Dailydave December 2020

dailydave@lists.aitelfoundation.org

2 participants
4 discussions

"Is it done yet? Boom! Typey Typey!"
by Dave Aitel 31 Dec '20

31 Dec '20

Today is my last day at Immunity. I don't know what to say about it that everyone on this list doesn't already know or that isn't weighed down with embarrassing secrets. At its best Immunity was a family, but also a machine for producing absolute monsters, and not just in the technical arenas. Even when it came to project management, we dropped people in the deep waters of the Marianas Trench and expected them to build bioluminescence on the way down. Because of my history at the NSA, I always believed managers at Immunity had to be as technical or more as anyone in their tree. This is less being a manager than being a Dungeon Master but it's also the only way to grow Ogres. There's a scene in the West Wing when someone tells Donna that her job can't be where she grows into a person, and she says, "Why Not? Why can't it be that thing?" and for a lot of us at Immunity that rung true, with kids and divorces and entire new career fields. I sent one last email to the internal list, but at some level a lot of Immunity is spread out amongst the stars and I wanted to thank everyone at once. It was the honor of a lifetime to work beside you all. We did great things together. -dave

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How many treadmills can you run on at once?
by Dave Aitel 16 Dec '20

16 Dec '20

I wanted everyone to browse here and enjoy this Microsoft Teams vulnerability: https://github.com/oskarsve/ms-teams-rce/blob/main/README.md I also enjoy the discussion <https://twitter.com/taviso/status/1336365194071535617?s=20> it has engendered when it comes to how to measure vulnerabilities that are "in the cloud" or via "Auto-update". It would be good to get clarity on these things. [image: image.png] Measurement is the first step of something else: intermediate analysis. I think we failed, as a community, when we accepted the premise that vulnerabilities could be flattened down to simple numbers, CVSS scores, VEP scores, whatever. Bugs are inherently complex and interlinked. Losing that is losing their essence - you lose the ability to think coherently about them. But if you follow any set of scoring guidelines for vulnerabilities, and the best ones are qualitative, like the Pwnie Awards, you know that even though a massive amount of effort has gone into mitigation, assessment, secure coding frameworks, education, and everything else that makes up the meta-SDL, we are flooded with bugs. The mitigations aren't working. The secure coding frameworks, aren't. For every bug we find and fix a dozen more are written by the developers we thought we trained. It is a natural response to try to hide from this knowledge of failure. To cook the CVE numbers. To take refuge in our stock prices. Let's write another blogpost about catching an APT and give it a funny insulting nickname. Unfortunately without intermediate analysis you cannot do higher level strategy. And the treadmill of the information security technology arena is beyond exhausting. An equally fast treadmill is running next to it for security policy and legal policy and another one for incident response. There's no intermediate analysis happening in any area, so we are left making strategy choices by random chance or luck or the occasional herculean effort. -dave

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Kiroshi Optics
by Dave Aitel 11 Dec '20

11 Dec '20

https://twitter.com/JesseHeinig/status/1336913378564919297 https://twitter.com/ClipperChip/status/1337289319988473856 People seem to think you can use etymology as some clue to deciphering the cyberpunk and cyber philosophy in general. You can read a whole Thomas Rid book <https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Machines-Cybernetic-Thomas-Rid/dp/0393286002> on it, and it's weird when people stress "Cybernetics" as if they've found some long lost hieroglyphic clue when the reality of how everything cyber evolved is staring right at them in flickering neon lights. As Hunter S. Thomson said, "with the right kind of eyes you can go up onto the top floor of any Silicon Valley building and you can almost see the high-water mark. That place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." When I was 20, working at the NSA, I once attended a cypherpunk meeting in DC, with Diffie and others crowded into a brownstone somewhere in one of the nicer parts of the city. The cypherpunk motto is very simple, "Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy. We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and we're going to write it." At 20, in my larval stage, I was so socially awkward that it wrapped around to blithe unfiltered ignorance. During introductions, when they asked me where I worked and I said, "The DoD", they asked me why. I shrugged, "'Cypherpunks write code', and there are are more at the NSA than you might think." And people got over it - I pestered people with technical questions later as I always do, and there were snacks. But everyone in that room was a fighter, striving against an unspoken force on the field we now know as cyber war. Although no genre is "about" anything, to some extent Cyberpunk novels have often had a keen awareness of analyzing what it means to be a human mind. The new game Cyberpunk 2077 is an excellent adaptation of this theme, and avoids playing the horrors of modern life for laughs - where GTA 5 leveraged its open world to poke fun at the system, and Red Dead Redemption allowed you to marvel at the world despite its failures, Cyberpunk 2077 drops you into the scene in first person as a rollercoaster of existential dread takes you on a fast paced journey into tasting every gritty philosophical sandgrain of losing what it means to be a human, to have a mind of your own. William Gibson has said, "Science Fiction is never about the future. It's always about the present." but he also said "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed." And in the same sense that chemistry is just really slow applied electromagnetism, Cyberpunk literature, and the new game is exactly that, is a story about how some place's future, Xinjiang's perhaps, is all of our futures. The way that brownstone living room was, if you had the right kind of eyes. -dave

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Worth a listen on your morning drive
by Dave Aitel 10 Dec '20

10 Dec '20

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyE29pX9HBE&feature=emb_logo&ab_channel=The… (text: https://www.internetgovernance.org/2020/11/13/hague-keynote-sovereignty-in-… ) Keynote by Milton Mueller, Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, USA) in the School of Public Policy. I lolled at this section which is so true it hurts: Since publishing that book I explored the concepts of sovereignty and cyberspace more deeply. I published a new paper developing an argument about the relationship between the two in International Studies Review last year. Sovereignty is a concept that needs to be rescued from international law, which works with a dead and mummified version of it. Most of what that discipline says about its application to the cyber domain is legally correct but totally useless for solving today’s governance problems. And most of them have no idea how to apply the concept to cyberspace other than to point out, endlessly, that physical layer devices can be assigned to a territory. """

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Dailydave December 2020