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Nearly 92 percent of malware use DNS to gain command and control, exfiltrate data or redirect traffic, according to Cisco's 2016 Annual Security Report. It warns that DNS is often a security "blind spot" as security teams and DNS experts typically work in different IT groups within a company and don't interact frequently. more
The Internet is chock full of really helpful people and autonomous systems that silently probe, test, and evaluate your corporate defenses every second of every minute of every hour of every day. If those helpful souls and systems aren't probing your network, then they're diligently recording and cataloguing everything they've found so others can quickly enumerate your online business or list systems like yours that are similarly vulnerable to some kind of attack or other. more
Over the past several months, CITP-affiliated Ph.D. student Sarthak Grover and fellow Roya Ensafi been investigating various security and privacy vulnerabilities of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in the home network, to get a better sense of the current state of smart devices that many consumers have begun to install in their homes. To explore this question, we purchased a collection of popular IoT devices, connected them to a laboratory network at CITP, and monitored the traffic that these devices exchanged with the public Internet. more
Experts, companies and civil society groups around the world ask governments to support strong encryption -- and reject proposals that would undermine the digital security it provides. more
The threat level has never been higher for organizations charged with protecting valuable data. In fact, as recent headlines will attest, no company or agency is completely immune to targeted attacks by persistent, skilled adversaries. The unprecedented success of these attacks against large and well-equipped organizations around the world has led many security executives to question the efficacy of traditional layered defenses as their primary protection against targeted attacks. more
In the debate about "exceptional access" to encrypted conversations, law enforcement says they need such access to prevent and solve crimes; cryptographers, on the other hand, keep saying it's too complicated to do safely. That claim is sometimes met with skepticism: what's so hard about encryption? After all, you learn someone's key and just start encrypting, right? I wish it were that simple - but it's not. more
U.S. Senators Jack Reed (D-RI) and Susan Collins (R-ME) have introduced the bipartisan Cybersecurity Disclosure Act of 2015 on Thursday, a bill that seeks to encourage the disclosure of cybersecurity expertise, or lack thereof, on corporate boards at publicly traded companies. more
I have a new book out, Thinking Security: Stopping Next Year's Hackers. There are lots of security books out there today; why did I think another was needed? Two wellsprings nourished my muse. (The desire for that sort of poetic imagery was not among them.) The first was a deep-rooted dissatisfaction with common security advice. This common "wisdom" -- I use the word advisedly -- often seemed to be outdated. Yes, it was the distillation of years of conventional wisdom, but that was precisely the problem: the world has changed; the advice hasn't. more
One of the longstanding goals of network security design is to be able to prove that a system -- any system -- is secure. Designers would like to be able to show that a system, properly implemented and operated, meets its objectives for confidentiality, integrity, availability and other attributes against the variety of threats the system may encounter. A half century into the computing revolution, this goal remains elusive. more
The RIPE 71 meeting took place in Bucharest, Romania in November. Here are my impressions from a number of the sessions I attended that I thought were of interest. It was a relatively packed meeting held over 5 days. So this is by no means all that was presented through the week... As is usual for RIPE meetings, it was a well organised, informative and fun meeting to attend in every respect! If you are near Copenhagen in late May next year I'd certainly say that it would be a week well spent. more
The Domain Name System (DNS) offers ways to significantly strengthen the security of Internet applications via a new protocol called the DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE). One problem it helps to solve is how to easily find keys for end users and systems in a secure and scalable manner. It can also help to address well-known vulnerabilities in the public Certification Authority (CA) model. Applications today need to trust a large number of global CAs. more
When it comes to protecting the end user, the information security community is awash with technologies and options. Yet, despite the near endless array of products and innovation focused on securing that end user from an equally broad and expanding array of threats, the end user remains more exposed and vulnerable than at any other period in the history of personal computing. more
Chancellor George Osborne announces government plan to almost double its investment in cyber security initiatives over the next five years, spending an additional £1.9 billion. more
A couple of days ago there was a lot of interest in how terrorists may have been using chat features of popular video console platforms (e.g. PS4, XBox One) to secretly communicate and plan their attacks. Several journalists on tight deadlines reached out to me for insight in to threat. Here are some technical snippets on the topic that may be useful for future reference. more
Google in partnership with the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois, has published the results of a multi-year study that measured how email security has evolved since 2013. Although Gmail was the foundation of the research, insights from the study are believed to be applicable to email more broadly. more
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