[TROOPERS] Second-day keynote, aka Magical thinking... v.1

Debut edition of 'Magical thinking ... and how to thwart it' presented at the 2017 edition of ERNW's TROOPERS Conference in Heidelberg.
https://youtu.be/8nNXKYXdADo?t=7m6s

Transcript

1. ✨Magical thinking✨ … and how to thwart it. 1 Mara Tam Senior Fellow Center for Advanced Studies on Terrorism
2. 2 whois?
3. ✨Magical thinking✨ … and how to thwart it. 3 Mara Tam Senior Fellow Center for Advanced Studies on Terrorism
6. 6 ➢ fallacia non causae pro causa ◦ waking up ◦ where are we? ➢ bestiarum vocabulum ◦ magical thinking in the wild ➢ thwarting ◦ translation layers agenda?
7. 7 Prior art ✨Literature review✨
8. 8 __________ Honoré-Victorin Daumier, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, ca. 1855, oil on oak, The National Gallery, London.
9. 9 ➢ policy hobbyists ◦ governance is a profession ➢ over-simplification (i.e. perpetual 101-ism) ◦ satisfying-but-facile helps nobody ➢ awareness raising ◦ we’re pretty flipping aware ➢ doomsaying ◦ see also : hand-wringing Curmudgeonly intro rant things I hate about ‘policy talks’
11. 11 ➢ policy hobbyists ◦ governance is a profession ➢ over-simplification (i.e. perpetual 101-ism) ◦ satisfying-but-facile helps nobody ➢ awareness raising ◦ we’re pretty flipping aware ➢ doomsaying ◦ see also : hand-wringing Curmudgeonly intro rant things I hate about ‘policy talks’
12. 12 ➢ ‘going dark’ ➢ crypto jihadis ➢ “intrusion software” ◦ that ‘standard execution path’ though bestiarum vocabulum magical thinking in the wild
13. 13 q : how dark is ‘dark’? a : It depends.
15. 15 q : crypto jihadis? a : Not really. “Every time there is an attack, we discover that the perpetrators were known to the authorities,” [...] “What this shows is that our intelligence is actually pretty good, but our ability to act on it is limited by the sheer numbers.” – François Heisbourg NYT, 17 Nov 2015
16. 16 q : crypto jihadis? a : Not really. (cont’d) “[W]hen it comes to internet communications we generally have to enlist the help of our American friends. Managing information sharing between an intelligence service of one country and a police service of another can be challenging on several fronts, including from a legal dimension [...].” – Alain Gringard Police Fédérale, Bruxelles
17. 17 ‘Complexity kills.’1 __________ 1 Enno.
19. 19 ➢ Operations and maintenance (O&M) ◦ ‘Steady state’ ➢ Development, modernisation, and enhancement (DME) ◦ Improves capability or performance ◦ Meets a regulatory or compliance requirement ◦ Includes capital expenditures (i.e. new stuff) O&M vs DME money doesn’t understand our problems
20. 20 __________ US Federal Government IT Funding. https://www.itdashboard.gov/drupal/summary/000
21. 21 __________ US Federal Government IT Funding, (FY) 2016. https://www.itdashboard.gov/drupal/summary/000 capex duct tape
24. 24 __________ richö + dominic, ‘Rusting up your GreatFET’, TROOPERS 2017.
25. 25 __________ Sergey [@k1k] Golovanov, ‘Hacking Team and Gamma International in “business-to-government’ malware”’, VB2013 : Berlin, https://www.virusbulletin.com/uploads/pdf/conference_slides/2013/Golovanov-VB2013.pdf. ➢ Exploit / 0day fetishism is not only impractical, it’s pretty useless. ➢ But! Don’t let that stop you if you’re in search of a windmill to joust.
27. 27 ➢ moar engineers will *not* solve this problem ➢ there is a new generalism for this field we have yet to articulate Translation layers they are missing and we need them
28. 28 ‘[...] every speaker, every writer, every practitioner in the field of cyber security who has wished that its topic, and us with it, were taken seriously has gotten their wish. [...] "we" and the cyber security issue have never been more at the forefront of policy. And you ain't seen nothing yet.’ __________ Dan Geer, ‘Cybersecurity as Realpolitik’, keynote address, BlackHat : Las Vegas, 6th August 2014. http://geer.tinho.net/ geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt
29. 29 Popular press citations, by section : ☢ 2/143 … 1.4% ☣ 3/125 … 2.4% 27/110 … 24.5% q : why is the cyber so hard? a : We set them up to fail.
31. 31 q : what do we do? a1 : Develop translation layers to communicate fluently between ‘technical’ and ‘mission’ space. a2 : Better the standard of documentation in technical and policy research. a3 : Accept the interlinkage of science and politics.
32. 32 questions? contact? ‣ @marasawr open dms ‣ marasawr [at] gmail ‣ linkedin.com/in/marasawr