Bumper Sticker from RBS

The research team at security & risk data aggregator (and more) Risk-Based Security (RBS) published a couple of their observations this month — observations that should be a reminder to all of us involved in global Financial Services risk management. RBS catalogs & analyzes thousands of breaches every year. They suggest that ad-hoc, personality-based, or other types of company-unique security practices put companies at a self-inflicted and avoidable level of risk. RBS researchers summarize their findings into a couple central themes:

• “Breaches can happen at even the most security-conscious organizations.”
• “The tenacity and skill of attackers when it comes to searching out weaknesses in organizational practices and processes is unrelenting.”

There are a couple key components to their follow-on recommendation:

• Employ a methodical and risk-based approach to security management, where risk assessments incorporate both:
  • The organization’s security practices, and
  • Downstream risk posed by vendors, suppliers and other third parties.

To address these risks and add structure to day-to-day risk management work, RBS researchers recommend that we:

• Define security objectives and
• Select and implement security controls.

The content of the memo describing RBS research observations is useful at the most high levels as a reminder in global Financial Services. While this seem a little like recommending we all continue to breath, eat well, and sleep enough. Their guidance to leverage mature security frameworks “to create robust security programs based on security best practice” is a long bumper sticker. In Financial Services at global scale, we all know that and our various constituencies regularly remind us of those types of requirements. Sometimes they even show up in our sales literature, contracts, and SEC filings.

Bumper stickers may still have their place. RBS observations and recommendations may not be what we need for implementation, but they can help with our elevator speeches & the tag-lines required in a number of frequently encountered risk management interactions.

Here is one way to use summarize their observations and recommendations:

Breaches continue to happen. 
Attackers are tenacious and unrelenting. 
Employ risk-appropriate levels of rigor and 
risk-based prioritization in the application 
your security practices, as well as in 
downstream  risk posed by vendors, suppliers 
and other third parties.

RESOURCES:

“Risk Based Security, NIST and University of Maryland Team Up To Tackle Security Effectiveness.”
https://www.riskbasedsecurity.com/2017/02/risk-based-security-nist-and-university-of-maryland-team-up-to-tackle-security-effectiveness/
February 17, 2017; By RBS

Another key message in the blog was to highlight a joint research project by “NIST’s Computer Security Resource Center and the University of Maryland, known as the Predictive Analytics Modeling Project (http://csrc.nist.gov/scrm/pamp-assessment-faqs.htm). The aim of the project is to conduct the primary research needed in order to build tools that can measure the effectiveness of security controls.” The project web site also says their mission includes seeing “how your organization compares to peers in your industry.” For more on this project see “CyberChain” at: https://cyberchain.rhsmith.umd.edu/.

Make use of OWASP Mobile Top 10

OWASP “Mobile Security Project” team updated their Mobile Top 10 Vulnerability list this week. {in the process they broke some of their links, if you hit one, just use the 2015 content for now: https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Projects/OWASP_Mobile_Security_Project_-2015_Scratchpad}

I was in a meeting yesterday with a group reviewing one facet of an evolving proposal for Office 365 as the primary collaboration and document storage infrastructure for some business operations.

Office 365 in global Financial Services? Yup. Technology pundits-for-sale, tech wannabes, and some who are still intoxicated by their mobile technology have been effective in their efforts to sell “cloud-first.” One outcome of some types of “cloud-enabled” operations is the introduction of mobile client platforms. Even though global Financial Services enterprises tend to hold many hundreds of billions or trillions of other people’s dollars, some sell (even unmanaged) mobile platforms as risk appropriate and within the risk tolerance of all relevant constituencies… My working assumption is that those gigantic piles of assets and the power that can result from them necessarily attract a certain amount of hostile attention. That attention requires that our software, infrastructure, and operations be resistant enough to attack to meet all relevant risk management obligations (contracts, laws, regulations, and more). This scenario seems like a mismatch — but I digress.

So, we were attempting to work through a risk review of Mobile Skype for Business integration. That raised a number of issues, one being the risks associated with the software itself. The mobile application ecosystem is composed of software that executes & stores information locally on mobile devices as well as software running on servers in any number of safe and wildly-unsafe environments. Under most circumstances the Internet is in between. By definition this describes a risk-rich environment.

All hostile parties on earth are also attached to the Internet. As a result, software connected to the Internet must be sufficiently resistant to attack (where “sufficient” is associated with a given business and technology context). Mobile applications are hosted on devices and within operating systems having a relatively short history. I believe that they have tended to prize features and “cool” over effective risk management for much of that history (and many would argue that they continue to do so). As a result, the mobile software ecosystem has a somewhat unique vulnerability profile compared to software hosted in other environments.

The OWASP “Mobile Security Project” team research resulted in the Top 10 mobile vulnerabilities list below. I think it is a useful tool to support those involved in thinking about writing or buying software for that ecosystem. You can use it in a variety of ways. Challenge your vendors to show you evidence (yes, real evidence) that they have dealt with each of these risks. You can do the same with your IT architects or anyone who plays the role of an architect for periods of time — then do it again with your developers and testers later. Business analysts, or those who act as one some of the time should also work through adding these as requirements as needed.  Another way to use this Mobile Top 10 resource is to help you identify and think through the attack surface of an existing or proposed mobile-enabled applications, infrastructure, and operations.

OK, I hope that provides enough context to make use of the resource below.

REFERENCES:

Mobile Top 10 2016-Top 10
https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Mobile_Top_10_2016-Top_10

M1 – Improper Platform Usage
https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Mobile_Top_Ten_2016-M1-Improper_Platform_Usage
This category covers misuse of a platform feature or failure to use platform security controls. It might include Android intents, platform permissions, misuse of TouchID, the Keychain, or some other security control that is part of the mobile operating system. There are several ways that mobile apps can experience this risk.

M2 – Insecure Data Storage
https://www.owasp.org/index.php?title=Mobile_Top_Ten_2016-M2-Insecure_Data_Storage  This new category is a combination of M2 + M4 from Mobile Top Ten 2014. This covers insecure data storage and unintended data leakage.

M3 – Insecure Communication
https://www.owasp.org/index.php?title=Mobile_Top_Ten_2016-M3-Insecure_Communication This covers poor handshaking, incorrect SSL versions, weak negotiation, cleartext communication of sensitive assets, etc.

M4 – Insecure Authentication
https://www.owasp.org/index.php?title=Mobile_Top_Ten_2016-M4-Insecure_Authentication This category captures notions of authenticating the end user or bad session management. This can include:
Failing to identify the user at all when that should be required
Failure to maintain the user’s identity when it is required
Weaknesses in session management

M5 – Insufficient Cryptography
https://www.owasp.org/index.php?title=Mobile_Top_Ten_2016-M5-Insufficient_Cryptography The code applies cryptography to a sensitive information asset. However, the cryptography is insufficient in some way. Note that anything and everything related to TLS or SSL goes in M3. Also, if the app fails to use cryptography at all when it should, that probably belongs in M2. This category is for issues where cryptography was attempted, but it wasn’t done correctly.

M6 – Insecure Authorization
https://www.owasp.org/index.php?title=Mobile_Top_Ten_2016-M6-Insecure_Authorization This is a category to capture any failures in authorization (e.g., authorization decisions in the client side, forced browsing, etc.). It is distinct from authentication issues (e.g., device enrolment, user identification, etc.).

If the app does not authenticate users at all in a situation where it should (e.g., granting anonymous access to some resource or service when authenticated and authorized access is required), then that is an authentication failure not an authorization failure.

M7 – Client Code Quality
https://www.owasp.org/index.php?title=Mobile_Top_Ten_2016-M7-Poor_Code_Quality
This was the “Security Decisions Via Untrusted Inputs”, one of our lesser-used categories. This would be the catch-all for code-level implementation problems in the mobile client. That’s distinct from server-side coding mistakes. This would capture things like buffer overflows, format string vulnerabilities, and various other code-level mistakes where the solution is to rewrite some code that’s running on the mobile device.

M8 – Code Tampering
https://www.owasp.org/index.php?title=Mobile_Top_Ten_2016-M8-Code_Tampering
This category covers binary patching, local resource modification, method hooking, method swizzling, and dynamic memory modification.

Once the application is delivered to the mobile device, the code and data resources are resident there. An attacker can either directly modify the code, change the contents of memory dynamically, change or replace the system APIs that the application uses, or modify the application’s data and resources. This can provide the attacker a direct method of subverting the intended use of the software for personal or monetary gain.

M9 – Reverse Engineering
https://www.owasp.org/index.php?title=Mobile_Top_Ten_2016-M9-Reverse_Engineering
This category includes analysis of the final core binary to determine its source code, libraries, algorithms, and other assets. Software such as IDA Pro, Hopper, otool, and other binary inspection tools give the attacker insight into the inner workings of the application. This may be used to exploit other nascent vulnerabilities in the application, as well as revealing information about back end servers, cryptographic constants and ciphers, and intellectual property.

M10 – Extraneous Functionality
https://www.owasp.org/index.php?title=Mobile_Top_Ten_2016-M10-Extraneous_Functionality Often, developers include hidden backdoor functionality or other internal development security controls that are not intended to be released into a production environment. For example, a developer may accidentally include a password as a comment in a hybrid app. Another example includes disabling of 2-factor authentication during testing.