Tag Archives: security

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Cybersecurity Roadmap for The Assimilation System Management Suite

Past Present And Future Signpost Showing Assimilation Cybersecurity Evolution (Roadmap) 2016 Security Roadmap

The Assimilation System Management Suite (ASMS) provides integrated capabilities in monitoring, general system management, network management, and cybersecurity. The next few releases will concentrate on strengthening our cybersecurity portfolio of low-noise automated security tools. The new capabilities include security best practice analyses, checksum integrity analyses, and patch tracking and management and integration with a few SIEM products. This post talks about our plans for those releases in more detail.

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Security compliance: No more drama!

No security compliance drama illustration

Getting into security compliance is a big effort. Worse yet, Verizon says 80% of those who get in compliance have trouble staying there. When you discover you’re out of security compliance, there’s typically high drama if an auditor notices, or even higher drama if your security team discovers you’ve let an intruder in. Too much drama and too much elapsed time reduces security and impairs organizational learning.

What’s needed is a way to find these problems right after they’re created – while the people involved still remember what they did and why they did it. This changes the whole dynamic and creates teachable moments instead of high stress drama – before an intruder or auditor finds the weakness.

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Eating the Security Compliance Elephant

How to eat an elephant? One bite at a time

Getting your organization into security compliance is a lot like eating an elephant. It’s a daunting task, but there’s really not much you can do but eat it one bite at a time. A recent Verizon survey indicated that 80% of all organizations surveyed indicated they have trouble staying in compliance. For these organizations, they get to eat that elephant again and again – and worse yet, under the critical eye of an auditor. Once you eaten the elephant, you don’t want it to become an annual event.

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Announcing the IT Best Practices Community

Cybersecurity best practices community

Computer security is problematic today, is expected to get worse for years to come. The security field is widely acknowledged to be suffering from a shortage of qualified security experts. Many people believe that significant improvements in automation are the only way to address this growing problem. Compared to the level of automation that system management has experienced in recent years, security has been estimated to be at least a decade behind.

Our IT Best Practices community was created to help support security automation efforts. We aim to collect, categorize and curate mechanically-verifiable best practices for servers, services and networking, in support of the idea of “best practices as code”.

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Living a little less dangerously with crypto in the Assimilation Project (part 4)

After a few mental missteps documented by previous blog posts (here and there), this is what I think of as a pretty reasonable approach to packet encryption in the Assimilation Project.  Although those two posts are now obsolete, the background post I wrote is still relevant.  I’ve learned a lot about crypto in the process […]

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Living Dangerously With Crypto In the Assimilation Project – Part 3

In this article, we talk in more detail about the Assimilation Project’s reliable UDP protocol, our decision to avoid session keys, factors influencing our initial choice of crypto libraries, and touch on key revocation. So, like before we’re looking forward to your comments on our design choices. Like before, grab your thinking cap, sit down with your crypto buddies and think hard about what we’ve done.

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Living Dangerously with Crypto in the Assimilation Project – How Many Keys?

This article outlines our approach to keys and key management given our unique problems in a pragmatic and effective way. Although we will use crypto libraries with well-proven algorithms, we will use them in slightly unconventional ways. So, get your crypto buddies, grab a beverage (adult or otherwise), put on your thinking cap, and think hard about how we’re planning on approaching these challenges. Although I’ve tried to think all this through, I’m not a crypto expert – which is why I’m asking for your help.

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Crypto background for the Assimilation project

Since its inception, the open source Assimilation project has been concerned with security, and paranoid at every opportunity. Like a lot of software, it has serious security concerns. On the one hand, our nanoprobes run on every server in the enterprise and exercise root privileges – creating a potentially dangerous attack surface. On the other hand, we incrementally create a high-value database which has fine-grained and up-to-date information about everything in the environment – software versions, ports, services, IP addresses and MAC addresses, known security vulnerabilities – a veritable treasure map for an attacker. This article details why cryptography is essential for communication in this environment, and some unique aspects of the problem we’re solving that affect how we use it. It is our hope our readers (this means you!) will give us a thorough flogging^H^H^H^H^H^H^H review of how we use cryptography in our software in this article and the next.

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Announcing Assimilation version 0.1.4

We are proud to announce the latest in our series of releases of the Assimilation software which will culminate in an incredibly useful production release. This release is eminently suitable for trials in an environment where the caveats are acceptable. We have quite a few pre-built Ubuntu packages, and a few CentOS/RHEL packages – so go forth, download and subdue the galaxy!