You don't win a war by defending yourself

Chris Hoff recently made this observations in a post about offensive computing and he's right. This is akin to carrying a gun in the real world to defend yourself, however this doesn't translate well into the wild west we call the internet. Fighting back can have significant unintended not to mention legal consequences.

The Metasploit site recently became the victim of a petty DDOS attack. Now the last person you want to DDOS is HD Moore and co. An amusing side effect though was that the victim could redirect the attack and basically flood anyone they wanted to by changing their own DNS entries. In theory they could have redirected the attack at individual attackers in the botnet systematically knocking them off the net, but they wouldn't know who was on the receiving end. Fighting back would be risky.

You may also find yourself on the wrong side conscripted into a fight you never knew or cared about. With aging and overloaded plumbing (dns, bgp, etc) it's hard enough to play fair. Guess it's time to layout the tar pits.

Is the CIA model still relevant?

When one thinks of securing information, practitioners will recite the standard CIA mantra. We need to protect information from confidentiality, integrity and availability threats. Some call these security primitives, attributes, goals, objectives, aspects, qualities, threat taxonomy, etc.

Since there is no clear consensus on this matter (as far as I can tell), I’ll just refer to them as threats to information assets that the owner needs to protect against. Is the CIA model still relevant though given today’s evolving threats?

Consider the following scenario, Bob the developer is in financial trouble and needs a quick “loan” to settle some debts. Lucky for him he has a transaction account with his employer, a bank. Using a service account, he logs on the transaction database and makes a small deposit into his account by altering his bank balance (the asset).

Looking at the CIA model we find that there was no breach of confidentiality, the balance has not been disclosed. The Integrity of the database is intact, redundancy checks pass. The database with his balance is still available, so he runs down to the street and makes an ATM withdrawal.

Did the CIA model consider these information threats?

Parker in his seminal work Fighting Computer Crime, proposed a new model that extended the CIA triad by introducing three additional non overlapping (atomic) attributes or threats.

• Confidentiality was extended to include Possession/Control. An adversary may steal a memory stick with you private key on it, but they may not have your pass phrase to use it. The confidentiality has not been breached but your adversary now has possession and control of your information asset.
• Integrity was extended to include Authenticity. An adversary may gain unauthorized access to database and update a table. Internal and external consistency checks (integrity) will pass but table now contains tampered data that’s not authentic or trustworthy.
• Availability was extended to include utility. A user may encrypt their private key with a pass phrase. If they forget their pass phrase the usefulness (utility) of the information asset is lost. The information is still available but not usable.

M.E. Kabay from Norwich University an advocate of this model calls it the Parkerian Hexad. I really like this model since it clearly delineates information threats and I’ve found it particularly helpful in my work.

I’m amazed though how little traction this has gotten within the security community.

Microsoft as part of the SDL has opted for the STRIDE model. A quick comparison between STRIDE and CIA/Parkerian Hexad shows how they overlap.

• Spoofing primarily deals with authentication, no overlap.
• Tampering overlaps with Integrity.
• Repudiation partially overlaps with Authenticity.
• Information Disclosure overlaps with Confidentiality.
• Denial of Service overlaps with Availability.
• Elevation of privilege primarily deals with Authorization, no overlap.

Although useful, I feel that STRIDE conflates information threats with services like authentication and authorization. We missed possession/control, authenticity and utility.

To further complicate things, Dave Piscitello proposed another model that Bruce Schneier really liked.

• Authentication (who are you)
• Authorization (what are you allowed to do)
• Availability (is the data accessible)
• Authenticity (is the data intact)
• Admissibility (trustworthiness)

Should we be surprised that our customers are confused when we struggle find consensus on the basics?

Dave's extended model goes beyond information threats and deals with identity, trust and access control. I like to think of these elements as services that control access to information assets.

My approach is to start with assets. First you have to figure out what information assets you have, and what threats you want to protect them from. You should also have an idea of how important they are to you and what the impact would be if certain threats were realized. Use Parker's model to evaluate threats and set your objectives.

Information is useless if you can't handle and process it. Consider how users and systems will interact with information.Threat modeling can really help you here. I'd suggest you go beyond STRIDE and including threats from Parker's model. It really needs a better name, it sounds weird to say Parkerian Hexad all the time. Dave's extended model can act as a heuristic here to ensure completeness.