The Immutable kBlog: thoughts on data integrity

Vivek Kundra’s legacy was to set in motion a deep change in the IT landscape for the Federal Government.  The last few years saw many sceptics express doubts about the government moving to the cloud, but the rudder did turn and now its obvious how deep the Fed is in this turn, addressing the challenges of procurement (e.g. Apps.gov) Security and simplified accreditation (FedRAMP).  However, a recent Presidential Memorandum on Managing Government Records that was released on November 28, 2011 sets  a pretty significant hurdle for agencies that use public cloud providers to jump over, let alone comply with for internal systems.  Specifically, these agencies are required to “managing electronic records, including email and social media, deploying cloud based services or storage solutions…supporting agency compliance with applicable legal requirements related to the preservation of information relevant to litigation”

Untangling that; basically preservation of records for litigation is pretty complex and is discussed in many publications. It is supported by the test of authenticity which results in whether the data carries sufficient evidential weight to be admissible see The Foundations of Digital Evidence and BS10008. As US Chief Magistrate Judge Paul W. Grimm (author of lorrain vs markel opinion paper) in his recent eDiscovery interview, suggests “rules that deal with whether it’s admissible or not must be addressed…If people weren’t aware of what they had to do to get this stuff into evidence during the discovery phase…they were potentially spending huge amounts of money only to be left wanting a trial because they couldn’t get it into evidence”.

Think about a simple case of a cloud provider who does somehow agree to provide data to support your e-Discovery requests but cannot prove the data´s authenticity.  Brings to mind all those sunk costs invested to discover, retain and preserve the data, but with no forethought towards actually having to use it in court.   

Author: Nadeem Bukhari

I know the Ponemon Institute has a sponsor for each of their studies but the recently released Second Annual Cost of Cyber Crime Study does contain some really valid findings that CSO´s should take into account. 

Their study highlights just how many companies are immature in the detective and reactive controls following a breach.  I would suggest that for data theft and fraud breaches, most of the deployed controls as so ineffective that often, the occurance of a breach is detected though a source outside of their organisations.  A great example of this is the TJX breach  where the incident was reported by TJX officials around a month after an extensive fraud had occurred. 

There are many reasons for this including but not limited to zero day hacks, or ineffective intrusion detection systems.  However, as Ponemon points out in their findings, “companies using SIEM were better able to quickly detect and contain cyber crimes than those companies not using SIEM”… Yes, the sponsor or this study is a SIEM provider.  More importantly though, it does point to the fact that audit log information is a key source of information in the detection capabilities.  However as recognised year after year by another study known as the Deloitte Global Financial Services Security Survey; within the top 5 internal/ external audit findings is “Audit trails/ logging issues”.  I.e., organisations are still wrestling with collection, analysis and protection of audit log data.   CSO´s need to place greater emphasis on using some of their rapidly reducing IT budgets on log collection, analysis and protection tools.  Because as Ponemon points out  “Cyber attacks can get costly if not resolved quickly…the average time to resolve a cyber attack by a participating organisation was 18 days at an approximate average cost of $415k with malicious insider attacks taking more than 45 days”… I know of more than a few log management solutions that cost less than that.
 
OK,  now lets assume that you have a solution to detect and fix a breach but now want to prosecute or even have to defend a prosecution.  Most companies are missing a critical capability that will cause such a significant pain point in litigation scenarios.  Specifically most organisations have not deployed capabilities so that the electronic data to be digital evidence ready.    I will write more on this in an upcoming post, however if you cannot prove the electronically stored data´s authenticity, it will not be usable as evidence.  A great source to identify the controls you need to consider are located in BS 10008 – Evidential weight and legal admissibility of electronically stored information. 

In addition to the digital evidence point, it is now a known fact that the hacker of today is not out to be noticed.  In fact they have always preferred to stay undetected until they want to get noticed.  To do this they delete or modify data that may show their activity.   In most hacking 101 books/ papers, there are sections on how to conduct a stealth attack and how to remain undetected by deleting or modifying log data.  It’s obvious that if the log data has been modified the time to detect and respond to an attack will be substantially increased. 

A professor at one of the first lectures that I had in Information Security asked the question: “What is the most dangerous thing a hacker can do?” After going through a list of responses by the class, he suggested; “It is to stay hidden and seep corruption into the organisations digital data that it even gets into the backups and yield an unrecoverable digital data environment…. This type of effect can put a company out of business”.  Now, years on, I recognise that this is not the worst a hacker can do, i.e. they can cause an outage of a power grid, mayhem at a nuclear plant etc.  However with respect to normal business it does make me wonder how many organisations were subjected to this type of attack when the UK´s Ministry of Defence published the warning “Foreign hackers ‘putting UK firms out of business’“.

Author: Nadeem Bukhari

I’ve read a great post on David Lacey’s blog. Very clearly, he points out how most people and organizations are forgetting that information security is based is a three-pillar house (Availability, Confidentiality and Integrity, or CIA).

Availability was the main focus some years ago. Denial-of-service was the main worry, and business continuity was the focus of organizations. Then came the turn for confidentiality, and encryption became something that was -almost- everywhere. The impacts of a loss in availibility is big; the impact of a loss of confidentiality is bigger… and scarier.

But now comes the time for data integrity. Right now, few decision-making minds in organizations focus on that, or care about it. But still, the impact of a loss in data integrity is -and here we agree with Mr. Lacey- huge. What if somebody changed the data -intentionally or not? Results can go from from undermining the people’s (think about the recent alleged attack by a hacker to the Virginia Health Professions Database) or even fraud (think about the Satyam Computers‘ case.

And it gets darker. The problem comes not only by safeguarding integrity, but also to the long and painful process of recovering from one of this attacks: how to know exactly which data is trustworhty (i.e. hasn’t been tampered with) and what is not?

It is surprising that currently there is not a big concern about this. We are guessing that unfortunately this concern will come when it is too late, and there are many breaches in data integrity and costs and consequences are there to remind us of its important. That is why, in David Lacey’s words,  it a time-bomb, waiting to explode.

The British Standards Institution (or BSI) has recently published the BSI 10008, a new standard that focuses on the evidential weight of electronic information. It establishes up a set of requirements organizations should follow in their data management procedures for ensuring… yes, you got it: the integrity of information.

The new standard’s name is quite self-explanatory: “Evidential weight and legal admissibility of electronic information. Specification”. As the BSI website states, “legal admissibility concerns whether or not a piece of evidence would be accepted by a court of law. To ensure the admissibility, information needs to be managed by a secure system throughout its lifetime (which can be for many years). Where doubt can be placed on the information, the evidential weight may well be reduced, potentially harming the legal case”. The BSI 10008 is aimed therefore to ensure that any piece of electronic information used in a Court of Law has the maximum evidential weight.

There are many interesting aspects here. First, it shows the need of clearly establishing guidelines and a common framework for how to deal with electronic data and digital evidence. And second -but no less important- it outlines how data integrity is a key aspect in information management.

We just bought a copy of the standard. We’ll read it and publish some thoughts… Stay tuned.

Public Health Records (PHR) allow individual to save, post, manage and share all their health record information via the Internet. Advantages associated to the use of this kind of tools are rather obvious: forget about trying to remember if you are allergic to this or that medication; don’t bother walking all the way to the doctor with your new test results, just to realize when it’s your turn to go talk to the doctor that you forgot home the previous results. Everything will be available online, but only for the people that you allowed to, and under the conditions that you stated.

Or at least in theory.

The adoption of PHR has been slower than assumed, mainly due to lack of trust in the protection of that data, according to Zöe Baird, president of the Markle Foundation. As a response, a group formed by technology companies, providers, health insurers and consumer groups released last June a common framework that will help consumers gain trust in these technologies. It is expected that this joint effort will boost its acceptance and use.

The framework consists of nine consumer policies that rely on seven different support technologies. It is no surprise that one of these technologies (CT3) is Immutable Audit Trails, and four of these nine consumer policies are based on the immutability of the audit trails. This, in other words, means that audit trails -files that track the use, access, modification or deletion of any data- must have integrity and be tamper evident: the integrity of this audit trails must be evident.

Security concerns have been shifting over the years: first on availability, later -in recent years- to confidentiality, and we totally agree with what David Lacey, one of the leading authorities in Information Security Management thinks.

As final users, we see the importance of data integrity only after an attack has occurred, or data has been tampered with. The impact of any change -be it malitious or accidental- is huge. Today, data integrity is percieved more as a “nice to have” than a “must have”… rarely enough stress is put in this.

Gradually people and enforcers are realising the potencial danger associated to “false proofs”. We in Kinamik believe that data integrity will be, quoting Mr. Lacey, “the next big threat”.