Security Basics mailing list archives
Re: RE: Re: Re: Re: Concepts: Security and Obscurity
From: levinson_k () securityadmin info
Date: 13 Apr 2007 03:42:43 -0000
Obscurity does not work.
It is impossible for you to make that assertion for all environments and situations. "Obscurity" includes a lot of different things. You cannot do a risk assessment in an ivory tower without knowledge of the specific environment, threats, etc.
Here we get to the real point. Obscurity is not the factor that is increasing the security of the site. You have a confounding variable in this model. That is monitoring.
Exactly. It is pointless in the real world to try to say that obscurity never works, because methods of obscurity are often inexplicably tied to other benefits. So maybe you're using a purely theoretical model that doesn't apply in the real world.
To test the effectiveness of obscurity scientifically you have to remove or make account for the confounding variables.
This kind of pure theoretical study would have no value in actual real world security.
In a test that is determined scientifically and without bias, the results show that obscurity does not reduce risk and is thus not a benefit.
I'd love to see such a study. It does not exist. Obscurity often reduces certain risks (script kiddies, viruses, etc.), while doing nothing to increase other risks (some determined attackers). This is what you call your win-win scenario.
When scanning a site managed by a profession 24x7 firms, with notice, I have rarely had them become aware of (maybe 1 in 10) the fact that the client is being tested.
That's because their logs are full of junk. Because they're not using obscurity.
It is randomised and over time and uses event sequence mining to reconstruct the ruleset (i.e. maths).
I would love to see you do such a low and slow scan of a site that uses a nonstandard TCP/IP port and something like port knocking. It would take you forever to assess all 65,535 TCP and UDP ports, certainly longer than your typical penetration testing engagement. Therefore, obscurity works. You keep arguing against obscurity by cherry picking these extreme cases of a very determined and experienced attacker. Yes, some attackers could bypass obscurity, and also antivirus, firewalls, etc. No one ever claimed obscurity would prevent these things. This does not make them useless at reducing risk. In risk assessments, countermeasures are tied to specific threats they are meant to mitigate. You are intentionally taking other irrelevant threats to try to claim zero effectiveness of obscurity. You also assert that obscurity is always expensive, despite many examples to the contrary. You are making "always" and "never" statements that are frequently impossible to support, certainly not by cherry picking certain extreme examples.
I do however guess that gets ride of much of the "hacker" community of course these days as it requires that SAS, SPSS, R or some other statistical package is used and does not rely on a tool.
So then we are in agreement that obscurity is effective at reducing certain risks. Thank you!
The confusion here is that you are assuming that this is the only (or best) method to increase log visibility and that this will find the attacker.
I did not. But it may very well be a good method to use, as it costs little or nothing. You cannot prove that this method is never a useful method. But it is easy to prove that it might *sometimes* be a useful method. kind regards, Karl Levinson http://securityadmin.info
Current thread:
- Re: Re: Concepts: Security and Obscurity, (continued)
- Re: Re: Concepts: Security and Obscurity lordl3ane (Apr 12)
- Re: Concepts: Security and Obscurity Daniel Miessler (Apr 17)
- RE: Concepts: Security and Obscurity Craig Wright (Apr 12)
- Re: Concepts: Security and Obscurity Daniel Miessler (Apr 12)
- RE: Concepts: Security and Obscurity Craig Wright (Apr 12)
- Re: Concepts: Security and Obscurity Ansgar -59cobalt- Wiechers (Apr 12)
- Message not available
- Message not available
- Re: Concepts: Security and Obscurity Daniel Miessler (Apr 17)
- Re: Concepts: Security and Obscurity Daniel Miessler (Apr 12)
- Re: Re: Concepts: Security and Obscurity lordl3ane (Apr 12)
- Re: Concepts: Security and Obscurity Jeffrey F. Bloss (Apr 13)
- Re: Concepts: Security and Obscurity Jeffrey F. Bloss (Apr 13)
- RE: Concepts: Security and Obscurity Craig Wright (Apr 15)
- Re: Concepts: Security and Obscurity Craig Wright (Apr 13)
- Message not available
- RE: Concepts: Security and Obscurity Craig Wright (Apr 17)
- RE: Re: Concepts: Security and Obscurity Craig Wright (Apr 15)
- Re: Re: Concepts: Security and Obscurity Florian Rommel (Apr 16)