Call me paranoid, call me what ever you like but if you are going to download software to my system please offer me the chance to review the ingredients before I click OK.  Ultimately, it would be nice to know what I am about to approve don’t you think?

I wonder if I am the only one that feels this way.  Major application and OS’s do a great job at offering this review before a user approves the update but such is not the case in the land of the Xbox 360 game console.  Sure you could argue that console gamer is not going to know a DLL from LSD but nonetheless, offering optional information about what the update is going to do for them is good form.   In Xbox360 land, you get a screen that looks something like this

and it would be great if the X or Y button gave you information on what was about to change on your system.  And while your taking down my feature request wonderful product manager of the xbox360, it would be nice to see the update history of the machine. 

Does the information exist?  Sure it does but you have to really hunt for it and I’m not sure all the updates have made it to the web.  For example, http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/archive/2007/11/30/december-2007-system-update.aspx

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/news/2006/1030-novemberupdate-completelist.htm

From a security stand point, it just spooks me out when I approve an update to my system and have no idea what has downloaded or what has been modified.  The number of independent game developers for Xbox360/Xbox-live are taking off and Microsoft has a solid program.  Lets just say that things will start to get very interesting.

—tk

I buy lots of electronics and have been experiencing a trend lately with rebates.  It may be just paranoia on my part but thought I would post this blog entry to see if anyone else is seeing the same pattern.

I bought another LCD monitor and with it was a mail-in rebate for 30.00.  Like all of these, you spend time to gather the required information, sent it in, and after a good 6 weeks time, you get a check.  Done?  Not quite because the “Pay To the Order of” has misspelled my last name.  If this was the first time this happened, it would not be an issue but 3 times in the last 6 months, something seems wrong.

Could it be that there is a strategy out there to raise the cost of accounting on the payee so that they at some point think it is not even worth it to pursue?  I wish we could see the statistics of all the people who go through with the mail-in but because of the run around, end up ultimately not redeeming their rebate. 

This information is not available so all we have to go on are patterns and paranoia.  Is 30 minutes of sitting on hold and filing more paperwork worth $30.00?  At some point, everything come to a cost/benefit decision.

—tk

Anyone who has been going to RSA year after year has seen lots of change.  Changes in the quantity of vendors, changes in the vendor types, changes in the booth personnel, even changes in the swag you get if you sit through a presentation.  I’m so glad we are past that dry spell of just pens and mints, we like t-shirts, USB-drives and remote control helicopter s!  This year was a great show and I’d like to share with you some observations. 

When I first started going to RSA, there were more vendors than there were customers.  It was a huge vendor boondoggle and while the business development people were having a great time, I was looking for customers to speak with and have a great conversation about what they were looking for at the show and what type of problems they were trying to solve. 

This year was great in terms of customers-to-vendor ratio.  We had a great turnout at our booth and I’ve almost lost my voice from non-stop conversations.  What does this change mean for future RSA shows?  I remember one year being at the show and having a customer tell me “You know what TK, this is a show of car parts, and frankly, I need transportation.”.  I’ll never forget this statement and I have a working theory. 

In the early days of the RSA show, the exhibitors sold all kinds of parts that when put together by a skilled craftsmen, created a powerful solution.  Composability was more important than Usability.  As the attendees change to more of a business level buyer persona, consumers that are not security subject matter experts, we move toward deeper solutions where Usability trumps Composability. 

When I hear those words “…this is a show of car parts, and frankly, I need transportation.”, I imagine a trend on the exhibit floor dominated by much more complete solutions.  Product designed for a persona that does not know how to fire up a debugger, does not know how to read a set of ACLs, but knows how to read market results and can use Excel to model any financial system you can imagine.  That might be a little extreme but nonetheless, the customers out number the vendors by a larger and larger margin. 

I predict that RSA next year will have less small highly technical one-trick-pony companies and more multi-product solutions and managed services companies.  To use that great quote, there will be more vendors selling cars and transportation services than there will be vendors selling parts. 

—tk

Xbox LIVE will be unavailable for approx. 3 hrs on April 1^st from 2pm PDT

Huh?  With all that virtualization, load balancing, and other service abstraction strategies we have today, why do we still have to deal with scheduled downtime?

I understand that we cannot plan on ever getting rid of an unscheduled outage because “stuff happens” but we certainly have at our fingertips methods that can avoid scheduled downtime once and for all.

I’m just bitter because it may take a bite out of my Halo3 Team Slayer.  The Master Chief would never allow for scheduled downtime!  It must be the work of the Covenant.  The fight continues…

—tk

At South-by-Southwest I attended talk given by Jennifer Fraser on Vitruvius who was the first Roman architect to write about the craft.  I saw some invariant patterns of good design that could be useful as we design information systems.  The warning I must underline is that building physics-based systems are different than building information-based systems, at least this is true in March of 2008.  Rival goods are not the same as non-Rival goods.

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio was born ~80 BC and died 25 BC.  Regardless of his abilities as an architect, he lives today because he was the person who wrote about the craft and documented the essence the architecture of his time.  If being referenced some 2000+ years later is not enough of a value proposition to get you to document your contribution,  I don’t know what is.

Jennifer referenced De architectura (Latin: “On architecture”) which consisted of 10 scrolls and “The Ten Books on Architecture” which is the translation and available on books.google.com.  Vitruvius said that well-designed buildings must exhibit three qualities: firmitas, utilitas, and venustas.  Respectively, utility, attractiveness, stability.

Looking at information system design, these qualities are also beneficial.  What is interesting in Jennifer’s presentation is that applications at some moment in time can be mapped to a vector in a firmitas, utilitas, and venustas space.

For example, an application can be at position ‘X’ when it is in demo format and ultimately its goal is to move to position ‘Z’.  There are times when an application would be not as attractive or has low utility but is ultra stable like ‘Y’; its goal over time is to get to position ‘Z’. 

Another thing that was clear was how Vitruvius understood his users.  He had an intimate understanding of who would occupy the dwelling and what tasks they would perform on a daily basis.  Up front in the design was a serious considerations for private and public spaces.  I can see how this has a parallel with information system. 

Vitruvius is quoted as saying “The eye is always in search of beauty” and who can argue that.  We should set our design goals high and demand beauty, utility, and stable system. 

—tk

Check out http://sxsw.org/

It is South by Southwest time again and Austin Texas is completely consumed by inventors, designers, artists, gamers, authors, and any other category that describes a creative class.  The beauty of this conference is that it brings together many creative disciplines and everyone shares their passion.  It is the intersection of software, film, and music. 

Today was registration and as you can see by my badge, I’ll just attend the technical sessions this year.  If I sound a little bummed about that it is because there are a few bands this year that I really wanted to see but things are just too busy at work.  Oh well.  This afternoon, I sat in on a good talk about Javascript patterns and tomorrow I’m looking forward to some great design sessions.  I’ll blog some of my thoughts. 

—tk

Hey, I want to apologize for being absent for so long.  I have a lot of stuff to write about and I’ll be getting it out in 2008.

Will you be at RSA?  I’m giving a talk on Game Theory and how these patterns can be applied to IT Security.  Check your program and don’t be shy – come over and say hello.

—tk

There is a new video game being released on Aug 21st called BioShock. It will be released for the Xbox 360 and PC - I've already got my copy pre-ordered. If you are interested there is a great Wikipedia page on it.

You may take a look and think it is just another first-person shooter but there is a very important pattern to what these designers are after and at the end of this posting I will tie that back in to how this pattern should apply to designers of vulnerability management and configuration compliance systems. Heck, this pattern applies to all information technology systems but I am getting ahead of myself. What makes this game different is that all the objects in this world work the way you would expect them to and therefore it is the player, not the game design that creates the tactics and strategies. It lets every player of the game express themselves differently and in ways that the game designer may have not predicted. I have come to know this form as 2nd-order game design; it is a game that facilitates games. I'll come back to this in a bit.

A popular thing gamers talk about are 'walk-throughs'. This is a document that some awesome player authored describing in fairly static terms the step-by-step progression of a game start to finish. It is a linear progression of what the game designer wants you to experience while you play the game. You are not going to find a walk-through for BioShock because it is all about choice, options, invention, and this static tree-like prescribed experience from the game designer does not apply. The game has an invention system which basically makes you the designer of your own game as you are in the game. In these 2nd-order designs, you are placed in to a world where every player would be entitled to a separate but just as exciting experience. The term 'sandbox' is used sometimes to describe this situation but I think the term falls short in describing the patterns exhibited by 2nd-order designs.

I can point to other systems that leverage this 2nd-order design pattern. One that I think you would will enjoy is http://ldd.lego.com/ Lego Digital Designer. Essentially, the consumer has the same authorship over the creation of a LEGO structure as the designers at Lego. My kid was invited to a birthday party and wanted to build his own Lego toy for his friend. He used this software to design, build a Lego creation and, he uploaded the design model to Lego. Lego, it captures an image of the creation as a label for the and puts it on the outside of a box, assembles all the components and ships your completed design with all the pieces and ships it to you. An important characteristic common to these 2nd-order designs is that the user is equally a consumer and a producer. The Lego Digital Design product is a product that creates markets that create products.

What does this 2nd-order design pattern have to do with Vulnerability Management and Configuration Management? I've been watching this market evolve for the past 10 years and in the beginning, designers/vendors hads a very strong opinion and position on what qualified as a vulnerability and what was "secure" versus 'insecure". Like early 1st-order game designs, the designer "told" the user how they should experience their world. The designers valued systems and opinions were forced on the user of the system and hopefully the two would be in harmony. This is yesterday's pattern and information system architecture will over time, favor the 2nd-order form where the role of designer/producer and user/consumer is dynamically portrayed by every member of the system.

I encourage the designers of information technology systems to get out of their own way; build 2nd-order systems: systems that allow the building of systems. Allow the user to build risk models and domain ontologies that the designer had no comprehension of when the product shipped. Let every player/user express themselves differently and in ways that the designer may have not predicted.

I have a vision of how information systems will evolve and hopefully in the coming days I'll blog about it.

--tk

How many times have you come across an interface design that leaves you wondering if the designer has ever used the interface themselves? I have one for you and I'll omit the vendor name and product so that I can communicate these facts without worrying about someone getting upset and missing the point altogether. Ultimately, we want to learn from mistakes and fix things.

There is an IP phone on the market that is very full featured. However, there is one feature that is highly dysfunctional. It would not be obvious if you just read through the documentation but very obvious when you use the phone.

The unit has a set of soft-buttons that are dynamic; their functionality is based on the context of your operational state (on call, directory lookups, settings, etc) . For example, If you reach over and adjust the volume up or down, a soft button changes to 'SAVE' so that you can make this adjustment permanent to your preferences. If in 3 to 4 seconds, you do not hit the soft-button, it changes back from 'SAVE' to its original assignment which is........END CALL.

Yup, you guessed it, if you hesitate and hit this button too late instead of saving this newly adjusted parameter, you will issue the command to end the call. Where is the interface police when you need them!

When dealing with soft-buttons, I think there should be an analysis performed so that functional classes are grouped such that the chances of you accidentally hitting the same button for wildly different commands are reduced.

What if there was a mouseover type of button on your browser that sensed that if you were in spell correct mode it would bind itself to 'learn word' and if you did not act on it in a few seconds changed back to 'erase all'. Bad design, no donut.

I have to just put this in the category of Interface No-Nos because I have not read any research to allow me to place it in any formal category of interface design. I'm sure you have a bucket of interface no-nos too. The trick is to always learn from our mistakes.

--tk

I am often told to relax or switch to decaf when I make a big deal about the words we use in our industry. I can usually walk away from most of the confusion but one that I cannot let go is the difference between data, information, and knowledge. This is a personal thing and I have come to know these terms through other domains like Library and Information Science (LIS) and the Knowledge Management industry.

What is the big deal? It is not a big deal until the time in which it is. It's like saying "This book is purely fictional except for those parts which are not". In your line of work, you may not at this point need a more granular descriptor; but for what I have been doing these past six years, I need all the help I can get describing these intangible notions that have no physical properties. Defining information as “stuff” is just not helpful.

We in information security and risk management have much to learn from other domains like Library and Information Science (LIS). I have been a very good study and I’m right in the middle of a great book on the Philosophy of Information; oh my god it is awesome. You may be thinking “Philosophy of Information, give me a break. I have a real job and some real problems to solve.” Great, and when you are done solving the problem at hand, think about other domains like the field of law for instance: while the majority of the field is made up of practitioners who serve the market, there is a small minority concerned with the intellectual underpinnings of the system. They are made up of legal theorists and philosophers that include the U.S. Supreme Court justices and their like. What I am saying is that what you may view as an unnatural imbalance in the community of experts is very natural and works quite well in other domains that face similar problems.

So let’s get back to this exploration of the difference between the terms data, information, and knowledge. Even with my years of concentration on this subject matter, I have only scratched the surface but intend to be up to my neck in the Philosophy of Information as it stands today in other fields.

Data
Data are described as a set whose members are distinct from one another but lack context beyond just their presents and absence. For example: 20 IP packets, 300 vulnerabilities, and 600 attacks. Value is created at this level by the sheer ability to capture the phenomenon, nothing more, and nothing less. Through some function X, data is transformed to information.

Information
We have come to understand information as an emergent form present when data are presented in context and a information connection is made between observer and that which is observed. Data from multiple domains are related and presented as a single form: information. Included in this synthesis are temporal factors that change the resolution of the presentation. Using the same examples above: "The first 20 packets from a TCP flow established between machine A and Machine B", "300 distinct vulnerabilities affecting our web-services over the past 5 years", "600 attacks originating from our servers"

Knowledge or Intelligence
A form of yet another higher order is knowledge or intelligence. I have found both of these terms interchangeable with the public sector biased toward the term intelligence and the private sector the term knowledge. Following the structure so far, knowledge then is data in context in context; the observer understanding the information in a context that is broader than what is presented at the time of observation. An example would be "Last night at 0100 hours, our sensors recorded 600 attacks originating from our extra-net servers with a destination of company X but the first 20 packets from a TCP flow established between machine A on our end and Machine B at company X showed that none of the attacks were exploiting the 300 distinct vulnerabilities effecting our web-services over the past 5 years."

As you can see, the value at each logical level is different depending on the processes you are involved in. The skill is to be able to jump around this cognitive model and with every movement, you the observer are growing your knowledge at a rate that is beyond the sum of what is being presented.

The form knowledge has some very peculiar properties that are worth mentioning. As we move further and further away from an economy based on rival-goods, these properties will no longer be in the background and will be center to our discourse.

[This collection noted by N. Wiener, A. Toffler, J Piaget, and others, comments by TK]

Knowledge is inherently non-rival
If I give it to you, I still have it. As opposed to rival-good where if I sell you something, in the transaction I sell you item A which then I no longer have and you pay me item B which then you no longer have.

Knowledge is intangible.
We can’t apply the domain of physics to it but that does not mean we cannot manipulate it.

Knowledge is non-linear
As we begin to develop more and more of a informational understanding of nature itself, we can see that non-linear patterns are much more common than linear patterns. Even in business, tiny insights can yield huge outputs.

Knowledge is relational
An observer attains meaning only when knowledge is held in some ratio to other knowledge.

Knowledge mates with other knowledge
This growth is exponential because the more there is, the more synthesis and analysis can be performed, the more new knowledge is created which is then fed back in to the system.

Knowledge is observer centric
There is a hermeneutic principle that knowledge follows: The hearer, not the speaker determines the meaning of an utterance. Piaget was quoted as saying “He who organizes his experiences organizes the world”

Knowledge is explicit or implicit, expressed or not expressed, shared or tacit.
It is at the very edge of our human knowing.

All of this research was done in the 1950’s and much of it has still not yet been applied because our community still suffers from what my buddy David Mann calls “Physics-envy”. The sooner we let go of the paradigms and language of the industrial age, the better. It really does not matter if you agree or don’t agree; it has already begun. Everything around us; our media, our social networks, our bodies are all transcending to a data/information/knowledge representation. I have a few ideas on how to go about managing risk and certainty that may or may not work out, but I can tell you that the methods we are using today are in their sunset years.

--TK