RSA

This again is going to be a little series of posts. Their main topic – next to the usual deviations & ranting I tend to include in blogposts 😉 – is some discussion of “trust” and putting this discussion into the context of recent events and future developments in the infosec space. The title originates from a conversation between Angus Blitter and me in a nice Thai restaurant in Zurich where we figured the consequences of the latest RSA revelations. While we both expect that – unfortunately – not much is really going to happen (surprisingly many people, including some CSOs we know, are still trying to somehow downplay this or sweep it under the carpet, shying away from the – obvious – consequences it might have to accept that for a number of environments RSA SecurID is potentially reduced to single factor auth nowadays…), the long term impact on our understanding of 3rd party (e.g. vendor) trust might be more interesting. Furthermore “Broken Trust” seems a promising title for a talk at upcoming Day-Con V… 😉

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Lots of stuff has been written about this blog post from RSA describing the (potential) details of the attack, so I will refrain from detailed comments on this piece that Marsh Ray nicely called “some of the most egregious hyperbole I’ve read in infosec”.

Just one short note. Presumably the attack, in an early stage, used a “spreadsheet [that] contained a zero-day exploit that installs a backdoor through an Adobe Flash vulnerability (CVE-2011-0609)”.

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Some of you may have heard of the break-in at RSA and may now be wondering “what does this mean to us?” and “what can be done?”. Not being an expert on RSA SecurID at all – I’ve been involved in some projects, however not on the technical implementation side but on the architecture or overall [risk] management side – I’ll still try to contribute to the debate 😉

Feel free to correct me either by comment or by personal email in case the following contains factual errors.

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