I’m currently involved in creating an up to date approach to handling external connections (read: temporary/permanent connections with external parties like business partners) of a very large enterprise. Currently they have sth along the lines of: “there’s two types of external connections, trusted and untrusted. the untrusted ones have to be connected by means of a double staged firewall”.
Which – of course – doesn’t work at all in a VUCA world, for a number of reasons (the demarcation between trusted and untrusted is quite unclear – just think of mergers & acquisitions –; “business doesn’t like implementing 2-staged firewalls in some part of the world where they just signed the memorandum for a joint venture to build windmills in the desert”; firewalls might not be the appropriate control for quite some threats anyway – see for example slide 46 of this presentation– and so on). Not to mention that I personally think that the “double staged firewall” thing is based on an outdated threat model, in particular when implemented with two different vendors (for the simple reason that the added operational effort usually is not worth the added security benefit. see this post for some discussion of the concept of “operational feasibility”…).
Back to the initial point: the approach to be developed is meant to work on the basis of several types of remote connections which each determine associated security controls and other parameters. Which, at the first glance, does not seem overly complicated, but – as always – the devil is in the details.
What to base those categories on: the trust or security level of the other party (called “$OTHER_ORG” in the following) – or just assume they’re all untrusted? The protection needs of the data accessed by $OTHER_ORG? The (network) type of connection or number & type of users (unauthenticated vs. authenticated, many vs. few), the technical characteristics of the services involved (is an outbound Bloomberg link to be handled differently than an inbound connection to some published application, by means of a Citrix Access Gateway? if so, in what way?) etc.
As a start we put together a comprehensive list of questions as for the business partner, the characteristics of the connection and the data accessed and other stuff. These have to be answered by the (“business side”) requestor of an external connection. To give you an idea of the nature of questions here’s the first of those (~ 40 overall) questions:
- Please provide details as for the company type and ownership of $OTHER_ORG.
- More specifically: does $COMPANY hold shares of $OTHER_ORG?
- Who currently manages the IT infrastructure of $OTHER_ORG?
- Does $OTHER_ORG dispose of security relevant (e.g. ISO 27001) certifications or are they willing to provide SAS 70/ISAE 3402/SSAE 16 (“Type 2”) reports?
- What is – from your perspective – $OTHER_ORG’s maturity level as for information security management, processes and overall posture?
- How long will the connection be needed?
- Which $COMPANY resources does $OTHER_ORG need to access?
- Does a risk assessment for the mentioned ($COMPANY) resources exist?
- What is the highest (data) classification level that $OTHER_ORG needs access to?
- What is the highest (data) classification of data stored on systems that $OTHER_ORG accesses by some means (even if this data is not part of the planned access)?
- Will data be accessed/processed that is covered by regulatory frameworks [e.g. Data Protection, PCI, SOX].
- What would – from your perspective – be the impact for $COMPANY in case the data in question was disclosed to unauthorized 3rd parties?
- What would – from your perspective – be the impact for $COMPANY in case the data in question was irreversibly destroyed?
- What would – from your perspective – be the impact for $COMPANY in case the service(s) in question was/were rendered unavailable for a certain time?
We then defined an initial set of “types of connections” that dispose of different characteristics and might be handled with different measures (security controls being a subset of these). These connection types/categories included
- “trusted business partners”/TBP (think of outsourcing partners, with strong mutual contractual controls in place etc.).
- “external business partner”/EBP (this is the kind-of default, “traditional” case of an external connection).
- “mergers & acquisitions [heritage]”/MA (including all those scenarios deriving from M & A, like “we legally own them but don’t really know the security posture of their IT landscape” or “somebody else now legally owns them, but they still need heavy access to our central systems, for the next 24-36 months”).
- “business applications”/BusApp (think of Bloomberg access in finance or chemical databases in certain industry sectors).
- “external associates”/ExtAss (“those three developers from that other organization we collaborate with on developing a new portal for some service, who need access to the project’s subversion system which happens to sit in our network”).
Next we tried to assign a category by analyzing the answers in a “point-based” manner (roughly going like: “in case we own them by 100% give a point for TBP”, “in case the connection is just outbound to a limited set of systems, give a point to BusApp”, “if it’s an inbound connection from less than 10 users, here’s a point for ExtAss” etc.), in an MS Excel sheet containing the questions together with drop-down response fields (plus comments where needed) and some calculation logic embedded in the sheet. This seemed a feasible approach, but reflecting on the actual points and assignment system, we realized that, in the end of the day, all these scenarios can be broken down to three relevant parameters which in turn determine the handling options. These parameters are
- the trustworthiness of some entity (e.g. an organization, a network [segment], some users). pls note that _their trustworthiness_ is the basis for _our trust_ so both terms express sides of the same coin.
- the (threat) exposure of systems and data contained in certain parts of some (own|external) network.
- the protection needs of systems and data contained in certain parts of (usually the “own”/$COMPANY’s) network.
Interestingly enough every complex discussion about isolating/segmenting or – the other side of the story – connecting/consolidating (aka “virtualizing”) systems and networks can be reduced to those three fundamentals, see for example this presentation (and I might discuss, in another post, a datacenter project we’re currently involved in where this “reduction” turned out to be useful as well).
From this perspective a total of eight categories can be defined, with each of those mentioned parameters potentially being “high” or “low”. These would look like
Taking this route greatly facilitates the assignment of both individual connections to a category and sets of potential (generic) controls to the connection type categories, as each answer (to one of those questions) directly influences one of those three parameters (e.g. “we hold more than 50% of their shares” => increase trust; “$OTHER_ORG needs to access some of our systems with high privileges” => increase exposure; “data included that is subject to breach laws” => increase protection need etc.).
Which in turn allows a (potentially weighted) points based approach to identify those connections with many vs. few (trust|exposure|protection need) contributing factors.
More on this including details on the actual calculation approach and the final assignment of a category in the next part of this series which is to be published soon…
Have a great weekend
Enno