What is security? My definition of security is the art and science of risk management. Things are going to go wrong, the world is an imperfect place. Computer security is all about the prevention of things going wrong that you can prevent, and the minimization of damage when things go wrong beyond your control. According to ISC2, there are 10 areas or domains of security

• Access Control
• Application Security
• Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning
• Cryptography
• Information Security and Risk Management
• Legal, Regulations, Compliance and Investigations
• Operations Security
• Physical (Environmental) Security
• Security Architecture and Design
• Telecommunications and Network Security

However, in the broader scale, I break these down into four major areas:

• Policy - Anticipating and planning for what to do when things go wrong. As the name implies, this is a definition of acceptable use of your network and computers.

• Security Engineering - Putting the tools in place to [hopefully] prevent or at least detect when things go wrong. This is the securing of your network and computers therein. This is what I refer to as the “wrench work”. These are the measures that the system administrator and the security engineer put in place to satisfy the policy requirements and IA findings.

• Information Assurance - Reviewing the policy and Security Engineering steps to insure that they are adequate to protect your investment when things go wrong. IA is the assurance of data confidentiality, integrity and availability. This is the measure of the effectiveness of the defenses in place, and recommendations for improving these defenses.

• Forensics - Figuring out why things went wrong. The art and science of data recovery and reconstructing crime scenes. Sort of like CSI, but nowhere near as sexy.

The other domains are the support infrastructure of the areas noted above. For the typical home Linux user, IA and Policy are implied, however, we will be taking a look at them in future podcasts. There is no such thing as complete security. I’ve often stated that security times usability is a constant. To get a truly secure system, you need to unplug it from the network, remove power, pack it in concrete and fire it into the sun…But then it isn’t very usable, is it? That said, your threat environment should dictate your security posture. You generally don’t see Mayberry-style small-town police forces toting automatic weapons and anti-aircraft missiles. By the same token, a sling and stones hasn’t worked in a combat environment since David’s time and he had God’s help. When planning security, one of the watchwords is ”Defense in Depth”. What does this mean? Well, it means that you should not depend on one method to detect or defend against an attack. In fact, you should have interlocking defenses. If one method fails or is defeated, this should trip another one.

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The feeds appear to be fixed. Thanks to LinuxChic as well as TechMonkey from the AlternaGeek podcast , we were able to get things straightened out. Several things appeared to be wrong, including problems after our recent WordPress upgrade, typos (the story of my life) and a couple of other problems.

But, it should be back on track and I can start working on episode 1.

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Well, yesterday, I left my old job. I was on vacation all this week (except for having to go to my exit interview yesterday), so I started my new job on Wednesday. The new job looks to be perfectly suited to me.

That said, I spent some quality time in audacity last night, doing the post production work. It is complete and I have done the listen through. I am converting to ogg and mp3 and will be doing the rss tags. It should be up there this weekend.

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I have had several people ask me about the books that Dave Yates and I discussed on LLL ep. 69, so I thought I would list the books that were mentioned and a brief description of them.

First, the Honor Harrington series. David Weber wrote a set of stories in the style of Horatio Hornblower, by C. S. Forester, which is the story of a British naval officer during the Napoleonic war. Weber takes this concept into space, and creates Captain Honor Harrington. a starship captain in Her Majesty’s navy of the star system of Manticore. Weber does a great job of setting up his universe and developing his characters. The following books comprise the series:

• On Basilisk Station
• The Honor of the Queen
• The Short Victorious War
• Field of Dishonor
• Flag in Exile
• Honor Among Enemies
• In Enemy Hands
• Echoes of Honor
• Ashes of Victory
• War Of Honor

There are also several anthologies, edited by David Weber.

• More than Honor
• Worlds of Honor
• Changer of Worlds
• The Service of the Sword

Finally, there are a couple of books from the Honorverse, which happened in parallel with the original books:

• Crown of Slaves
• Shadows of Saganami

The second series I mentioned was the Legacy of the Alldenata series. Quoting wikipedia, “The central premise is that in 2001, humanity receives greetings from a highly advanced, peaceable Galactic Federation. However, all is not well, for a species of aggressive aliens known as the Posleen are attacking the Galactics. Since the Galactics are almost entirely unable to fight, they are appealing to the proven military abilities of humanity for aid. However, things are rarely as simple as they seem, and humanity soon discovers that the Galactics are no friends at all. There are plots within plots, some going back to the dawn of humanity and beyond: plots that endanger the very survival of humanity.”

• A Hymn Before Battle
• Gust Front
• When the Devil Dances
• Hell’s Faire
• The Hero
• Cally’s War
• Sister Time
• Watch on the Rhine

Finally, I mentioned the Hammer’s Slammers series, by David Drake. It is a series of stories about a mercenary regiment commanded by Col. Alois Hammer. Like David Weber, many of Drake’s stories mold either historical events or other story concepts into his universe. The original series consists of:

• Hammer’s Slammers
• At Any Price
• Counting the Cost
• Rolling Hot
• The Warrior
• The Sharp End
• Paying the Piper

Many of these books are not available as e-books.

Baen Books has a free library, in which the first few books of a series can be downloaded in a number of formats. However, Jim Baen also felt that giving away books in these formats would generate sales. He started releasing books on CD with hardback editions of new releases. These CDs were released as open source, so people have posted them online. One site is at the Fifth Imperium. Enjoy!

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Well, I guess my feet are firmly in the fire for the podcast. Dave Yates from the LottaLinuxLinks Podcast interviewed me today. We had a good chat, Dave is a great guy who does a terrific podcast, and I thank him for having me on.

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This is one I have been watching. The CanSecWest security conference featured a Pwn2Own contest, in which a set of fully patched laptops, one running OSX Leopard, another running Windows Vista and a third running a patched version of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon.

Day 2 saw the takedown of the OSX machine with a Safari bug, which was previously unknown. Today, the final day of the contest, the Vista box was compromised with an unknown Flash exploit. Another term for an unknown exploit is a zero-day.

Zero-day exploits are almost indefensible. This is why I preach the sermon of defense in depth. Always have defenses in place that allow you to detect intrusions, and these defenses be layered. This gives you options to thwart the attack, even if it is only to start by pulling the ethernet cable.

As for the competition, I am somewhat surprised that the OSX box, which is Unix/BSD based fell first. However, it was an application-based attack versus a core OS level compromise…

Does this make Linux invincible? Absolutely not. It does say something about closed-source versus open source  development, but there are also vulnerabilities in open source software, but there are more eyes available to look at it. We should never let our guard down, even running open source.

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I found a workaround for Audacity to allow me to use it. The problem was that once started, it would not play back (or presumably record) audio. It would give errors such as

Expression ‘ret’ failed in ’src/hostapi/alsa/pa_linux_alsa.c’, line: 1034
Expression ‘AlsaOpen( hostApi, parameters, streamDir, &pcm )’ failed in ’src/hostapi/alsa/pa_linux_alsa.c’, line: 1066

I tried every combination of input and output devices available, and none worked. Hitting google, I found that killing jackd was the workaround, because jack and audacity apparently don’t play together nicely. This is on a Debian/sid system with audacity 1.3.4-1.2, in case anyone is having similar problems.

I have the theme completed, and will probably start recording in the next day or two. I had hoped to have the first episode out by the end of March, but now it looks like the first week or so of April. I have a lot on my plate right now, including a job change.

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Jimmy pointed out that it has been over a week since I made a post. Sorry about that…I have been (in the universal podcaster’s chorus) incredibly busy. I got defiant rebuilt, though it is still having issues (it locked up on me last night for apparently absolutely no reason other than age).

The other problem I am having is with audacity. This is apparently a common problem among Debian and Ubuntu users. I am running sid, which ships with the audacity-1.3.4-1.2 package, and for the life of me, I can’t get it to make sounds. Most of the output settings cause an error about not being able to connect with ALSA, but if I go to OSS and select /dev/dsp1, it seems to play, but no sound. I think it could be perhaps a problem with jack.

So I am looking for a solution to this problem, as well as looking at other packages. Including qtractor, which GitarMan from the LLL IRC channel turned me on to yesterday.

I’ll get this thing off the ground, even if I have to get out and push!

I have also been playing with network monitors. I have a couple of vmware machines that I am using for NMS testing. I have thus far played with Zenoss, OpenNMS, and am currently installing Pandora FMS. I have the server and [web] console installed, and am working on some issues I have with the agent, for instance, it wants to run as root and have a passwordless ssh key on each client to communicate with the server, so I am modifying the agent to run as a non-privileged user (e.g. pandora), since most of the checks don’t require root privs to work.

I do like one thing about Pandora. There are no binaries. Everything is written in Perl or Bash. The same team also wrote a security auditing tool called Babel, and I am going to be playing with that as well once Pandora is all set up. I may package both for Debian (and possibly Ubuntu).

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I was in Manassas yesterday and stopped by a PC shop. They had internal removable hard drive enclosures with an LCD display and internal fan. I bought two of them.

Got a chance to swap the current drive into the new enclosure, and it actually dropped the temperature of the drive from 35 degC to 20 degC. However, while the errors have dropped from 58 yesterday to 10 today, I believe the damage is already done. So tonight when I get home, I’ll start the rebuild.

The firewall is standing up pretty well as well. Haven’t had any problems with it at all.

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Well, its been a heckofa week. I found the problem on defiant, my workstation and recording station for the podcast. /dev/hda is dying a slow and agonizing death. I have a replacement drive, however this weekend was chock full of activities. Saturday was spent with a friend of mine pulling the carbs off of the bike, finding and fixing the bent choke linkage, and getting her running. There are still carb balance issues, but she is running better.

Sunday was my youngest’s 18th birthday, and she wanted to go to the Melting Pot, which was a great experience but expensive.

So currently, I am backing the information off of defiant, and will hopefully be able to get the to the task of rebuilding in the next day or so.

As if that is not bad enough, crazyhorse, my firewall, finally gave up the ghost. I found I had no vpn access to my home network from work, and thought it was a problem with Comcast. However, I got home and checked it, and the drive light was on solid, the CDROM drive was flashing and the power supply was hot. So I spent friday night pressing the SPARC I have been building out into service…Until 2am saturday.

Once I get defiant back up and running, I plan to get some recording done.

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