Comment by EthanHeilman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EthanHeilman | Hacker News Reader

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>I know data security is hard, but maybe if the government spent money on proper protections of people's data instead of building data centers to spy on it's citizens, this wouldn't have happened.

The Gozer Principal: in Information Security you get to design the weapon that will be used against you [1]. Don't build a tool you are unwilling to hand to your greatest enemy.

For example what happens when foreign governments steal the domestic bulk surveillance data? I bet the NSA accidentally hoovers up all sorts of top secret information that is just accidentally sent over the wire or non-classified data that could do great damage to US interests. Or what happens when a foreign government gains access to the tools used to perform this bulk collection? They could inject fake traffic or hide traffic for strategic deception campaigns.

Collect it all is a strategically empty slogan, it represents a serious risk to US national security, but on the other hand it is a wonderful Rice Bowl [2] for the NSA.

>What can an organization do to protect such sensitive information, or at least reduce their exposure and the amount of data that is able to be leaked before detection?

* Keep it offline/airgapped.

* Store the most dangerous data on paper with hashes replicated online to insure integrity.

* Delete information you don't need anymore.

* Do not have a centralized repository of data to reduce risk of catastrophic exposure.

There are always trade offs between usability, functionality and security.

[1]: https://twitter.com/ethan_heilman/status/510993743156375552

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_rice_bowl#Other_uses

Thank you for this. great write up, and totally on point.

> * Keep it offline/airgapped.

Agreeable, but what about physical access? What about compromised individuals, or nefarious agents?

> * Store the most dangerous data on paper with hashes replicated online to insure integrity.

Interesting; i guess that reduces the accessibility of the information, so it's harder for you and harder for someone else. Interesting, and in line with your comment about the Gozer Principal (is there anything more than a tweet about that?)

> * Do not have a centralized repository of data to reduce risk of catastrophic exposure.

Also a great point too; and pretty contrary to how we typically design systems.

Thanks again!

> what about physical access? What about compromised individuals, or nefarious agents?

Always a risk and a very hard problem to solve since someone always needs access and that person can be compromised. Detecting and preventing this is what counter-intelligence is for, but counter-intelligence is never a guarantee of security.

You can trade off usability for security to slow the speed at which an attacker can copy everything giving you more time to detect the activity. This only makes sense if they information is exceptionally important to protect. That being said, even paper can be stolen in large quantities. Jonathan Pollard managed to steal quite a bit of classified paper from the US during his tenure. The Israeli's needed multiple highspeed copying machines to keep up with his output [1].

One could imagine a system in which records are stored in multiple places and people only have access to the local files. No one agent could compromise the entire system. Then again, you might be so secure you protect the information from yourself and may not be able to "connect the dots" which is probably what you have the information for in the first place.

As Snowden suggested, "The Two Man Rule" [2] can also make enemies spies jobs harder. While it is true a determined attacker can overcome it by gaining the other parties credentials, such actions raise the risk the spy being caught.

A very silly idea:

I've been told on older nuclear armed submarines the device used to launch the missiles must be carried from one part of the sub to another to begin the launch sequence. The device was extremely heavy and awkward requiring multiple people to move it and making the movement of it very obvious and loud. Thus, they accidentally achieved an additional "Two Man Rule". Perhaps if very secret information was encrypted and then stored on heavy large objects which could only be read/decrypted at another location in the building than it would be difficult to quickly steal and decrypt many of the files. A computational version of this would be a cipher that requires massive resources (memory, CPU) to decrypt. This is likely more fantasy than reality, but at least enemies spies would have to break a sweat.

>Interesting, and in line with your comment about the Gozer Principal (is there anything more than a tweet about that?)

I've been working on a blog post on it, but I don't really have enough content to flesh it out and make it worth reading at the moment.

[1]: https://books.google.com/books?id=MDZlAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT66&lpg=P...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-man_rule

Wow, yet another insightful comment! many thanks.

The two-man rule is a good idea - not fool-proof, but I suppose nothing really is.

And the story about the heavy device on nuclear subs; that's brilliant! Although I'm not sure a computational version would be a ciper that needs a lot of resources to decrypt, unless that is something that even people who have valid access need to expend resources for in order to access.

It really seems like ease of access is the enemy; that's a pretty fruitful take away.

I do hope you share your blog post about the Gozer Principal on HN when you're done, I look forward to reading that.

all of your points totally undermine the benefits of centralization and computerization. perhaps that is the point and that there are some things that should just not be digitized or made "easy to do," but security people also recognize that security is often not the end goal. creating a usable system where the reward outweighs the risk is the goal. if the reward, despite this risk/vulnerability, is still very high, then we'll probably keep doing it.

your points are what you would want to do if you wanted to make an ideally secure system, but nobody wants only an ideally secure system...

100% agree! Typically you do not want to trade off usability for security, but there are situations in which you do. The question then becomes how much do you trade off and are there solutions that give you similar gains but don't involve trade offs?

I'm just proposing some tools which might be useful when security is significantly more important than other considerations.

I don't think that this is a case where you want to trade off security for usability, and I don't think that generally those cases exist. You always want more usability. The problems that OPM has are massive, their solutions need to scale. Solutions like what you propose make their solutions stop scaling.

Security people (and armchair security people especially) think that security is the end goal. Security is never the end goal. The mission is the end goal. Security is only useful in so much as it helps you achieve the mission. Sometimes security needs to get out of the way when the mission needs to get done. It is always a tradeoff. The personnel clearance system is already such a tradeoff, a background investigation system that needs to scale to millions of people. Good luck making it "ideally secure."

There were data hygiene and application/network security best practices that OPM should have followed. In hindsight, they would have been way cheaper than the response to a breach like this. Responding by taking all the systems offline would most likely be far more expensive to the system as a whole than a future breach.

> There were data hygiene and application/network security best practices that OPM should have followed

Like what? Can you reference anything?

Your comment criticizes security but, this is a HUGE leak. You can't just sweep this kinda data under the rug for the sake of usability. That's just laziness. The mission matters and is important, but if you can't protect the data that people give you, you shouldn't have it at all.

This was a government agency; there is NO REASON for any kind of security tradeoff.

A company with CC info? Ok, yeah that's a different story with different tradeoffs. But this is the kind of data breaches that can cause vast amounts of harm to individuals and the nation; people's lives are put in danger by this leak. You wanna tell me that it's OK to sacrifice security for the sake of usability in cases like that? Would you feel the same if it was your life that was now at risk?

They had a responsibility to protect the data they held AS WELL AS to serve the mission. not one or the other. both. it is irresponsible to take risks with data that is not yours.

You know that there is no perfect security, right? So do you imply that, since security is so important, government should stop function? Anything government does decreases security, even if so slightly.

With FISMA no one builds even remotely secure systems, nothing anyone here would even want their name associated with. And this is because under FISMA government executives can "except risk", and they don't have to justify why.

So when your agency needs an application to do X, and you will face consequences if it doesn't get spun up, and to do so requires you cut a lot of security corners, but you won't face any consequences for doing so, you're going to cut those corners. Especially if not cutting those concerns means delays in rolling out that system, or spending a ton of money to fix all those security problems. The state of information security in the government is atrocious for this reason. It's not that complicated. There is no real incentive to secure systems, and very real insentives to not do so. You just issue the ATO and accept the risk. It's up an running and everyone is happy. If it's not and running people are pissed. It gets owned, people shrug and say "well nothing is totally secure".

Until this changes, compromises will continue.

Boom. Nailed it. A sad, but accurate state of affairs.

>Security people (and armchair security people especially) think that security is the end goal.

This only seems to be your mistaken perception of what security people think. I'm a security analyst and I've never met anyone in my industry that believes that security is a goal that can be achieved. Security is a process that will never end.

>I don't think that this is a case where you want to trade off security for usability, and I don't think that generally those cases exist. You always want more usability.

If you believe that security is always a tradeoff(which you stated) and you believe that there is never a situation where you would want to make such a tradeoff, you are basically saying that there is never a situation where you would want security, which is ridiculous. There is always a balance between usability and security. In most cases, the scales will tip towards usability by a large margin, but there are times where a significant hit to usability in the name of security is the right decision.

> … but nobody wants only an ideally secure system

Indeed! The ideally secure system would be one which doesn't exist/doesn't have ANY interface, much like the perfect computer which doesn't perform any IO with the rest of the world.

"The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards... and even then I have my doubts."

- Prof. Gene "Spaf" Spafford

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