Well, 6 months of hard work, planning, endless phone calls, emails, accolades, assaults, cancellations, headaches, strong cups of coffee, sponsorship groveling, blogging, writing, and finally making it all happen are over.
My Smart Grid Security East conference was a success. With the help of all the wonderful speakers, sponsors, and my own team, we made it happen. We have a bunch of videos to edit and post on the site, and some papers, presentations, and slide shows to upload, but the lion's share of the work is done.
It is quite overwhelming when so many brilliant people tell you how wonderful something you built is. These are all people I respect TREMENDOUSLY, and I cannot help feeling elated by their approval. It is both exhilarating and humbling. I would love to list them all in this blog posting, but you would probably stop reading halfway through the list, and I want to bring up a far more important point...so hang on.
As my conference drew to a close, I reflected on all the moments I felt defined my sense of accomplishment for this event. There was the opportunity to sit down to lunch with Bill Hunteman, Senior Advisor for Cyber Security for the US Department of Energy, who chatted openly about the DOE's roll and challenges. Then there was the opportunity to enjoy breakfast with Matt Carpenter and Michael Assante. I had an opportunity to converse extensively with the young, brilliant, and very "neighborly" Travis Goodspeed, who exposes security flaws in between pints of his favorite IPA's. I enjoyed countless meals and moments with Daniel Thanos of GE Energy, and Bobby Brown of EnerNex, and Erich Gunther (who wears so many hats...well, lets just say he is everywhere).
Then there were all the wonderful AMI security minds. There was Ed Beroset of Elster, and Stephen Chasko of Landis+Gyr, and Ido Dubrawsky and Robert Former of Itron. All brilliant people working hard to build the products that we will rely on to securely manage our energy infrastructure going forward.
I literally could go on for several pages, but suffice it to say I had many "moments" with some great people.
Yet, life has a way of showing you what really matters right at the moment when you think you have it all figured out. As I was leaving the conference hall at the final moments of the event, I was approached by a lovely young lady, who goes by the name of Summer. She had won a free pass to my conference through a contest Andy Bochman of the Smart Grid Security Blog held.
She had contacted me by email after she won, and was thrilled because she is focusing her studies on Smart Grid cyber security, and she was attending school at the nearby Tennessee Tech University. I welcomed her and told her she could bring along someone else from the school as a guest of the conference.
As Summer approached me, her young face broke out into a huge smile, and she profusely thanked me for the event and the opportunity to hear from the brightest minds in the world of Smart Grid security. She then told me that the person she had brought with her had decided to change his thesis topic to Smart Grid security.
It was at that moment that I felt truly humbled. As I get older (and hopefully wiser), and raise my children to be the best that they can be, the things that matter the most to me are maturing. There was a time when I felt it would be great to be remarkably wealthy (okay, I still think that would be great), or achieve great fame (granted, that wouldn't be so bad either), but what matters the most is when you find a way to be the change you want to see. I look at so much of what our youth has to deal with today, and often wonder how they can possibly cope with the mess they have been given. I wonder where they can look for any guidance that will in any way affect them in a positive manner, and at that moment realized that something I had created served to positively influence at least 2 young minds.
Wouldn't we all like to do that?
Be the change you want to see...
Friday, March 4, 2011
Friday, February 11, 2011
Keeping Out Of The Trough
I am absolutely thrilled and truly blessed beyond all words to be hosting the Smart Grid Security East conference (co-hosted by EnerNex) in Knoxville, TN from February 28th to March 2nd. I have had the great pleasure of working with some of the finest security minds in the Smart Energy industry for the last year, and most of them are speaking at my event. If you are not aware of this by now, you should take a closer look. I think you will be duly impressed.
What struck me as an absolutely fantastic illustration of what the Smart Grid security landscape looks like today was a slide that Ido Dubrawsky of Itron sent me (and gave Bobby Brown of EnerNex credit for):
What struck me as an absolutely fantastic illustration of what the Smart Grid security landscape looks like today was a slide that Ido Dubrawsky of Itron sent me (and gave Bobby Brown of EnerNex credit for):
This one slide really says it all for me, and completely illustrates my goal for creating this conference. The people I have been working with in the NIST, OpenSG, and DHS groups for the last year are indeed (by and large) luminaries in the world of Smart Grid security. Everyone acknowledges that there are issues to deal with, and we are well above "The Trough" and are rapidly moving along the path of true productivity in addressing security. Have we "solved" the security problems of the Smart Grid...no.
Will we ever "solve" the problem?
Well, this is like asking the question "Will we ever solve the problem of obesity?".
There is an easy way to solve the obesity problem. Simply stop eating. Of course the problem with that solution is that it tends to lead to bigger problems. However, we have discovered that putting a little thought into what we eat, and combining it with some other good practices, tends to lead to a pretty darn good quality of life and avoids obesity (I am not a good example of this, but I am working on it). If you find yourself not quite understanding how to tackle this problem, there are plenty of people out there to help you.
The same holds true for Smart Grid security. It is an ongoing issue that comes about as the result of an idea to implement a system which will ultimately serve to address some major energy issues throughout the world, and ultimately improve our quality of life. It is not being ignored, and if want to know more about what is being done to address the issues, the answers are out there.
I hope some of you can make it to my conference.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
The Smart Grid Security Misinformation Network
It seems that a lot of the news we hear about Smart Grid security seems to focus on how we are all potentially doomed due to the lack of attention being given to Smart Grid security. Bad news does seem to get a lot of attention, so I can certainly see how this may be a great way to attract readers. I have a Google Alert set to "Smart Grid Security", and every evening I get an email with the latest headlines. It seems to come in waves, but I get a lot of links to random postings where the author proclaims that not enough attention is being given to Smart Grid security.
I am not sure what "enough" really means in the eyes of many of these authors, but I will say that there are a lot of people paying very close attention to Smart Grid security. I personally belong to 2 of 12 NIST Smart Grid Cyber Security Working Groups (http://collaborate.nist.gov/twiki-sggrid/bin/view/SmartGrid/WorkingGroupInfo) and these groups generally meet for 1 hour per week. Members from every corner of the energy and security industries regularly attend these meetings, and the discussions and associated tasks are certainly focused on securing our Smart Grid. The NIST CSWG is also where the NISTIR 7628 Security Guidelines came from, which was a collaborative effort of over 400 people from the energy, security, legal, regulatory, government, educational, and general technology industries. Many of these same people are still quite active in the efforts of the NIST Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) and NIST CSWG. Besides the NIST effort, several standards development organizations have become involved in working towards developing standards for securing the smart grid.
The US Department of Homeland Security has put together a comprehensive Industrial Control Systems Joint Working Group (ICSJWG), which is open to anyone who wants to help (http://www.us-cert.gov/control_systems/icsjwg/index.html). I am also a member of this group, and recently attended a conference (also open to anyone who wishes to attend) in Seattle Washington. The speakers were all excellent (okay, I was one of them), and the presentations are all freely available at http://www.us-cert.gov/control_systems/icsjwg/presentations.html .
Under the UCA International Users Group (UCAIUG) there exists the vaunted and very active Open Smart Grid (OpenSG) users group, with several active Smart Grid security groups operating under their umbrella. Literally hundreds of people (many of the same working with the NIST groups) meet regularly to discuss security, take on tasks, and publish documentation which has been utilized by NIST to help develop their special publications (including NISTIR 7628), and by both utilities and public utility commissions to guide their security efforts and regulatory efforts.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has worked with the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), who have developed critical infrastructure protection requirements (NERC CIPS), which are used by utilities for auditing the security in bulk generation and transmission. The US Department of Energy (DOE) has granted millions of dollars to organizations who are charged with researching and developing security methods to protect our energy infrastructure.
There are several active Smart Grid and Industrial Control Systems active mailing lists, and several LinkedIN groups focused on Smart Grid security discussions and collaboration. Several research organizations (most notably Pike Research) have invested enormous efforts on researching and reporting on the topic of Smart Grid security, and the security product and vendor community has come out in force to address the challenges that are constantly being discovered and discussed among Smart Grid security professionals.
Of course, I must take the opportunity to also give myself a shameless plug, since I created the Smart Grid Security Summit (www.smartgridsecuritysummit.com), which took place this past Summer, and this has led to the upcoming Smart Grid Security East conference (www.smartgridsecurityeast.com), where representatives from all the above mentioned organizations (and a lot more) will be presenting on nearly every Smart Grid security topic there is to talk about. I certainly hope some of you can make it to the event. It will be worth your time if Smart Grid security information is what you seek. You can also freely join and attend meetings of the NIST, DHS, and OpenSG groups. Anyone interested in helping is welcome.
Otherwise, please continue to peruse the fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) driven news headlines. If nothing else, they are quite entertaining.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
WikiLeaks and Why "Plan B" is now more important than "Plan A"
We all understand the idea of "Plan A" and "Plan B". Plan A is the plan we put in place that is meant to work as planned. In security, it is the plan we hope will ensure the CIA (Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability) triad is in place. We put a lot of effort into Plan A, and then the more intelligent among us will put some effort into a Plan B. This is the plan we switch over to in the event Plan A fails.
This is generally the "damage control" mode plan. This is the plan we all hope we never have to go to, since by this point something very bad has happened. This could be something like...say perhaps...all of our national secret and top secret information getting leaked on a website.
That can be a really bad thing...
By now we are all probably keenly aware that the masterminds behind the WikiLeaks website have decided that information must all be publicly shared no matter what. Someone asked me my opinion about this several days ago....if I thought it was a good thing of bad thing...and my response was simple. I do not have an opinion about it being a good thing or bad thing. What I do know is that it is something that exists, and we must now figure out a way to deal with it, because it is NOT going to go away...EVER! It is like winter in Cleveland...deal with it.
I know this may sound harsh, but that is what we are facing. We live in an age where information ebbs and flows (and overflows) like water in an ocean. It comes to us as a gentle and calm breeze, or as a hurricane. It drifts down like snowflakes, or comes crashing down like an avalanche.
Okay...enough analogies...you get the picture. The truth is, we simply no longer have the control of information we once thought we had. The very nature in which we communicate today has created an environment were massively scalable information storms can occur. In the "good old days" we communicated by sending letters and talking. Today we communicate by generating data that gets pumped into "The Cloud", and then BLINDLY trust that it will only get to the intended recipients and nobody else.
Isn't that cute...
The Plan A way of dealing with information has been to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the information for as long as information has been important to us (essentially forever, but perhaps more so today in the information age). While we have created some absolutely fantastic systems for insuring both the integrity and availability of information over the last several decades, it seems that the very systems we have built have made it increasingly more difficult to insure confidentiality. Through the application of Moore's Law we have created systems with insane amounts of processing power, and have driven down the cost of these systems to almost nothing (I say almost nothing because you can find computers for free these days...at least in the San Francisco Bay Area), meaning that anyone can get their hands on the tools needed to both obtain and distribute information. There was a time when getting confidential information meant breaking encryption or applying brute force or dictionary attacks on systems. While this is still true today, we now live in a world where there are so many people accessing systems throughout the world, we no longer need to break into systems to get a hold of sensitive information. Today somebody who has authorized access to information either copies it or sends it into the cloud for all to consume. What makes this so difficult to control is that there are so many who have access to information, and either through direct access or aggregation the information can be assembled into nice little information bombs.
In other words, confidentiality has become nearly impossible to both achieve and manage.
This makes Plan A an incredibly difficult plan to manage, and certainly makes our reliance on Plan A more and more difficult to justify from a due diligence/due care perspective. We simply live in an age where we MUST assume compromise. We must accept the fact that, at some point, confidentiality goes out the window. Time to look at Plan B.
I am not sure what the US Government is doing with respect to Plan B. I saw an article where the US Government is warning college students to not talk about WikiLeaks...or else. I see some efforts to shut down the WikiLeaks site, and cut off funding sources. I imagine these are all some valid steps to take...in an act of desperation. Okay, maybe it is not desperation, but it certainly seems desperate. I mean...c'mon...do we really believe this is going to do anything more that irritate a bunch of college students who already do not like our government to begin with, and who are perhaps infinitely more savvy about the information age?
I am fairly certain that Plan B has not been given the level of attention it should have been given. It is very difficult for people who are intelligent AND arrogant (a bad but common combination) to consider the possibility that their best laid plans may have a fatal flaw. Consequently, anything more than a cursory level of attention to Plan B is considered an admission that maybe they are not as smart as they think they are. Perish the thought!
The truth is, Plan B has ALWAYS been more important than Plan A. By the time you get to point where you need to use Plan B, things have generally gotten very bad. This is now the time were you must not only figure out how to keep things operational, but also undo the damage that caused Plan A to fail. This is the "do or die" moment.
We certainly need to continually focus on protecting information. We do indeed have systems and methods available to us today that can buy us some time in the race between those who need to protect information and those who want to uncover it. We simply need to understand that at some point the information we so dearly protected is likely to be become publicly available, and use that mentality to weather the information age. It may take some time, but I am sure we will eventually get to a point where we can deal with this...much like I dealt with 21 years of Cleveland winters.
This is generally the "damage control" mode plan. This is the plan we all hope we never have to go to, since by this point something very bad has happened. This could be something like...say perhaps...all of our national secret and top secret information getting leaked on a website.
That can be a really bad thing...
By now we are all probably keenly aware that the masterminds behind the WikiLeaks website have decided that information must all be publicly shared no matter what. Someone asked me my opinion about this several days ago....if I thought it was a good thing of bad thing...and my response was simple. I do not have an opinion about it being a good thing or bad thing. What I do know is that it is something that exists, and we must now figure out a way to deal with it, because it is NOT going to go away...EVER! It is like winter in Cleveland...deal with it.
I know this may sound harsh, but that is what we are facing. We live in an age where information ebbs and flows (and overflows) like water in an ocean. It comes to us as a gentle and calm breeze, or as a hurricane. It drifts down like snowflakes, or comes crashing down like an avalanche.
Okay...enough analogies...you get the picture. The truth is, we simply no longer have the control of information we once thought we had. The very nature in which we communicate today has created an environment were massively scalable information storms can occur. In the "good old days" we communicated by sending letters and talking. Today we communicate by generating data that gets pumped into "The Cloud", and then BLINDLY trust that it will only get to the intended recipients and nobody else.
Isn't that cute...
The Plan A way of dealing with information has been to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the information for as long as information has been important to us (essentially forever, but perhaps more so today in the information age). While we have created some absolutely fantastic systems for insuring both the integrity and availability of information over the last several decades, it seems that the very systems we have built have made it increasingly more difficult to insure confidentiality. Through the application of Moore's Law we have created systems with insane amounts of processing power, and have driven down the cost of these systems to almost nothing (I say almost nothing because you can find computers for free these days...at least in the San Francisco Bay Area), meaning that anyone can get their hands on the tools needed to both obtain and distribute information. There was a time when getting confidential information meant breaking encryption or applying brute force or dictionary attacks on systems. While this is still true today, we now live in a world where there are so many people accessing systems throughout the world, we no longer need to break into systems to get a hold of sensitive information. Today somebody who has authorized access to information either copies it or sends it into the cloud for all to consume. What makes this so difficult to control is that there are so many who have access to information, and either through direct access or aggregation the information can be assembled into nice little information bombs.
In other words, confidentiality has become nearly impossible to both achieve and manage.
This makes Plan A an incredibly difficult plan to manage, and certainly makes our reliance on Plan A more and more difficult to justify from a due diligence/due care perspective. We simply live in an age where we MUST assume compromise. We must accept the fact that, at some point, confidentiality goes out the window. Time to look at Plan B.
I am not sure what the US Government is doing with respect to Plan B. I saw an article where the US Government is warning college students to not talk about WikiLeaks...or else. I see some efforts to shut down the WikiLeaks site, and cut off funding sources. I imagine these are all some valid steps to take...in an act of desperation. Okay, maybe it is not desperation, but it certainly seems desperate. I mean...c'mon...do we really believe this is going to do anything more that irritate a bunch of college students who already do not like our government to begin with, and who are perhaps infinitely more savvy about the information age?
I am fairly certain that Plan B has not been given the level of attention it should have been given. It is very difficult for people who are intelligent AND arrogant (a bad but common combination) to consider the possibility that their best laid plans may have a fatal flaw. Consequently, anything more than a cursory level of attention to Plan B is considered an admission that maybe they are not as smart as they think they are. Perish the thought!
The truth is, Plan B has ALWAYS been more important than Plan A. By the time you get to point where you need to use Plan B, things have generally gotten very bad. This is now the time were you must not only figure out how to keep things operational, but also undo the damage that caused Plan A to fail. This is the "do or die" moment.
We certainly need to continually focus on protecting information. We do indeed have systems and methods available to us today that can buy us some time in the race between those who need to protect information and those who want to uncover it. We simply need to understand that at some point the information we so dearly protected is likely to be become publicly available, and use that mentality to weather the information age. It may take some time, but I am sure we will eventually get to a point where we can deal with this...much like I dealt with 21 years of Cleveland winters.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Can I Steal A Vowel ? Never Mind...I Don't Need To.
The human mind is capable of some amazing feats. The conceptual capabilities of a young child, for example, astound me. I am a fairly good chess player, and recently my 6 year old son decided he wanted to learn chess (having seen "Wizard Chess" played in a Harry Potter movie), and I decided to indulge him.
Being a firm believer that children are far more capable of what some tend to give then credit for, I play him just as hard as I would play anyone, which meant the first few games resulted in quick checkmates. It did not take long for him to figure out how to think ahead and use inference as a strategic method, and he has since managed to achieve stalemate. Games now frequently last for an hour or more. Not bad for a 6 year old. Pappa is so proud!
What amazes me is watching him "think". I swear I can almost feel his brain thinking, and I swear I can sense his "brain muscles" getting stronger. I also believe that ANYONE can build those "brain muscles" if the drive exists to do so.
Let's consider an interesting story I read this morning. It was an article on esquire.com about a Wheel of Fortune contestant who solved the puzzle with 1 letter (and a freebie apostrophe). I read the story and realized that she was using a highly tuned level of inference in order to arrive at her conclusion. It reminded me of a conversation I recently had with Dr. Fred Cohen (we occasionally meet at the local Peet's for coffee and conversation). He stated that he believes that inference is impossible to prevent, and I have to say that I tend to agree with him.
A hacker (researcher, penetration tester, whatever term you like) is presented with overwhelming amounts of information surrounding a system all the time. In fact, the challenge is not where to find the information, but how to filter out what does not matter. With a little mental exercise, this can be accomplished very quickly...mainly because most organizations charged with protecting information are inherently lazy, and fail to understand the power of aggregation and inference. I have discovered countless pieces of company "confidential" information from piecing together bits of information available in various "sanitized" versions of documents. Bear in mind, I am not a "hacker" (at least not in the modern sense of the word), but I get how hackers think...at least to some degree.
I think about this a lot when I consider Smart Grid technologies, as well as health care information technologies. As these technologies grow we are going to see new sources of information emerge, and in our inherent somewhat lackadaisical manner of dealing with security at the decision making helm of our corporate culture, we will create plenty of early opportunities for aggregation and inference.
Things are going to get interesting....
Being a firm believer that children are far more capable of what some tend to give then credit for, I play him just as hard as I would play anyone, which meant the first few games resulted in quick checkmates. It did not take long for him to figure out how to think ahead and use inference as a strategic method, and he has since managed to achieve stalemate. Games now frequently last for an hour or more. Not bad for a 6 year old. Pappa is so proud!
What amazes me is watching him "think". I swear I can almost feel his brain thinking, and I swear I can sense his "brain muscles" getting stronger. I also believe that ANYONE can build those "brain muscles" if the drive exists to do so.
Let's consider an interesting story I read this morning. It was an article on esquire.com about a Wheel of Fortune contestant who solved the puzzle with 1 letter (and a freebie apostrophe). I read the story and realized that she was using a highly tuned level of inference in order to arrive at her conclusion. It reminded me of a conversation I recently had with Dr. Fred Cohen (we occasionally meet at the local Peet's for coffee and conversation). He stated that he believes that inference is impossible to prevent, and I have to say that I tend to agree with him.
A hacker (researcher, penetration tester, whatever term you like) is presented with overwhelming amounts of information surrounding a system all the time. In fact, the challenge is not where to find the information, but how to filter out what does not matter. With a little mental exercise, this can be accomplished very quickly...mainly because most organizations charged with protecting information are inherently lazy, and fail to understand the power of aggregation and inference. I have discovered countless pieces of company "confidential" information from piecing together bits of information available in various "sanitized" versions of documents. Bear in mind, I am not a "hacker" (at least not in the modern sense of the word), but I get how hackers think...at least to some degree.
I think about this a lot when I consider Smart Grid technologies, as well as health care information technologies. As these technologies grow we are going to see new sources of information emerge, and in our inherent somewhat lackadaisical manner of dealing with security at the decision making helm of our corporate culture, we will create plenty of early opportunities for aggregation and inference.
Things are going to get interesting....
Monday, November 8, 2010
Smart Grid Hackenomics
I recently attended (and presented at) the Department of Homeland Security Industrial Control Systems Joint Working Group (DHS ICSJWG) meeting in Seattle Washington. It was a interesting event, and STUXNET seemed to be the hot topic everyone was discussing. Most of the sessions were quite good, and many were informative.
When I attend these types of events, I often find the side conversations I have with attendees more interesting than the conference itself. I had the opportunity to chat with people who work at DHS, FBI, NRC...and just about any other 3 letter agency seeking to get a handle on cyber security issues. It does my heart good to know that our government is indeed serious about cyber security, and truly seeking knowledge.
The most interesting discussion I had, however, was on the last day. It was during a lunch break with one of the attendees, and we started a discussion on the economics of attacking the Smart Grid. Essentially, we agreed that "hobbyist" attackers and "nation-state" attacks are perhaps not the types of threats that should (or do) cause great levels of concern at the C-level's of stakeholder companies. At the highest decision making level of any organization directly affected by security threats, the only issue that consistently keeps them awake at night is money...or rather the loss of money. In fact, when we talk about security, we must constantly understand that an enterprise's chief (and arguably exclusive) security concern is in securing their ability to keep making money (and not lose money).
In other words, if security does not lead to more $$$, expect some rolling eyes. Likewise, if a lack of security leads to a loss of $$$, expect some wide eyes. This is the beginning of my Theory of Hackenomics.
In our discussion, we used the financial industry as an example of an economic model that makes a lot of sense to organized criminal enterprises. In the former Soviet Union, there are criminal enterprise organizations that provide tools and support services (for a fee) to criminals who want to make a career out of exploiting security holes in the financial industry. This is a very popular target for criminals because it is both large in size, and the direct result of a successful attack is immediate access to cash. So as part of my theory I want to state the following: The quicker an attack leads to cash for the attacker, the greater the likelihood that the attack moves from theory to reality.
This is, however, only part of the theory. The other part has to do with volume. For organized crime to get involved, the volume needs to be big enough to take the risk. Remember, organized crime is just as concerned with risk as corporations are (some will argue that corporations are the "new" organized crime anyhow). Therefore a quick path to cash that does not include a large enough volume is not necessarily a win for organized crime.
Another important issue to consider is keeping the attack as "clean" as possible, in order to make collecting and retaining the cash as easy as possible. A good example of this is how financial firms created Credit Default Swaps as a way to hedge high risk investments. This instrument allowed the potential for a large return on the chance that those who took out those crazy loans on overpriced homes (and such) would default. Well, as it turns out, those who purchased Credit Default Swaps seem to have done quite well. It was essentially a low risk method of shorting the entire financial system, and it is perfectly legal under today's laws.
So now this brings me to what became an interesting part of the lunch discussion. I postulated that if a large stakeholder in the Smart Grid ecosystem (in other words, a large publicly traded utility or AMI product vendor) was vulnerable to a major Smart Grid related attack, and an attacker held onto a 0-Day vulnerability, he could potentially sell the 0-Day vulnerability for a lot of money to a large criminal enterprise, who could then short the stock of the utility or product vendor, and then publicly announce the vulnerability. Granted, this would require some coordinated effort, but if done correctly, one could make a killing when the stock plummeted on the bad news. The news alone would probably drop the price enough to make a lot of money with a high enough volume. The news immediately followed by an actual attack would probably lead to a very big win for the criminal enterprise.
As we continue to have lunch, we discussed a few more ideas, and I thought of a few more over the last several weeks (I am not going to go into them here), and I came to the conclusion that Smart Grid Hackenomics may indeed be an interesting discipline for criminal organizations to investigate...and they probably already are.
Hopefully, the C-Level people at stakeholder organizations have thought of this as well.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Mobile Application Insecurity
Being someone who has develops secure mobile applications, I am consistently dumbfounded at large enterprises (who should know better) that fail to secure their mobile applications. A recent article in The Wall Street Journal highlighted some findings by viaForensics which pointed out several banking applications for mobile devices that store passwords unencrypted on devices.
The banking industry is no stranger to security concerns. They are indeed one of the largest purchasers of security products and services globally. The rush to bring mobile applications to the marketplace by enterprises has not overlooked financial firms, however, and they are simply not applying basic principals of secure application development - such as build security in from the very beginning, and test the security before deploying the applications. I am absolutely floored by the number of financial applications available on the iPhone (for example) that do not require something as simple as a PIN to enter the application after storing the password (let alone encrypting the password).
It is carelessness at best, and completely irresponsible at worst. Banks, Large Enterprises, and Health Care organizations should make maximizing security a priority with any and every application that deals with ANY potentially sensitive information...and they consistently fail to do so often enough to convince me that there will be a lot more breaches before things get better.
What I also find remarkable is how a company like Apple, who scrutinizes application submissions and regularly rejects applications that use foul language, show nudity, or (God forbid) replicates Apple functionality. Yet Apple does not bother to reject applications submitted by banking and health care organizations (the latter being something I am personally well aware of) that fail to encrypt information. Is this their responsibility?
Yes it is!
Security is everyone's responsibility, and until we understand that, we will continue down the same path with every new technology, platform, and latest and greatest thing that comes down the pike.
You can bank on that.
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