Connections and Intersections: Resilience Engineering and Security John Allspaw Adaptive Capacity Labs

about me Consortium for Resilient Internet-Facing Business IT Adaptive Capacity Labs

Early 2000s Human Factors Safety Science Cognitive Systems Engineering

…a community emerges… Rail Maritime Surgery Intelligence Agencies Law Enforcement Aviation/ATM Space Mining Construction Explosives Fire f i ghting Anesthesia Pediatrics Power Grid & Distribution Military Agencies Mid 2000s

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what makes this work as well as it does? what makes this work dif f i cult for people? what makes them good at it?

Resilience is the story of the accident that didn’t happen. security incident

anticipating monitoring responding learning Hollnagel, E. (2016). Resilience Engineering Perspectives, Volume 2 (C. P. Nemeth, Ed.). CRC Press.

observing inferring planning troubleshooting diagnosing correcting modifying reacting anticipating adapting

adaptation What: • conditions • investments • stances • activities …are necessary for effective adaptation to happen…. when/ where/how it needs to?

adaptation What: • conditions • investments • stances • activities …are necessary for e f f ective adaptation to happen…. when/where/how it needs to? Resilience is something that you do, not something that you have. bit.ly/ResilienceIsAVerb

incidents do not arrive with clear labels attached “I’m a garden-variety outage!” “I’m an attacker-led incident!”

#warroo m 2020-01-26 14:57:4 0 Steve Hey guys, why is this happening 3 times a day every last 3 days? Is this some continuous attack effort or some continuous issues with servers? #incident-48712 
 2018-02-12 08:32:31 Lisa I’m not en t i rely sure we’re not being a t t acked at the moment… #emergency-room-3 2019-10-07 05:34:22 Phil wait is it possible that we’re just seeing this because there might be a DDoS going on?

What is the automation doing now? What will it do next? How in the world did we ever get into that mode?

anticipating monitoring responding learning What new vulnerabilities — and exploits — might be coming? Is our data safe at the moment? Is anyone actively probing or attacking us right now? What happened? How exactly did that happen? How did we know what we knew, when we knew it? What is the automation doing now? What will it do next? How in the world did we ever get into that mode? attacker they

what does it look like to understand RE through a security lens?

Challenges to Adversarial Interplay Under High Uncertainty: Staged-World Study of a Cyber Security Event DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University By 
 Matthieu Branlat, B.S., M.S. 
 Graduate Program in Industrial and Systems Engineering The Ohio State University 2011 bit.ly/BranlatRedBlue

Blue Team’s defense activity Red Team’s attack activity

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ALL work in security is cognitive work Effective security requires sustaining your ability to adapt on both short and long time scales 20+ years of research in Resilience Engineering: resilience = sustained adaptive capacity

Understanding Resilience Engineering will take time the concepts are not intuitive and also critically important

Change Is Afoot 2018 2019 J. Paul Reed 2018 Nora Jones Casey Rosenthal 2020 Jessica DeVita Chad Todd Tim Tischler 2021 Learning From Incidents In Software http://learningfromincidents.io

Thanks! @allspaw Adaptive Capacity Labs