Securosis Blog

For developers one of the most visible API gateway operations is key management. But dear reader this is not your father’s key management – the kind laden with X.509, PKI, and baroque foofaraw that security teams had to beg developers to implement. This is 2013 and the keys are OAuth access keys! And developers are asking us for the keys too, so what should we do?

One of our favorite friends, Jack Daniels, has a new post on Active Defense:

If you make the claim that “active defense” is only a euphemism for “hacking back”, you are either hyping an agenda, or selling a (probably outdated) security model. Or perhaps you’ve just been misled by the previously mentioned shysters. By my count that’s three flavors of wrong, although one may be slightly less bitter.

The FTC has issued new rules on data collection for minors:

Now, the list of what counts as “personal information” has been expanded to include geolocation markers, IP addresses, pictures or audio of the child, and persistent cookies that can track users across sites. The rules also now apply to companies that make plug-ins or advertising networks, which often collect information but aren’t thought of as discrete sites that fall under the rules.

Andy Ellis (yes, @csoandy) had a good educational post on DNS Reflection attacks. The DrDos (no, Digital Research DOS isn’t making a comeback – dating myself FTW) has proven an effective way for attackers to scale Denial of Service (DoS) attacks to over 100gbps. Andy explains how DNS Reflection works, why it’s hard to deal with, and what targets can do to defend themselves.

Our schedules are already filling up for Black Hat this year, so if you want to meet please drop us a line.

Normally by this time of year things slow down, people go on vacation, and we get to relax a bit, but not this year. At least not for me. It has been seven days a week here for a while, playing catch-up with all the freakin’ research projects going on. And I have wanted to comment on a ton of news items, but have not had the time. So this week’s summary consists of comments on a few headlines I have not had any other the chance to comment on. Here we go:

Branden Williams is exactly right: 2013 is a pivotal year for PCI DSS. A new version of the guidance will hit later this year.

We have begun to see a shift in Denial of Service (DoS) tactics by attackers, moving up the stack from networks to servers and from servers to the application layer. Over the last 18 months we have also witnessed a new wave of vulnerabilities and isolated attacks against databases, all related to denial of service. We have seen recent issues with Oracle with invalid object pointers, a serious vulnerability in the workload manager, the TNS listener barfing on malformed packets, a PostgreSQL issue…

Our previous post discussed the first step in the development process: getting access to the API gateway through access provisioning. Now that you have access it’s time to discuss how the gateway supports your code development and deployment processes. An API gateway must accomplish two primary functions: help developers build, test, and deploy applications; and help companies control use of their API. They are part development environment and part operational security tool.

Ericka Chickowski posted an interview with the creators of the open source library AntiSQLi at Dark Reading. She is discussing a very interesting development tool, but the value proposition gets somewhat lost in the creators’ poor terminology.