Intersection of Security and Reliability
There are many lively active discussions in the industry about security engineers becoming more like software developers, and SREs and software developers becoming more like security engineers.
Security vs privacy
Security and privacy are closely related concepts. In order for a system to respect user privacy, it must be fundamentally secure and behave as intended in the presence of an adversary. Similarly, a perfectly secure system doesn’t meet the needs of many users if it doesn’t respect user privacy
TODO Understanding adversaries
Attack motivations
Therefore, we can consider the purpose of attacks through the eyes of the people who carry them out. Doing so may better equip us to understand how we should respond, both proactively (during system design) and reactively (during incidents). Consider the following attack motivations:
- Fun
- To undermine the security of a system for the sheer joy of knowing it can be done.
- Fame
- To gain notoriety for showing off technical skills.
- Activism
- To make a point or broadcast a message—typically, a political viewpoint— widely.
- Financial gain
- To make money.
- Coercion
- To get a victim to knowingly do something they don’t want to do.
- Manipulation
- To create an intended outcome or change behavior—for example, by publishing false data (misinformation).
- Espionage
- To gain information that might be valuable (spying, including industrial espionage). These attacks are often performed by intelligence agencies.
- Destruction
- To sabotage a system, destroy its data, or just take it offline
Threat modelling (insider risk)
Threat modeling insider risk Numerous frameworks exist for modeling insider risk, ranging from simple to highly topic-specific, sophisticated, and detailed. If your organization needs a simple model to get started, we have successfully used the framework in Table 2-2. This model is also adaptable to a quick brainstorming session or fun card game. Table hier
Mitigations against insider risk
We have found a few concepts to be particularly effective when thinking about insider risk:
- Least privilege
- Granting the fewest privileges necessary to perform job duties, both in terms of scope and duration of access. See Chapter 5.
- Zero trust
- Designing automated or proxy mechanisms for managing systems so that insiders don’t have broad access that allows them to cause harm. See Chapter 3.
- Multi-party authorization
- Using technical controls to require more than one person to authorize sensitive actions. See Chapter 5.
- Business justifications
- Requiring employees to formally document their reason for accessing sensitive data or systems. See Chapter 5.
- Auditing and detection
- Reviewing all access logs and justifications to make sure they’re appropriate. See Chapter 15.
- Recoverability
- The ability to recover systems after a destructive action, like a disgruntled employee deleting critical files or systems. See Chapter 9