Category Archives: Security

SCADA security references

NIST published their Critical Infrastructure Protection guidelines and I also noted the National Information Assurance Program (NIAP) Process Control Security Requirements Forum (PCSRF). Wish I had these references about four years ago. This is an especially interesting paper, which I think was done for the PCSRF and ISO/IEC 15408:

http://www.isd.mel.nist.gov/documents/falco/ITSecurityProcess.pdf

The Gas Technology Institute/American Gas Association Encryption page also has some good pointers and here’s the Department of Energy (DoE) guide to CyberSecurity.

Gopher eats Microsoft

Once upon a time, Georgi Guninski wrote AIX buffer overflows. Aleph One provided shellcodes. Now everyone hammers on Microsoft vulnerabilities and Bill Gates is retraining his employees for security awareness. That seems like a good idea as UNIX gopher servers could suddenly gain popularity again. Think your “internal” network is safe? Think again as one of your users might connect to a gopher site…oh, and all versions of IE are vulnerable. Go Minnesota!

Would you like Web Services with that?

So let’s get one thing straight, the “web services” (WS) revolution is a new term for standards-based communication between networked applications. Does this change anything for anyone? Not really, not yet. An executive at a small software company asked me to help them decide what to do about WS, so it’s been on my mind lately. The rather sharp-witted Register points out a clear case where not even Microsoft or Sun can figure out how to turn the WS hype into real value for customers.

Packet Trap

There’s something really nice about a good pasta sauce. There are so many recipes on the web, it’s hard to know where to begin. My favorite, of course, is the easiest: a bit of your favorite oil, add some basil, pine nuts, and garlic in the blender. Just press a button and…pesto!

There’s something really suspicious about a product called the White Glove, but there’s no doubt that Fred Cohen has a unique view. In light of this, I think when I build a DMZ for a client tomorrow I will try to convince them to call it a “Packet Trap.”