It’s naive empiricism, much like the discussions around terrorism:  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=33&v=9dKiLclupUM

What Dave is essentially saying (I think) and what Alex Stamos misses is that 
0-days have fat tail risks.

-Nate

> On Nov 1, 2019, at 11:57 AM, Don A. Bailey <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Alex is exceptional but this is a critical fact that is indeed overlooked by 
> a vocal majority.
> 
>> On Nov 1, 2019, at 11:22 AM, Dave Aitel <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> Ok, so you can/should watch it here:
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uohyx7OIugY 
>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uohyx7OIugY>
>> 
>> Alex is a great keynote speaker and I really like a lot of his talk 
>> (especially where he delves into how disintermediation has broken all social 
>> systems without ever using the word disintermediation) but also I think he's 
>> super wrong about something so I'm going to spam this at him (and all of 
>> you) to annoy him, specifically in a section about priorities as a 
>> community, which is followed by a whole section on how the technical 
>> companies all emulate Steve Jobs and pretend everything they do is perfect.
>> 
>> <image.png>
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> "Even in a position where we faced the best attackers, I only saw true 0day 
>> deployed twice"
>> 
>> <image.png>
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> <image.png>
>> 
>> 
>> """If you have Superman vision and you're able to zoom in to the screen you 
>> would see that every pixel on the screen is actually comprised of sub pixels 
>> right of red green blue sub pixels this sub pixel represents all of the 
>> human harm ever caused by side-channel attacks in the history of information 
>> security. This is what dominates discussion in the security research 
>> community - super complicated esoteric issues for which there's almost no 
>> demonstration ever or even good theoretical purposes in which this would be 
>> the best way for somebody to leak out information or somehow otherwise 
>> compromise the system. And so this is the fundamental issue - that if you 
>> actually look at what people are working on that pyramid is inverted. People 
>> are spending way more than a sub-pixel thinking about super esoteric 
>> side-channel attacks in Intel processors. That doesn't mean we shouldn't 
>> research. It doesn't mean we shouldn't fix it. But it shouldn't be the thing 
>> that we think way more about..... I want to read way more about how people 
>> are making it easier for real enterprises to patch their systems. I want to 
>> read way more about how people are designing their systems to not be able to 
>> be easily abused to cause harm and a variety of really horrible ways then I 
>> read about more side-channel attacks. I certainly don't want people coming 
>> up with with damn names and domains just for their side channel attack. That 
>> drives me totally insane."""
>> 
>> So here's two things:
>> 1. The security research community is tiny. We get a not insignificant 
>> subset of it at INFILTRATE every year. The reason the material the research 
>> community puts out gets attention is precisely because it turns conventional 
>> wisdom on its head. You study the latest heap overflow because it fills in 
>> your knowledge of how weird machines work in the real world. You learn about 
>> HTTP Desync attacks because they reflect a larger problem in parsers in 
>> general, in that you cannot ADD two parsers together to get a more secure 
>> solution (which is also what weird machines tell you). Hey it turns out WAFs 
>> and AVs can only make you LESS secure, not more. That's a USEFUL thing to 
>> know!
>> 
>> You study side channel attacks because it answers the question "If I can't 
>> trust the silicon what can I trust?" and the answer is a dried leaf you 
>> found in your driveway and an old walnut stick, and not the latest blinky 
>> box from a company set up by a conglomerate that also does government 
>> contracting "on the side" for a government that is not yours. :)
>> 
>> 2. There's lots of hackers out there who use ONLY 0day. This is one of those 
>> things that's obvious every time you talk to a group of old ones about their 
>> favorite bugs and everyone's favorite was one that nobody detected for 
>> decades. Kaspersky finds someone using Chrome 0day about once a month now. 
>> And that's because advanced attacks have strategic impact, and even if you 
>> solved the entire rest of that pyramid, one good 0day can tumble a society.
>> 
>> How would one detect side channel attacks exactly? What it looks like is 
>> someone (me maybe) buying a bunch of VMs in your hosting provider and then 
>> using their CPU for a little bit.
>> 
>> I don't think Maersk had issues with patching. The issue is that no matter 
>> how good at patching you are, it doesn't matter in the face of a worm that 
>> uses Active Directory to traverse around, and they probably did not listen 
>> to the Bloodhound researchers talk about the many many ways AD is a risk all 
>> by itself. Every attacker (Avast 
>> <https://www.zdnet.com/article/avast-says-hackers-breached-internal-network-through-compromised-vpn-profile/>
>>  and the Indian Nuclear 
>> <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/indian-nuke-plants-network-reportedly-hit-by-malware-tied-to-n-korea/>
>>  hackers, this week alone) seems to have Domain Admin but the security 
>> engineering community hasn't asked why yet...
>> 
>> -dave
>> 
>> 
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