Our last nine months of research into identity and access management have yielded quite a few surprises – for me at least. Many of these new perspectives I have shared piecemeal in various blogs, and others not. But it occurred to me today, as we start getting feedback from the dozen or so IAM practitioners we have asked to critique our Cloud IAM research, that some key themes have been lost in the overall complexity of the content. I want to highlight a few points that really hit home with me,…
This guy, Prince said, could back up CloudFlare’s claims. This really was Web Dresden, or something. After an inquiry, I was ready to face vindication. Instead, I received this note from a spokesperson for NTT, one of the backbone operators of the Internet:
Infrastructure as a Service storage can be insanely complex when you include operational and performance requirements. First you need to create a resource pool, which might itself be a pool of virtualized and abstracted storage, and then you need to tie it all together with orchestration to support the dynamic requirements of the cloud – such as moving running virtual machines between servers, instantly snapshotting multi-terabyte virtual drives, and other insanity.
Russell Thomas and a bunch of his friends recently posted a research paper called How Bad Is It? – A Branching Activity Model to Estimate the Impact of Information Security Breaches, which attempts to provide a structure for estimating the impact of a breach. This work is necessary – we have no benchmarks, or even consensus, about what breached organizations should even be counting.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is often thought of as merely as a more efficient (outsourced) version of our traditional infrastructure. On the surface you still manage things that look like simple virtualized networks, computers, and storage. You ‘boot’ computers (launch instances), assign IP addresses, and connect (virtual) hard drives. But while the presentation of IaaS resembles traditional infrastructure, the reality underneath is anything but business as usual.
A lot of folks ask me how I work from home. My answer is simple: I don’t. I have a home office, but I do the bulk of my work from a variety of coffee shops in my local area. So I give a few minutes’ thought at night to where I want to work the following day. Sometimes I have a craving for a Willy’s Burrito Bowl, which means I drive 20 minutes to one of their coffee shops in Sandy Springs. Other times I just have to have the salad bar’s chocolate mousse at Jason’s Deli, which means there are…
MailChimp is offering a 10% discount to customers who enable 2-factor authentication.
Impressive. Time to finish migrating our lists over to MailChimp (we only use them for the Friday Summary right now). We need to reward efforts like this.
I recently participated in a roundtable for NetworkWorld, tackling the question of Who is responsible for cloud security?. First of all the picture is hilarious, especially because it shows my head photoshopped onto some dude with a tie. Like I’d wear a tie.
Matt Asay wrote a very though provoking piece on Oracle’s Big Miss: The End Of The Enterprise Era. While this blog does not deal with security directly, it does highlight a couple of important trends that effect both what customers are buying, and who is making the decisions.
A couple years ago Brian Sullivan of Microsoft demonstrated blind SQLi and server-side JavaScript injection attacks on Mongo, Neo4j, and other big data engines, but this is the first time I have seen someone get a shell and bypass ASLR. From the SCRT Information Security Team Blog, they found an 0-day to do just that: