RE: Concepts: Security and Obscurity

["Craig Wright" <Craig.Wright () bdo com au>]

Hi Daniel,
As I have stated, I could (and have) quoted names that allign with my view (Vosh, Schiener, etc), but this remains 
conjecture without proof.
 
Noise and attacks are not neccessarily related. Security is a Survival function and as such related to reliability 
engineering (like it or not). If we now take an example, a vendor comes out with a new product and claim, do we believe 
them or do we test it's claim? I am of the latter. I do not believe the claim pior to testing and have found few 
vendors that meet the claims they make.
 
So where is the proof that changing ports adds security. I have sent and gathered much evidence - but other than 
oppinion have recieved nothing that proves any gain from obscurity. 
 
So where is the proof that demonstrably shows that changing a port makes a service more secure? I can show examples 
that disprove this, but I can not categorically disprove the negative for all cases. So I am going to rely on 
scientific and engineering principles and wait to see if anyone can give some evidence that there is any net gain.
 
Many common beliefs are not correct in either general life or in Information Security. Some of these prevail against 
the evidence, but I prefer truth through scientific reasoning. So if this is the case, please show me some quantified 
evidence. It should be available if it exists - elsewise there is a good experiment and paper for somebody on the list.
 
Regards,
Craig
 
Sample of papers etc again:

Secrecy, Security, and Obscurity B Schneier (May 15, 2002)

Security Engineering, A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems - p310+ by Ross J Anderson

An Approach for Certifying Security in Software Components Anup K, Ghosh & Gary McGraw

B Schneier "Cryptography, security and the future Communications of the ACM, January 1997

J Voas and K Miller "Predicting softwares minimum time to hazard and mean time to hazard for rare input events In Proc 
of the Int Symp on Software Reliability Eng

J Voas C Michael and K Miller "Condently assessing a zero probability of software failure High Integrity Systems Journal

Why cryptosystems fail - RJ Anderson

Large scientific databases - R Williams, P Messina, F Gagliardi, J Darlington, ... - Joint EU-US Workshop, Annapolis, 
USA, September, 1999

The Hidden Cost of Ubiquity: Globalisation and Terrorism B Krug, P Reinmoeller - 2003 - dspace.ubib.eur.nl

PK Algorithms, T Cryptology, C Editors, JE Cordant (emeraldinsight.com)




Craig Wright
Manager of Information Systems

Direct +61 2 9286 5497
Craig.Wright () bdo com au

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________________________________


From: Daniel Miessler [mailto:daniel () dmiessler com]
Sent: Wed 18/04/2007 1:19 AM
To: Craig Wright
Subject: Re: Concepts: Security and Obscurity




On Apr 13, 2007, at 5:21 PM, Craig Wright wrote:

> This idea that your logs are not full of junk as you have 
> obscurity? Where did this come from? Please?

Are you serious? How about because the only people touching your 
daemon will be those with private information? Hence, less noise.

I hate to bust out with this, Craig, but you seem to have some major 
gaps in your understanding of the concepts being discussed here. You 
have SANS certifications. Find me a SANS instructor that disagrees 
with my article. I'll bet you $100 that you can't.

I'll also bet that I can find 3 (Mike Poor, Eric Cole, Ed Skoudis) 
that agree with it. Plus, I've already run the issue by Richard 
Bejtlich (a speaker at SANS and the author of Tao Of Network Security 
Monitoring). He promotes the running of SSH on a non-standard port, 
and agrees with my position.

In short, you're out in left field somewhere. You're obviously a 
bright guy, though, so I'm not quite sure why this isn't clicking for 
you. But since it isn't I'm not going to keep debating you about it.

Kind regards,

--
Daniel Miessler
E: daniel () dmiessler com
W: http://dmiessler.com
G: 0xDA6D50EAC