Rational Survivability

I was very interested and excited to learn what NIST researchers and staff had come up with when I saw the notification of the “Draft Interagency Report 7904, Trusted Geolocation in the Cloud: Proof of Concept Implementation.”

It turns out that this report is an iteration on the PoC previously created by VMware, Intel and RSA back in 2010 which utilized Intel’s TXT, VMWare’s virtualization platform and the RSA/Archer GRC platform, as this one does.

I haven’t spent much time to look at the differences, but I’m hoping as I read through it that we’ve made progress…

You can read about the original PoC here, and watch a video from 2010 about it here.  Then you can read about it again in its current iteration, here (PDF.)

I wrote about this topic back in 2009 and still don’t have a good firm answer to the question I asked in 2009 in a blog titled “Quick Question: Any Public Cloud Providers Using Intel TXT?” and the follow-on “More On High Assurance (via TPM) Cloud Environments”

At CloudConnect 2011 I also filmed a session with the Intel/RSA/VMware folks titled “More On Cloud and Hardware Root Of Trust: Trusting Cloud Services with Intel® TXT”

I think this is really interesting stuff and a valuable security and compliance capability, but is apparently still hampered with practical deployment challenges.

I’m also confused as to why RSA employees were not appropriately attributed under the NIST banner and this is very much a product-specific/vendor-specific set of solutions…I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a NIST-branded report like this.

At any rate, I am interested to see if we will get to the point where these solutions will have more heterogeneous uptake across platforms.

/Hoff

Funny Attention Dogs And Owners Sign (Photo credits: www.dogpoopsigns.com)

Imagine you are part of a company in the “Pet Industry.”  Let’s say dogs, specifically.

Imagine further that regardless of whether you work on the end that feeds the dog, provides services focused on grooming the dog, sells accessories for the dog, actually breeds and raises the dog or deals with cleaning up what comes out the other end of the dog, that you also simultaneously spend your time offering your opinions on how much you despise the dog industry.

Hmmmm.

Now, either you’re being refreshingly honest, or you’re simply being shrewd about which end of the mutt you’re targeting your services toward — and sometimes it’s both ends and the middle — but you’re still a part of the dog industry.

And we all know it’s a dog-eat-dog world…in the Pet business as it is in the Security business.  Which ironically illustrates the cannibalistic nature of being in the security industry whilst trying to distance oneself by juxtaposing the position of the security community.

Claiming to be a Dog Whisperer in an industry of other aimless people shouting and clapping loudly whilst looking to perpetuate bad dog-breeding practices so they can sell across the supply chain is an interesting tactic.  However, yelling “BAD DOG!” and wondering why it continues to eat your slippers doesn’t change behavior.

You can’t easily dismantle and industry but you can offer better training, solutions or techniques to make a difference.

Either way, there’s a lot of tail wagging and crap to clean up.

Lots to consider in this little analog.  For everyone.

/Hoff

P.S. @bmkatz points us all to this amazing resource you may find useful.

Lori Macvittie is at the Gartner DC conference today and tweeted something extraordinary from one of the sessions focused on SDN (actually there were numerous juicy tidbits, but this one caught my attention:

Attendees: we run a flat dc network. Assign subnets to server admins. They configure/provision as needed. #sdn doesn’t add value. #gartnerdc

— Lori MacVittie (@lmacvittie) December 4, 2012

Amazing, innit?

To which my response was:

@lmacvittie Someone should have told them that the server huggers said the same thing about virtualization.

— [Christofer] Hoff (@Beaker) December 4, 2012

Regardless of how one might “feel” about SDN, the notion of agility in service delivery wherein the network can be exposed and consumed as a service versus a trunk port and some VLANs is…the right thing.  Just because the network is “flat” doesn’t mean it’s services are or that the delivery of said services are any less complex.  I just wrote about this here: The Tyranny Of Taming (Network) Traffic: Steering, Service Insertion and Chaining…

“Flat networks” end up being carved right back up into VLANs and thus L3 routing domains to provide for isolation and security boundaries…and then to deal with that we get new protocols to deal with VLAN exhaustion, mobility and L2 stretch and…

It seems like some of the people at the Gartner DC show (from this and other tweets as I am not there) are abjectly allergic to abstraction beyond that which they can physically exercise dominion.

Where have I seen this story before?

/Beaker