Geoff,
Agreed, which is great for a point to point VPN'ish solution with extra
processing power at the NIC level that IPSec lacks in and of itself.
I took my response a bit further, in that with a 3Com'ish solution, a group of
systems can still be infected and that once infected can generate spoofed
traffic that could be used to affect other systems (in normal cases).
Beyond that, would you ever only allow for a server or a series of clients to
only connect with each other? And to not have access to other systems that
didn't have a special NIC in them? To gain the full benefit that you are
talking about, you almost wind up with a type of hermetically sealed network,
and such things don't seem to provide the full benefit that other
interconnected networks provide.
Here is another thought, when 3Com'ish systems are to operate in an environment
with external connections, it is possible that they will become infected, once
infected the crypto cert that you mentioned below would then correctly
authenticate the systems amongst themselves, but would not prevent the spread
of the traffic that is less than legitimate. The basic thought being, what is
the actual benefit of assured communications that can themselves be compromised?
One of the things that would be cool, is a concept that some friends of mine
have, that extends from the former Authenticated Execution Methodologies and
that would extend the NIC Cert, to a Processor Cert, that would then allow only
applications and solutions that have appropriate cert's and then you could
enforce the chain of custody for all communications and gain benefit from the
offloaded crypto processing.
Until such a thing happens that works on enforcing the legitimacy of comms that
are put onto the network stack from inside of each host, then we have to look
at ways of discriminating against the traffic and developing methods to isolate
known good traffic from traffic that is not known to be generated by legitimate
processes.
I hope this makes sense and I am glad that you have mentioned some good
technologies that can definitely benefit folks on list...
v/r
Bob
-----Original Message-----
From: gjgowey@tmo.blackberry.net [mailto:gjgowey@tmo.blackberry.net]
Sent: Thursday, September 27, 2007 8:30 PM
To: Bob Beringer
Cc: 'Lafosse, Ricardo'; security-basics@securityfocus.com; 'Bob Beringer'; 'Rob
Thompson'
Subject: Re: Full Disk Encryption, Digital Signatures and enterprise Data
Analysis and Transactional Auditing (eDATA)
By spoofing I meant trying to bypass restrictions that would usually rely on
evaluating the MAC address. A crypto cert embedded in the card would easilly
provide absolute assurance that the system is indeed supposed to be on the
network. I wasn't refering to it providing additional protection against
external traffic, but that's also true that the crypto would only be in affect
among themselves providing privacy for all traffic over the wire between those
systems. However, 3Com also has some sort of central policy management
software that, according to the literature, looks like it can do a lot in an
infrastructure that uses these cards.
Geoff
Sent from my BlackBerry wireless handheld.
-----Original Message-----
From: "Bob Beringer" <bob.beringer@usa.net>
Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2007 19:15:07
To:<gjgowey@tmo.blackberry.net>
Cc:"'Lafosse, Ricardo'"
<rlafosse@sfwmd.gov>,<security-basics@securityfocus.com>,"'Bob Beringer'"
<bob@eor.us>,"'Rob Thompson'" <my.security.lists@gmail.com>
Subject: Full Disk Encryption, Digital Signatures and enterprise Data Analysis
and Transactional Auditing (eDATA)
Geoff,
Thanks for the email, responses inline:
I hate to sound like an adobe sales person (I'm not, but I do like their
acrobat line of products), but they have a product that serves as a document
policy system. Check out adobe document center.
You're right, Adobe makes a great solution for digitally signing documents
and for augmenting e-Discovery efforts. Once we realized a solution was
needed in an effort to augment the last FDE effort, we made several attempts
to get Adobe to support a Pilot, but they seemed too busy to help out.
Hopefully, now that I have a bit more time we will be able to track down the
right people and put the solution through an appropriate bake-off with other
products, as we have done in the past with other solution sets... Presently
we know that the solution is much like a hot rod, but we haven't gotten a
chance to put it up on a lift and fully inspect the solution or kick the
tires...
Also, I don't like using MAC's for anything including as a computer :-)
Turns out that most of the Executive level clients that I have, "do like
them and do use them in support of business efforts" and that makes them
more important to secure and manage than most of the other systems in the
enterprise, (at least for the enterprises that I work with).
or a method of what IP/vlan/access a system can have because pretty much most
all NIC's allow you to change their MAC.
Agreed, this is a huge, huge problem! End Point Awareness, eTelemetry,
enterprise Data Analysis and Transactional Auditing (eDATA), IP Based
Transactional Accounting and Layer-8 correlation efforts are all moving
towards an appropriate solution to this problem.
One of the projects that I have undertaken is to build a company with a
heart, and to start out by "Reuniting all of the lost and orphaned packets
of the world with their Parents (PIDs)". To that end, we have been working
on enhanced mechanisms for following packet generation from the very soul of
the process and all the way through its logical course of action on the
remote system or application. Packet Based Chain of Custody is the next big
forefront in Internet-Networking Security at all levels around the world.
Now the 3Com cards on the other hand use crypto keys stored right in the card.
I'd like to see that spoofed.
I don't want to speak out of turn, but I think that the 3com cards will
prevent data and streams from being spoofed amongst themselves, but not
necessarily true for the Layer two indicators when the NIC's send traffic to
systems outside of the gateway, proxy, or even to other systems within the
same broadcast domain (to other systems) that don't have the compatible 3Com
cards.
Hope this makes sense and helps...
v/r
Bob
+12404756858
-----Original Message-----
From: "Rob Thompson" <my.security.lists@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2007 14:58:32
To:"Bob Beringer" <bob.beringer@usa.net>
Cc:"Lafosse, Ricardo" <rlafosse@sfwmd.gov>,security-basics@securityfocus.com,
"Bob Beringer" <bob@eor.us>
Subject: Re: Full Disk Laptop Encryption
On 9/27/07, Bob Beringer <bob.beringer@usa.net> wrote:
MAC agents, I do not know what you are referring to with this.
Meant to be "MAC FDE" == FDE for PowerBook, MacBook Pro's, ect...
That's hilarious. That is NOT at all anything that I had considered.
I was thinking more along the lines of MAC address, networking,
somehow something is being verified that the laptop is encrypted or it
was not allowed on the network or something of the sort... ;p
Data-in-Motion - are you talking about data after it has physically
left your hard drive. Ie. e-mail, thumbdrives, network traffic,
etc...
Exactly! Now encryption can be managed centrally or remotely and can
ensure cryptographically based chain of custody, from the sectors on the
drive, through the Network and then on to the destination system or even
to the field level in databases that might live on the destination systems
as well. Everything is encrypted at the object level, so you can
literally have a single word document that allows for three different
viewers to see different levels of redacted documents or the like (there
are many other cool things that their solution does, but this is one
technique...)
That is pretty nifty. That type of functionality I didn't even think
was possible. I will be checking into this for sure.
<snip>
More setup time and effort is a small price to pay when you have a
more efficient and properly configured solution deployed. It is well
worth the time, IMO.
Agreed, but sometimes you want to know that the solution is going to take
a bit of effort to properly plan and deploy, so that you don't assume it
will be less effort and wind up over budget or red in the face due to
over-committing to the folks around you. (So it was my way of putting a
small disclaimer and friendly heads up, so that you know that along with
more power comes more responsibility ;-))
I hear you there. I have found through my excessive blunders in the
computing world that have turned me into the find Computer Nerd that I
am today (If you could only "hear" my sarcasm... ;p) that it's best
to plan on the worst. That way, if things actually go as desired and
not as they "do", then you can take that extra time and run out for a
beer or two.
I will have to check into this TECSEC. My curiosity is piqued. Thank
you for the tip.
Ask to talk to Jay Wack and tell him that Bob Beringer sent you, he is a
busy man but he is the right guy to talk to...
I hope that this information helps :-)
It sounds like it will. Funny, I didn't get involved in this thread,
looking for a new vendor. But I'll have to check into the TECSEC.
It'll be a while, as I'm swamped right now, but I will post my results
some time in the future. From the sounds of it, it sounds like we may
have an alternative to our current solution.
<snip>
--
Rob
