DC. He was reflecting on the current "bogey man" known as Cyber security. 

Now to most of us, Cyber space is a Hollywood (sci-fi genre) conjured term used synonymously with the Internet. It's origins are actually from a 1984 novel called Neuromancer.  In the National Security discourse the term cyber-space is the "5th domain" with implications far removed from a Hollywood set. There is complex language of "mutually assured dependence" and Cyber warfare. Why the 5th domain? Well the other four are: land, sea, air and space. General Hayden artfully distringuished cyber-space as the only domain that was created by man, the rest of which was "created by god" - and natural events. Adding: "we did not do such a good job". Simply-put the Internet is inherently untrusted, and was designed for anonimyity and information movement. Not for security.

In the US we are still grappling with the ownership of the "cyber thing" which Hayden points out is very much fractured. There are voices that seek to frame the problem as a matter of commerce to be shepherded along led with the private sector. On the other, cyber is a matter of national security with bills that promote a nation navigating both times of cyber peace .. and war. Clearly its not a trivial topic. The private sector owns a lot of critical infrastructure from our energy supplies, power grids and financial markets. And the networks and systems are not entirely isolated from this thing called cyber-space. For ill-doers this is a prize. 


The Internet was designed and engineered for friend not foe.


The growing voices that suggest cyber space should be regulated and done so by government, immediately starts to run chills down the spine of civil libertarians and privacy mavens. They fear as Hayden put it: that the US government will make the dubious offer that it cannot protect its citizens unless, it is allowed to monitor them on the Internet. A fear reinforced when General Hayden gave a wink to his own prior employers (NSA) "abridged sense of privacy".


His message was one of a sense of urgency and not alarmist. He encouraged industry to spend energy into thinking about security and privacy and not just the ease of use of the Internet. And the need for doctrine about what can and should not happen in cyber space. (think about the lack of norms against a a cyber attack on a hospital's patient management system).

As John Negroponte put it (also a presenter) in cyber space "proceed with caution"

In Cyber Space, It Pays ... To Pay Attention

The ability to imagine the future and do so rather inaccurately is a uniquely human quality. Lest we forget the faulty real-estate asset valuations and risky gambles some financial services firms undertook. That inability to "get it right" in the midst of plenty of relevant information saw us enter into one of the worst economic downturn. 

Now, while we do imagine creatively (flying machines, submarines, Internet, smart-phones and electric cars to name a few) it is still difficult for us humans to get the future right, because of some familiar limitations. First we are locked in the present as we try and predict the future, or in other words the future almost always looks like a different version of the present, at least for most of us. And second we are very subjective in our forecasts. We can get stuck into believing that our own point of view reigns supreme, and that when we evaluate our claims against those of others – we will doubt those of others. 

Let’s say you regularly drive your car down a route home-bound and we'd like to evaluate your driving behavior. For this test we've created 3 driver proficiency categories. You are either someone that drives in “auto-pilot”, you are a directionally challenged driver (and a lost cause) or you are an individual that is extremely in-tune with your surroundings. 

If you find yourselves in the last category – you are a near perfect driver.  You know the distance of your car to the next. You observe the erratic behavior of a truck 20 feet ahead and two lanes across. You are tracking the changing weather conditions. You are aware. Actually there is a term you don’t fall into: Driving Without awareness (DWA): someone in a state where there is no active attention to the task of driving. 

Congratulations, you’ve managed to free yourself of simply focusing on the precise task of driving. You are pretty good at making forecasts because you are not totally centered around your-self, and instead you are actively absorbing (and filtering) information from your environment. And in relationship to the introduction of this blog, you are someone that does not ignore subtle cues and signals.

If you were to program all those keen skills into a next generation drive-assist system it would have features such as defensive driving heuristics, map-based reasoning and use your own experience to predict traffic flows. Moreover it would be smart enough to respond to changing situations with more acuity with or with-out you in the loop. 

And so it is also true that the goal of better understanding our surroundings exists all around us: air-line traffic control, supply chain management, in the battle-field, doctors and other critical decision makers must all maintain some level of situational awareness in dynamic and tricky environments.

The process of raising that situational awareness barometer starts with differentiating status (of something) from events and thus relying heavily on surveillance (more passive monitoring) and reconnaissance (actively targeting someone or something) to recognize errant behavior, the terrain and environmental conditions, track targets and sense indicators and early warning signs. 

Think of an air traffic controller and the tools they need to get and maintain the right attention to track fast moving objects from colliding with each other in mid-air. 

It is increasingly apparent that in Cyber space (as in land, air and sea) there is virtual terrain and dimensions of time and space. To conduct commerce, serve citizens and communicate without some sort of handle on one’s surroundings is akin to walking in a dark alley with no perception whatsoever. It’s out of the question. 

Organizations of course rely on intrusion detection systems, event monitoring, incident response and readiness teams, anti-virus scanners and well managed applications and operating systems. Hopefully that pristine infrastructure or application is under a digital microscope where anything that is out of place or odd will be observed. 

The challenge is that observation or witnessing an event, is again different and harder than forecasting or predicting an outcome.

For example, consider an trusted insider that is observed downloading sensitive files for an extended period of time - after hours. On the surface there may have been no reason to doubt any misuse of privileges. There may have been no “rule-breaking" behavior. With some  projection and connection of the dots, there may be an opportunity to prevent a serious incident of data theft. Consider, if that same individual 4 months earlier was placed on administrative leave and 1 year earlier had visited a web site that is known to distribute malware. 

The point is that most of today’s IT security systems that help gleam what’s happening, what has happened and what is about to happen are either disconnected or most likely not in place at all. 

As we live, work and play in cyber space - organizations and all of us must raise our own situational awareness and in different ways. Whether it’s changing passwords on a regular basis, updating anti-virus definitions or avoiding that tempting link in our emails. 

Organizations and government agencies must also up the ante in terms of accurately detecting suspicious behavior, putting in place credible deterrents and automating responses that will minimize the impact of a potential threat actually occurring - whether that threat is known or unknown. They must also get better at working with a wider latitude of information that originates in cyber-space and must be correlated to the physical world.

US Federal agencies and cloud computing: Reason to be cautious

Cloud computing in the enterprise has generated plenty of hype – and plenty of eye-rolling among wary CIOs of federal government agencies. Federal IT leaders continue to express legitimate concerns about the effectiveness of cloud environments in securing sensitive government and consumer data. Many are also skeptical of the promised cost savings and service quality.

Amid the healthy skepticism, however, lies increasing pressure to give serious consideration to cloud computing initiatives. The Obama Administration is focused on lowering the cost of government operations while driving innovation. Many local, state and federal government agencies are evaluating cloud computing, though few are actually implementing cloud-based solutions at the federal level.

While there are no quick answers, there are some clear steps federal agencies – not just CIOs, but all senior decision-makers – can be taking now to prepare their organizations for cloud-based computing environments. Here are three key points federal agencies should consider in an effort to break through the hype and lay the groundwork for a clear, reasoned path to cloud computing.

1. It’s OK to say no.

Federal agencies under pressure to embrace cloud computing are fully justified to just say no. The fact is that most federal agencies should not venture into a “classic” public cloud any time soon, for a simple reason: Incumbent cloud service providers such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft do not comply with current Certification & Accreditation rules dictated by the Federal Information Security Management law. This makes the public cloud a non-starter for most federal organizations, while providing a clear litmus test for the future viability of cloud providers.

To their credit, commercial cloud providers are making some progress in regards to federal compliance. Both Microsoft and Google, for example, are close to receiving accreditation for FISMA compliance, and Google has reportedly completed a System Security Plan for its Google Apps platform.

Key issues around compliance involve where the data actually resides in a commercial or public cloud environment and how vulnerable it will be to cyber attacks. CIOs are rightly concerned that their data could be stolen by hackers, mixed with data from their cloud providers’ other customers, or inadvertently exposed. The recent cyber attacks on Google and other organizations emanating from China will do nothing to quell concerns around moving sensitive information into cloud environments.

As Robert Carey, CIO of the US Navy, noted at a federal executive forum in November 2009:  “Public clouds are not necessarily appropriate for Army or Navy information to be just sitting out there, and therefore the models that you would use to describe the security of that information might have to, and probably will have to change a great deal.”

2. Not all clouds are created equal.

Although the public cloud is not a near-term option for federal agencies, other options do exist to help federal and intelligence agencies gain more flexibility and achieve cost efficiencies for their IT infrastructures.

The basic technologies of a cloud environment – high speed Internet connections, browsers, grid computing and virtualization – are well established and can be duplicated by any organization.  This makes it possible for government agencies or departments to build “private clouds” – infrastructures that use cloud technologies but are more aligned with current security requirements.

Adopting virtualization and other cloud technologies, even in a closed environment, could increase efficiencies and reduce infrastructure costs by breaking down the silos created through the use of proprietary technologies. Consider the efficiencies of something as basic as a shared email system; these and other non-core applications are good candidates for early migration into private cloud environments.

The DoD’s Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is moving toward what arguably could be the world’s largest private cloud, as it looks to integrate the Defense Information Systems Network, its data centers, and its command and control applications. This cloud-based approach to sharing information could serve as a model for other agencies – and for commercial providers as well.

The type of information each agency handles will influence its approach to cloud solutions. Just as most governments tag data with different levels of sensitivity, from low level (published widely and no restrictions) to ultra secure (classified security information for top government leaders only), they can also begin to design cloud architectures for different levels of information. For example:

·         Any agency that deals in the public domain – such as the EPA, the Census Bureau, or the Department of Interior – could serve as a “canary in a coal mine” test case for a cloud infrastructure.

·         The GSA’s recent launch of apps.gov – a storefront for cloud-based business, productivity and other applications featuring non-sensitive data – is an example of where federal agencies can begin testing the waters.[iv] The GSA has already seen positive results from moving the USA.gov portal to the cloud. The transition significantly lowered GSA's costs, saving taxpayers an estimated $1.7 million annually.

·         New public programs that must launch quickly to meet legislative mandates – Cash for Clunkers is one recent example – are candidates for testing the ability of cloud solutions to scale quickly .

On the other hand, Homeland Security and other agencies that deal with ultra-secure data have little or no incentive to consider a cloud solution. In situations where data security presents an untenable risk, the government may choose to pursue other avenues, such as optimizing the infrastructure in place using traditional IT practices or decoupling data and processing to allow use of public or private cloud infrastructure without jeopardizing data security.

3. Who’s accountable?

The issue of governance is perhaps the biggest obstacle to federal agency adoption of cloud computing. Regulatory mandates require that an agency must know precisely who has access to data and where the data resides, both physically and logically. Some providers will guarantee the presence of data in the U.S., while others will not, or cannot, prove their ability to do so. In addition, agencies must have considerable transparency into the operations of the service provider. This raises two key questions:

·         Who will oversee the passage of data throughout a cloud environment?

·         Whose role is it to ensure that this data is continuously managed and protected?

Agencies will need to establish comprehensive policies for issues such as encryption key management along with network, application, and data-level mechanisms that enable the verification of data movement and storage in cloud-based environments.

The good news is that government agencies do have plenty of experience in establishing governance policies for external service providers. The same risk assessments used over the past decade to qualify third-party storage facilities or other service providers can be applied, at least in part, to cloud computing vendors.

Agencies can also rely on existing rules and structures that govern IT decision-making; these policies and processes can be adapted to determine the chain of command for decisions and activities related to cloud computing.

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When a closed mind bears the standard, pity those who follow

Most cloud vendors are setting themselves up as the gold-standard in terms of everything from how thier product's are priced, labeled, serviced etc. They are patiently waiting for signs of a critical mass to declare victory over important matters that will influence customer defection rates and unbending loyalty. History is litered with examples of technology standards pitted against each other with the consumer watching the battle unfold. Most recently: Blu-Ray, HD DVD, USB, GSM, CDMA. The consumer cares about standards and those obscure protocols because they impact our wallet, our sanity and life-long experience with every day products. 

To pick and choose standards for cloud computing we need not look further than the ‘web services/SOA’ craze of the last 5 years. That hoopla spawned standards and vendor specifications to last us a life-time. All of us (tech savvy or not) will see XML as one of those unsung hero's and a saving grace that pulls us back from the brink of mass confusion. It is THE currency of data portability and like the electric socket in our home will force cloud vendors to conform in some fashion. I can pull out all my blog posts into a neat folded ‘XML’ file and take it where ever I want. I can do the same with iTunes.

On the flip side vendors still must be willing to cooperate and commit to that sort of openness, secure cloud integration, application portability and data portability. Will the US home developer actually put that 110 Volt electric socket and in all of the rooms?

Some would say that the higher you go up the cloud stack the more difficult it is to reclaim your content. The prevailing sentiment is that an infrastructure provider allows you to move in, and move out with all your belongings. Like a hotel room. A software-as-a-service provider gets to keep all that code – that it owns - and if you walk away you are down more than your data. Here is a blog I wrote about reclaiming your data and applications.

If salesforce.com confirmed to ideal standards it would allow an organization to export all that goodness and make it much easier as it hunts for a replacement. Standards have been around for thorny 'middle-ware' since 2004: interoperability and business process management. SaaS and PaaS vendor are in the drivers seat and will want to stay that way. If I can't increase stickiness, I will lock-you in. Telecom carriers along side COTS application vendors have long played the lock-in game. In the end they hold the shorter end of the stick. Instead they should focus on customer and brand loyalty, service-levels and building trust and legitimate interdependence.

The nuance that gets lost in the discourse: plenty of standards already exist. Yet vendors are avoiding adoption as others play into sound-bites until they get critical mass. Another simple example, all the standards for security are ready for prime-time cloud computing: SAML, XAXML, KEYPROV, ISO 15489, EDRM, PKCS, WS-Federation, Liberty ID-FF etc.)

There are a number of notorious topics that do deserve special attention. Service Level Agreements and contract terms and conditions are not uniform across service providers. Count on government bodies such as the US GSA to swiftly drive the convergence to common attributes around performance metrics, incident response details etc.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) calls out customer on-boarding, service provisioning, inter-cloud interaction as prime topics that deserve attention:

• VM image distribution (e.g., DMTF OVF)
• VM provisioning and control (e.g., Amazon EC2 API)
• Inter-cloud VM exchange
• Persistent storage (e.g., Azure Storage, S3, EBS, GFS, Atmos)
• VM SLAs that are machine readable
• uptime, resource guarantees, storage redundancy
• Secure VM configuration (e.g. NIST Security Content Automation Protocol)
• Workflow and business rules import and export

In a world of constant motion and innovation we should expect to live with some degree of propriety and feature-loss or gain. What we should expect, is some sort minimum code of interoperability, ethics and portability.

Trust Part I. "I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you"

Trust, its role and significance to our society is obvious. I wanted to share some well-known research and opinions on the meaning, formation and attributes of trust. A discussion that will carry over into cloud computing.



First things first...do you trust your life-long friend to keep a life-long secret? Do you trust your car dealer to complete the schedule oil change, tire rotation and that oh so mandatory surprise problem by the promised 4:00 PM pick-up time? Do you trust your employer to give you the 10% raise the year after a recession?


Trust is a resource. You give it, you take it and you create something out of it. In almost all situations where trust comes into play there is uncertainty such as the role of emotion in the early stages of a relationship.


Why are some people a good judge of character, while others can make money even when the stock market is tanking, or millions of others are willing to buy and sell from each other without a face to face introduction? Its because each of these people are able to deal in varying outcomes with that resource called trust. 

So what is the definition of trust? There is little agreement about the exact, let alone conceptual, meaning of trust. Trust has been defined as:

• a behavior (Zand, 1972)
• an attitude (Kegan & Rubenstein, 1973)
• a confidence (Cohen, 1966)
• an expectancy (Rotter, 1980; Scanzoni, 1979)
• a belief or set of beliefs (Barber, 1983; Bromiley & Cummings, 1995; Rotter, 1967)
• a dispositional variable (Rosenberg, 1957; Rotter, 1967, 1980)
• a situational variable (Johnson-George & Swap, 1982)
• a structural variable (Fox, 1974; Lewis & Weigert, 1985a,b)
• a social agency relationship variable ... you get the picture

Rousseu et.al. (1998) does a good job of boiling the meaning of trust into a receipe that is one part risk and one part interdependance:

• Risk occurs where information is unavailable, the future outcome is unpredictable, and where
  there is a possibility of loss or harm (Chiles & McMackin, 1996; Lewis & Weigert,
  1985).
• Interdependance: where one party relies on another, or perhaps many others, to achieve desired results

More in Part II


PS: the quote in the Title is by Friedrich Nietzsche.