« Protecting the world from YOUR network | Main | Mac Users: Prevent Presentation Hijacking, Disable or Pair Your Remote Control »

Thursday, 11 April 2013

Measure twice, cut once: sound advice for infosec, too

 

Woodshop
Photo by mtneer_man
My K-12 experience included classes in both woodworking and metal crafting.  Of the two, I most benefitted from wood shop. My wood shop teacher didn’t stop at explaining the correct way to hammer, saw or turn wood: in addition, he fed us a steady stream of adages as we worked wood - Measure twice but cut once. If you can't find the time to do it properly, how will you find the time to fix it? You can do it quickly or you can do it right.  - and infused an ethos that embraced quality and competency as well.  

Software developers are constantly criticized for sloppy coding practices. System and network administrators are similarly castigated for configuration errors. While the root causes of some of these criticisms includes unrealistic benchmarks, increasingly minimalist quality assurance efforts by vendors, or a desire by “everyone” to publish at Internet pace, it’s quite possible that software development could be improved and deployments better secured if the tech community were to infuse a similar ethos of quality and competency to hacking code and managing hosts.

The tech community focuses on “how to” and expects that practioners learn ethics, patience, and care for its crafts along the way. Many artisan- or master-quality craftspersons are born through the current method but not nearly enough. By adapting certain axioms that helped me and my wood shop classmates to, “not just make do but make fine”, perhaps the tech community can affect positive changes in how it develops, deploys, uses and enjoys fine software.

Some axioms that might cross over well from wood shop to hacking code or administering hosts include:

Measure twice cut once

CWE/SANS tells us that resource mismanagement, insecure interaction between components, and porous defenses are the most common software errors. What would make more sense than to preach to developers, “Review twice, put into production once”? This same advice is probably applicable elsewhere in tech. It’s certainly useful for anyone responsible for configuring a host or security system. Even email users would benefit from reading a URL twice before even bothering to cut-and-paste the URL into a browser. And wouldn’t everyone benefit from “read twice, hit send once”?

Better tools save time; they don't make you a better craftsman

If any adage is more appropriate for how to manage technology today, please share. The desire to publish or produce in Internet time drives us to automate. Recent history offers ample evidence that automation developed or deployed in haste, by individuals who are not craftsmen, generally gets owned. Perhaps tech needs to spend less time developing substitutes for craftsmen, more time developing the craft itself, and return to developing automation when we can be more confident we’ll get it right.

Isn’t It Strange?

Isn't it strange how princes and kings,
and clowns that caper in sawdust rings,
and common people, like you and me,
are builders for eternity?

Each is given a list of rules;
a shapeless mass; a bag of tools.
And each must fashion, ere life is flown,
A stumbling block, or a Stepping-Stone.

- R. L. Sharpe

Getting it right is a terrific segue for the next axiom.

If you can't find the time to do it properly, how will you find the time to fix it? 

Haste to production is a root cause for configuration errors, inclusion of scripts without review, lax patch management and many of the software errors I noted earlier. Perhaps it’s time to empower mid-level managers or developers with the responsibility to challenge impossible deadlines. Before the tech community can do this, however, we need to conduct studies that prove what many infosec professionals believe is true: the cost to restore is commonly greater than the cost to have spent sufficient time to review and test.

Clamps_design_5_long_sleeve_tshirtYou can never have enough clamps

Before you laugh, think about why clamps matter in woodworking. They serve as additional arms and legs to hold or secure materials in place. When you build larger or intricate furniture, you will use many clamps. Now, think about infosec: security folks encourage defense in depth, which is similar: you can never have enough $security_measures.

The things I make may be for others, but how I make them is for me

Do you or your organization value quality or pride in product or service workmanship, or is the higher priority getting to market first, quickly, or cheaply? Consider software companies and developers: take pride in your product, preach and practice coding as a craft that has as many nuances – design, documentation security, performance – as crafting a ladder back chair. You have choices: you can hack, or you can be a hack.

Change

The tech community needs to react thoughtfully not impulsively to assertions that the criminals are winning, that we’re losing the war, and that terrorists are in our water systems. We’re not going to mitigate any of these threats by producing generations of digital citizens who develop more secure software or administer hosts securely until we correct the aesthetic.

Posted at 07:41 AM in All matters security, Web/Tech |

Comments

Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

The comments to this entry are closed.

Find me on Mastodon and Facebook

Spotlight Posts

  • FTC's proposed Trade Regulation Rule on Impersonation of Government and Businesses is important for #infosec
    M3AAWG comments on the FTC's proposed rule Trade Regulation Rule on Impersonation of Government and Businesses is available. I was one of the contributors to the comment. In the comment, M3AAWG "suggests additional regulatory solutions and best practices to complement the goals of this rule, such as clarifying the scope of the rule to include the use of domain names in impersonation schemes and the use of technologies that enable impersonation" and the important role that Whois plays in investigating impersonation and fraud. Several reports that my Interisle colleagues and I published are cited in the comment, along with the...
  • Cybercrime Information Center reports sharp increases in phishing attacks, unique domains reported in August-October 2022 time period
    A recent ebb in domain names reported for phishing created some euphoria in the domain industry. With phishing activity, as with tides, ebbs are invariably followed by flows. In their August- October 2022 Quarterly Phishing Activity, the Cybercrime Information Center observed a 40% increase in phishing attacks and a nearly 20% increase in unique domain names reported for phishing.
  • Cybercrime Information Center's YouTube Channel
    My colleagues and I at Interisle have created a YouTube channel to complement the quarterly reporting and studies of cybercrime we host at the Cybercrime Information Center. Our goal is to share, in a few minutes, the findings and insights from our research in a format that's easily accessible and shareable, informative, and entertaining. The inaugural videos provide 2-5 minute summaries of our annual Phishing and Malware Landscape studies. We'll continue to produce videos of our annual studies. If you like what you see, leave us a comment.
  • Malware Landscape 2022: unabated malware growth, continued exploitation of IoT devices
    My colleagues at Interisle and I have published a study, Malware Landscape 2022: A Study of the Scope and Distribution of Malware. The study, which analyzed 2.5 million records of distinct malware events from May 2021 to April 2022 collected by the Cybercrime Information Center, explains what malware was most prevalent, where malware was served from, and what resources criminals used to pursue their attacks.
  • New TLDs are coming #Dangerclose.
    A Domain Name Wire post, Time to pay attention to the next round of new TLDs, begins with an ominous: They’re coming. Eventually. While not as dramatic or enduring as Arnold Schwarzenegger's "I'll be back", the reporter cites policy activity at ICANN as evidence that new TLDs are coming. Eventually. In a September 2019 post, and in response to the ICANN memorandum, Readiness to Support Future Rounds of New gTLDs, I asked, Has enough been done to study and rectify the concentration of security threats in the new TLD space? In that post, I quoted correspondence from ICANN's security advisory...

Search

My Photo

Categories