The Cyber Security Handbook – Prepare for, respond to and recover from cyber attacks by Alan Calder

Author:Alan Calder [Alan Calder]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: IT Governance Publishing
Published: 2020-12-09T16:00:00+00:00

12.8.1 Security by design

The prominence of very basic security flaws led to the concepts of ‘secure by design’ and ‘privacy by design and by default’ becoming more widespread in recent years. They are also encouraged by governments, including those of the EU and the UK; the UK government’s initiative was driven by the growing number of IoT devices, which bring “huge opportunities” but many consumer devices “lack even basic security provisions”.68 The idea of security by design is that products and services are designed with security in mind from the earliest stages, whether it is something completely new or an innovative use of existing technology.

As an example, a state-of-the-art plug-and-play video conference room solution that includes interactive whiteboarding was found to have multiple major vulnerabilities. Given that it is extremely likely that this technology is used to discuss and display highly confidential information, it is reasonable for consumers to expect an adequate level of security to be built in. Unfortunately, a third party discovered that data was exposed via a publicly accessible Cloud service that lacked encryption, among other flaws, some of which were still not fixed five months after discovery.69

As security pioneer Bruce Schneier put it70:

These aren’t subtle vulnerabilities. These are stupid design decisions made by engineers who had no idea how to create a secure system. And this, in a nutshell, is the problem with the Internet of Things.

Unfortunately, the problem is not limited to the IoT. Engineers are constantly coming up with innovative systems, whether in the form of a new mobile or web application, hardware, IoT or something else entirely, that are designed to make life easier. Of course, that is only the case if the system functions as it should – and with the cyber landscape as it is, achieving that means designing and executing the innovation with security in mind. For that, threat analysis is key. Conduct risk assessments (see 12.12), consider the threat landscape and your attack surface, and look at incoming intelligence (see 13.1). Consider how the proposed system might fail or be attacked, and how you can mitigate those failures and prevent those attacks without impacting functionality. Then, you can build the necessary security controls and measures into the system.

For example, if you wanted to develop a mobile application that could turn on the heating at home remotely – in other words, create Internet-controlled thermostats – you would need to put a network interface on the home thermostat and design a Cloud service that allows users (via their phones) to communicate with that thermostat. A secure-by-design approach would require you to think about points such as:

•Can the network interface support encryption?

Since supporting encryption takes processing power, is a more powerful processor needed?

An encryption solution adequate now might not be adequate later (as new vulnerabilities are constantly being discovered), so how can we update the firmware?

•How will authentication work?

If the switch has no means of putting in a password, authentication needs to happen differently, perhaps by allowing only approved end-user devices to communicate with the thermostat.

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