Cricket Liu, Infoblox | CyberConnect 2017
>> Announcer: Live from New York City It's TheCube. Covering CyberConnect 2017. Brought to you by Centrify and the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology. >> It got out of control, they were testing it. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in New York City for CyberConnect 2017. This is Cube's coverage is presented by Centrify. It's an industry event, bringing all the leaders of industry and government together around all the great opportunities to solve the crisis of our generation. That's cyber security. We have Cricket Liu. Chief DNS architect and senior fellow at Infoblox. Cricket, great to see you again. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, nice to be back John. >> So we're live here and really this is the first inaugural event of CyberConnect. Bringing government and industry together. We saw the retired general on stage talking about some of the history, but also the fluid nature. We saw Jim from Aetna, talking about how unconventional tactics and talking about domains and how he was handling email. That's a DNS problem. >> Yeah, yeah. >> You're the DNS guru. DNS has become a role in this. What's going on here around DNS? Why is it important to CyberConnect? >> Well, I'll be talking tomorrow about the first anniversary, well, a little bit later than the first anniversary of the big DDoS attack on Dyn. The DNS hosting provider up in Manchester, New Hampshire. And trying to determine if we've actually learned anything, have we improved our DNS infrastructure in any way in the ensuing year plus? Are we doing anything from the standards, standpoint on protecting DNS infrastructure. Those sorts of things. >> And certainly one of the highlight examples was mobile users are masked by the DNS on, say, email for example. Jim was pointing that out. I got to ask you, because we heard things like sink-holing addresses, hackers create domain names in the first 48 hours to launch attacks. So there's all kinds of tactical things that are being involved with, lets say, domain names for instance. >> Cricket: Yeah, yeah. >> That's part of the critical infrastructure. So, the question is how, in DDoS attacks, denial-of-service attacks, are coming in in the tens of thousands per day? >> Yeah, well that issue that you talked about, in particular the idea that the bad guys register brand new domain names, domain names that initially have no negative reputation associated with them, my friend Paul Vixie and his new company Farsight Security have been working on that. They have what is called a -- >> John: What's the name of the company again? >> Farsight Security. >> Farsight? >> And they have what's called a Passive DNS Database. Which is a database basically of DNS telemetry that is accumulated from big recursive DNS servers around the internet. So they know when a brand new domain name pops up, somewhere on the internet because someone has to resolve it. And they pump all of these brand new domain names into what's called a response policy zone feed. And you can get for example different thresh holds. I want to see the brand new domain names created over the last 30 minutes or seen over the last 30 minutes. And if you block resolution of those brand new domain names, it turns out you block a tremendous amount of really malicious activity. And then after say, 30 minutes if it's a legitimate domain name it falls off the list and you can resolve it. >> So this says your doing DNS signaling as a service for new name registrations because the demand is for software APIs to say "Hey, I want to create some policy around some techniques to sink-hole domain address hacks. Something like that? >> Yeah, basically this goes hand in hand with this new system response policy zone which allows you to implement DNS policy. Something that we've really never before done with DNS servers, which that's actually not quite true. There have been proprietary solutions for it. But response policy zones are an open solution that give you the ability to say "Hey I do want to allow resolution of this domain name, but not this other domain name". And then you can say "Alright, all these brand new domain names, for the first 30 minutes of their existence I don't want-- >> It's like a background check for domain names. >> Yeah, or like a wait list. Okay, you don't get resolved for the first 30 minutes, that gives the sort of traditional, reputational, analyzers, Spamhaus and Serval and people like that a chance to look you over and say "yeah, it's malicious or it's not malicious". >> So serves to be run my Paul Vixie who is the contributor to the DNS protocol-- >> Right, enormous contributor. >> So we should keep an eye on that. Check it out, Paul Vixie. Alright, so DNS's critical infrastructure that we've been talking about, that you and I, love to riff about DNS and the role What's it enabled? Obviously it's ASCII, but I got to ask you, all these Unicode stuff about the emoji and the open source, really it highlight's the Unicode phenomenon. So this is a hacker potential haven. DNS and Unicode distinction. >> It's really interesting from a DNS standpoint, because we went to a lot of effort within the IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force, some years ago, back when I was more involved in the IETF, some people spent a tremendous amount of effort coming up with a way to use allow people to use Unicode within domain name. So that you could type something into your browser that was in traditional or simplified Chinese or that was in Arabic or was in Hebrew or any number of other scripts. And you could type that in and it would be translated into something that we call puny code, in the DNS community, which is an ASCII equivalent to that. The issue with that though, becomes that there are, we would say glifs, most people I guess would say characters, but there are characters in Unicode that look just like, say Latin alphabet characters. So there's a lowercase 'a' for example, in cyrillic, it's not a lowercase 'a' in the Latin alphabet, it's a cyrillic 'a', but it looks just like an 'a'. So it's possible for people to register names, domain names, that in there Unicode representation, look like for example, PayPal, which of course has two a's in it, and those two a's could be cyrillic a's. >> Not truly the ASCII representation of PayPal which we resolve through the DNS. >> Exactly, so imagine how subtle an attack that would be if you were able to send out a bunch of email, including the links that said www.-- >> Someone's hacked your PayPal account, click here. >> Yeah, exactly. And if you eyeballed it you'd think Well, sure that's www.PayPal.com, but little do you know it's actually not the -- >> So Jim Ruth talked about applying some unconventional methods, because the bad guys don't subscribe to the conventional methods . They don't buy into it. He said that they change up their standards, is what I wrote down, but that was maybe their sort of security footprint. 1.5 times a day, how does that apply to your DNS world, how do you even do that? >> Well, we're beginning to do more and more with analytics DNS. The passive DNS database that I talked about. More and more big security players, including Infoblox are collecting passive DNS data. And you can run interesting analytics on that passive DNS data. And you can, in some cases, automatically detect suspicious or malicious behavior. For example you can say "Hey, look this named IP address mapping is changing really, really rapidly" and that might be an indication of let's say, fast flux. Or you can say "These domain names have really high entropy. We did an engram analysis of the labels of these". The consequence of that we believe that this resolution of these domain names, is actually being used to tunnel data out of an organization or into an organization. So there's some things you can do with these analytical algorithms in order to suss out suspicious and malicious. >> And you're doing that in as close to real time as possible, presumably right? >> Cricket: That's right. >> And so, now everybody's talking about Edge, Edge computing, Edge analytics. How will the Edge effect your ability to keep up? >> Well, the challenge I think with doing analytics on passive DNS is that you have to be able to collect that data from a lot of places. The more places that you have, the more sensors that you have collecting passive DNS data the better. You need to be able to get it out from the Edge. From those local recursive DNS servers that are actually responding to the query's that come from say your smart phone or your laptop or what have you. If you don't have that kind of data, you've only got, say, big ISPs, then you may not detect the compromise of somebody's corporate network, for example. >> I was looking at some stats when I asked the IOT questions, 'cause you're kind of teasing out kind of the edge of the network and with mobile and wearables as the general was pointing out, is that it's going to create more service area, but I just also saw a story, I don't know if it's from Google or wherever, but 80% plus roughly, websites are going to have SSL HTBS that they're resolving through. And there's reports out here that a lot of the anti virus provisions have been failing because of compromised certificates. And to quote someone from Research Park, and we want to get your reaction to this "Our results show", this is from University of Maryland College Park. "Our results show that compromised certificates pose a bigger threat than we previously believed, and is not restricted to advanced threats and digitally signed malware was common in the wild." Well before Stuxnet. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And so breaches have been caused by compromising certificates of actual authority. So this brings up the whole SSL was supposed to be solving this, that's just one problem. Now you've got the certificates, well before Stuxnet. So Stuxnet really was kind of going on before Stuxnet. Now you've got the edge of the network. Who has the DNS control for these devices? Is it kind of like failing? Is it crumbling? How do we get that trust back? >> That's a good question. One of the issues that we've had is that at various points, CAs, Certificate Authorities, have been conned into issuing certificates for websites that they shouldn't have. For example, "Hey, generate a cert for me". >> John: The Chinese do it all the time. >> Exactly. I run www. Bank of America .com. They give it to the wrong guy. He installs it. We have I think, something like 1,500 top level certification authorities. Something crazy like that. Dan Komenski had a number in one of his blog posts and it was absolutely ridiculous. The number of different CA's that we trust that are built into the most common browsers, like Chrome and Firefox and things like that. We're actually trying to address some of those issues with DNS, so there are two new resource records being introduced to DNS. One is TLSA. >> John: TLSA? >> Yeah, TLSA. And the other one is called CAA I think, which always makes me think of a California Automotive Association. (laughter) But TLSA is basically a way of publishing data in your own zone that says My cert looks like this. You can say "This is my cert." You can just completely go around the CA. And you can say "This is my cert" and then your DNS sec sign your zone and you're done. Or you can do something short of that and you can say "My cert should look like this "and it should have this CA. "This is my CA. "Don't trust any other one" >> So it's metadata about the cert or the cert itself. >> Exactly, so that way if somebody manages to go get a cert for your website, but they get that cert from some untrustworthy CA. I don't know who that would be. >> John: Or a comprimised-- >> Right, or a compromised CA. No body would trust it. No body who actually looks up the TSLA record because they'll go "Oh, Okay. I can see that Infoblox's cert that their CA is Symantech. And this is not a Symantech signed cert. So I'm not going to believe it". And at the same time this CAA record is designed to be consumed by the CA's themselves, and it's a way of saying, say Infoblox can say "We are a customer of Symantech or whoever" And when somebody goes to the cert and says "Hey, I want to generate a certificate for www.Infoblox.com, they'll look it up and say "Oh, they're a Symantech customer, I'm not going to do that for you". >> So it creates trust. So how does this impact the edge of the network, because the question really is, the question that's on everyone's mind is, does the internet of things create more trust or does it create more vulnerabilities? Everyone knows it's a surface area, but still there are technical solutions when you're talking about, how does this play out in your mind? How does Infoblox see it? How do you see it? What's Paul Vixie working on, does that tie into it? Because out in the hinterlands and the edge of the network and the wild, is it like a DNS server on the device. It could be a sensor? How are they resolving things? What is the protocol for these? >> At least this gives you a greater assurance if you're using TLS to encrypt communication between a client and a web server or some other resource out there on the internet. It at least gives you a better assurance that you really aren't being spoofed. That you're going to the right place. That your communications are secure. So that's all really good. IOT, I think of as slightly orthogonal to that. IOT is still a real challenge. I mean there is so many IOT devices out there. I look at IOT though, and I'll talk about this tomorrow, and actually I've got a live event on Thursday, where I'll talk about it some more with my friend Matt Larson. >> John: Is that going to be here in New York? >> Actually we're going to be broadcasting out of Washington, D.C. >> John: Were you streaming that? >> It is streamed. In fact it's only streamed. >> John: Put a plug in for the URL. >> If you go to www.Infoblox.com I think it's one of the first things that will slide into your view. >> So you're putting it onto your company site. Infoblox.com. You and Matt Larson. Okay, cool. Thursday event, check it out. >> It is somewhat embarrassingly called Cricket Liu Live. >> You're a celebrity. >> It's also Matt Larson Live. >> Both of you guys know what you're talking about. It's great. >> So there's a discussion among certain boards of directors that says, "Look, we're losing the battle, "we're losing the war. "We got to shift more on response "and at least cover our butts. "And get some of our response mechanisms in place." What do you advise those boards? What's the right balance between sort of defense perimeter, core infrastructure, and response. >> Well, I would certainly advocate as a DNS guy, that people instrument their DNS infrastructure to the extent that they can to be able to detect evidence of compromise. And that's a relatively straight forward thing to do. And most organizations haven't gone through the trouble to plumb their DNS infrastructure into their, for example, their sim infrastructure, so they can get query log information, they can use RPZs to flag when a client looks up the domain name of a known command and control server, which is a clear indication of compromise. Those sorts of things. I think that's really important. It's a pretty easy win. I do think at this point that we have to resign ourselves to the idea that we have devices on our network that are infected. That game is lost. There's no more crunchy outer shell security. It just doesn't really work. So you have to have defensive depth as they say. >> Now servs has been around for such a long time. It's been one of those threats that just keeps coming. It's like waves and waves. So it looks like there's some things happening, that's cool. So I got to ask you, CyberConnect is the first real inaugural event that brings industry and some obviously government and tech geeks together, but it's not black hat or ETF. It's not those geeky forums. It's really a business community coming together. What's your take of this event? What's your observations? What are you seeing here? >> Well, I'm really excited to actually get the opportunity to talk to people who are chiefly security people. I think that's kind of a novelty for me, because most of the time I think I speak to people who are chiefly networking people and in particular that little niche of networking people who are interested in DNS. Although truth be told, maybe they're not really interested in DNS, maybe they just put up with me. >> Well the community is really strong. The DNS community has always been organically grown and reliable. >> But I love the idea of talking about DNS security to a security audience. And hopefully some of the folks we get to talk to here, will come away from it thinking oh, wow, so I didn't even realize that my DNS infrastructure could actually be a security tool for me. Could actually be helpful in any way in detecting compromise. >> And what about this final question, 'cause I know we got a time check here. But, operational impact of some of these DNS changes that are coming down from Paul Vixie, you and Matt Larson doing some things together, What's the impact of the customer and they say "okay, DNS will play a role in how I role out my architecture. New solutions for cyber, IOT is right around the corner. What's the impact to them in your mind operationally. >> There certainly is some operational impact, for example if you want to subscribe to RPZ feeds, you've got to become a customer of somebody who provides a commercial RPZ feed or somebody who provides a free RPZ feed. You have to plumb that into your DNS infrastructure. You have to make sure that it continues transferring. You have to plumb that into your sim, so when you get a hit against an RPZ, you're notified about it, your security folks. All that stuff is routine day to day stuff. Nothing out of the ordinary. >> No radical plumbing changes. >> Right, but I think one of the big challenges in so many of the organizations that I go to visit, the security organization and the networking organization are in different silos and they don't necessarily communicate a lot. So maybe the more difficult operational challenge is just making sure that you have that communication. And that the security guys know the DNS guys, the networking guys, and vice versa. And they cooperate to work on problems. >> This seems to be the big collaboration thing that's happening here. That it's more of a community model coming together, rather than security. Cricket Liu here, DNS, Chief Architect of DNS and senior fellow of Infoblox. The legend in the DNS community. Paul Vixie amongst the peers. Really that community holding down the fort I'll see a lot of exploits that they have to watch out for. Thanks for your commentary here at the CyberConnect 2017 inaugural event. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with more after this short break. (techno music)
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and the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology. Cricket, great to see you again. but also the fluid nature. Why is it important to CyberConnect? of the big DDoS attack on Dyn. And certainly one of the highlight examples was in the tens of thousands per day? in particular the idea that the bad guys register a legitimate domain name it falls off the list because the demand is for software APIs that give you the ability to say "Hey I that gives the sort of traditional, reputational, stuff about the emoji and the So that you could type something into your browser of PayPal which we resolve through the DNS. a bunch of email, including the links that And if you eyeballed it you'd think to your DNS world, how do you even do that? We did an engram analysis of the labels of these". And so, now everybody's talking about Edge, The more places that you have, the more sensors kind of the edge of the network Who has the DNS control for these devices? One of the issues that we've had that are built into the most common browsers, And the other one is called CAA I think, So it's metadata about the cert Exactly, so that way if somebody And at the same time this is it like a DNS server on the device. At least this gives you a greater assurance out of Washington, D.C. It is streamed. If you go to www.Infoblox.com So you're putting it onto your company site. It is somewhat embarrassingly called Both of you guys know what you're talking about. What's the right balance between sort of defense perimeter, And that's a relatively straight forward thing to do. CyberConnect is the first real inaugural event actually get the opportunity to Well the community is really strong. And hopefully some of the folks we get to talk to here, What's the impact to them in your mind operationally. You have to plumb that into your DNS infrastructure. And that the security guys know the DNS guys, Really that community holding down the fort
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David McNeely, Centrify | CyberConnect 2017
(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from New York City It's theCUBE, covering CyberConnect 2017. Brought to you by Centrify and the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. Live here in New York is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Centrify's CyberConnect 2017, presented by Centrify. It's an industry event that Centrify is underwriting but it's really not a Centrify event, it's really where industry and government are coming together to talk about the best practices of architecture, how to solve the biggest crisis of our generation, and the computer industry that is security. I am John Furrier, with my co-host Dave Vellante. Next guest: David McNeely, who is the vice president of product strategy with Centrify, welcome to theCUBE. >> Great, thank you for having me. >> Thanks for coming on. I'm really impressed by Centrify's approach here. You're underwriting the event but it's not a Centrify commercial. >> Right >> This is about the core issues of the community coming together, and the culture of tech. >> Right. >> You are the product. You got some great props from the general on stage. You guys are foundational. What does that mean, when he said that Centrify could be a foundational element for solving this problem? >> Well, I think a lot of it has to do with if you look at the problems that people are facing, the breaches are misusing computers in order to use your account. If your account is authorized to still gain access to a particular resource, whether that be servers or databases, somehow the software and the systems that we put in place, and even some of the policies need to be retrofitted in order to go back and make sure that it really is a human gaining access to things, and not malware running around the network with compromised credentials. We've been spending a lot more time trying to help customers eliminate the use of passwords and try to move to stronger authentication. Most of the regulations now start talking about strong authentication but what does that really mean? It can't just be a one time passcode delivered to your phone. They've figured out ways to break into that. >> Certificates are being hacked and date just came out at SourceStory even before iStekNET's certificate authorities, are being compromised even before the big worm hit in what he calls the Atom Bomb of Malware. But this is the new trend that we are seeing is that the independent credentials of a user is being authentically compromised with the Equifax and all these breaches where all personal information is out there, this is a growth area for the hacks that people are actually getting compromised emails and sending them. How do you know it's not a fake account if you think it's your friend? >> Exactly. >> And that's the growth area, right? >> The biggest problem is trying to make sure that if you do allow someone to use my device here to gain access to my mail account, how do we make it stronger? How do we make sure that it really is David that is logged onto the account? If you think about it, my laptop, my iPad, my phone all authenticate and access the same email account and if that's only protected with a password then how good is that? How hard is it to break passwords? So we are starting to challenge a lot of base assumptions about different ways to do security because if you look at some of the tools that the hackers have their tooling is getting better all the time. >> So when, go ahead, sorry. finish your thoughts. >> Tools like their HashCat can break passwords. Like millions and millions a second. >> You're hacked, and basically out there. >> When you talk about eliminating passwords, you're talking about doing things other than just passwords, or you mean eliminating passwords? >> I mean eliminating passwords. >> So how does that work? >> The way that works is you have to have a stronger vetting process around who the person is, and this is actually going to be a challenge as people start looking at How do you vet a person? We ask them a whole bunch of questions: your mother's maiden name, where you've lived, other stuff that Equifax asked-- >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, everybody has. >> We ask you all of that information to find out is it really you?. But really the best way to do it now is going to be go back to government issued IDs because they have a vetting process where they're establishing an identity for you. You've got a driver's license, we all have social security numbers, maybe a passport. That kind of information is really the only way to start making sure it really is me. This is where you start, and the next place is assigning a stronger credential. So there is a way to get a strong credential on to your mobile device. The issuance process itself generates the first key pair inside the device in a protected place, that can't be compromised because it is part of the hardware, part of the chip that runs the processes of the phone and that starts acting as strong as a smart card. In the government they call it derived credentials. It's kind of new technology, NIST has had described documentation on how to make that work for quite some time but actually implementing it and delivering it as a solution that can be used for authentication to other things is kind of new here. >> A big theme of your talk tomorrow is on designing this in, so with all of this infrastructure out there I presume you can't just bolt this stuff on and spread it in a peanut butter spread across, so how do we solve that problem? Is it just going to take time-- >> Well that's actually-- >> New infrastructure? Modernization? >> Dr. Ron Ross is going to be joining me tomorrow and he is from the NIST, and we will be talking with him about some of these security frameworks that they've created. There's cyber security framework, there's also other guidance that they've created, the NIST 800-160, that describe how to start building security in from the very start. We actually have to back all the way up to the app developer and the operating system developers and get them to design security into the applications and also into the operating systems in such a way that you can trust the OS. Applications sitting on top of an untrusted operating system is not very good so the applications have to be sitting on top of trusted operating systems. Then we will probably get into a little bit of the newer technology. I am starting to find a lot of our customers that move to cloud based infostructures, starting to move their applications into containers where there is a container around the application, and actually is not bound so heavily to the OS. I can deploy as many of these app containers as I want and start scaling those out. >> So separate the workload from some of your infostructure. You're kind of seeing that trend? >> Exactly and that changes a whole lot of the way we look at security. So now your security boundary is not the machine or the computer, it's now the application container. >> You are the product strategist. You have the keys to the kingdom at Centrify, but we also heard today that it's a moving train, this business, it's not like you can lock into someone. Dave calls it the silver bullet and it's hard to get a silver bullet in security. How do you balance the speed of the game, the product strategy, and how do you guys deal with bringing customer solutions to the market that has an architectural scalability to it? Because that's the challenge. I am a slow enterprise, but I want to implement a product, I don't want to be obsolete by the time I roll it out. I need to have a scalable solution that can give me the head room and flexibility. So you're bringing a lot to the table. Explain what's going on in that dynamic. >> There's a lot of the, I try as much as possible to adhere to standards before they exist and push and promote those like on the authentication side of things. For the longest time we used LDAP and Kerberos to authenticate computers, to act a directory. Now almost all of the web app develops are using SAML or OpenID Connect or OLAF too as a mechanism for authenticating the applications. Just keeping up with standards like that is one of the best ways. That way the technologies and tools that we deliver just have APIs that the app developers can use and take advantage of. >> So I wanted to follow up on that because I was going to ask you. Isn't there a sort of organizational friction in that you've got companies, if you have to go back to the developers and the guys who are writing code around the OS, there's an incentive from up top to go for fast profits. Get to market as soon as you can. If I understand what you just said, if you are able to use open source standards, things like OLAF, that maybe could accelerate your time to market. Help me square that circle. Is there an inherent conflict between the desire to get short term profits versus designing in good security? >> It does take a little bit of time to design, build, and deliver products, but as we moved to cloud based infostructure we are able to more rapidly deploy and release features. Part of having a cloud service, we update that every month. Every 30 days we have a new version of that rolling out that's got new capabilities in it. Part of adapting an agile delivery models, but everything we deliver also has an API so when we go back and talk to the customers and the developer at the customer organizations we have a rich set of APIs that the cloud service exposes. If they uncover a use case or a situation that requires something new or different that we don't have then that's when I go back to the product managers and engineering teams and talk about adding that new capability into the cloud service, which we can expect the monthly cadence helps me deliver that more rapidly to the market. >> So as you look at the bell curve in the client base, what's the shape of those that are kind of on the cutting edge and doing by definition, I shouldn't use the term cutting edge, but on the path to designing in as you would prescribe? What's it look like? Is it 2080? 199? >> That's going to be hard to put a number on. Most of the customers are covering the basics with respect to consolidating identities, moving to stronger authetication, I'm finding one of the areas that the more mature companies have adopted as this just in time notion where by default nobody has any rights to gain access to either systems or applications, and moving it to a workflow request access model. So that's the one that's a little bit newer that fewer of my customers are using but most everybody wants to adopt. If you think about some of the attacks that have taken place, if I can get a piece of email to you, and you think it's me and you open up the attachment, at that point you are now infected and the malware that's on your machine has the ability to use your account to start moving around and authenticating the things that you are authorized to get to. So if I can send that piece of email and accomplish that, I might target a system administrator or system admins and go try to use their account because it's already authorized to go long onto the database servers, which is what I'm trying to get to. Now if we could flip it say well, yeah. He's a database admin but if he doesn't have permissions to go log onto anything right now and he has to make a request then the malware can't make the request and can't get the approval of the manager in order to go gain access to the database. >> Now, again, I want to explore the organizational friction. Does that slow down the organization's ability to conduct business and will it be pushed back from the user base or can you make that transparent? >> It does slow things down. We're talking about process-- >> That's what it is. It's a choice that organizations have to make if you care about the long term health of your company, your brand, your revenues or do you want to go for the short term profit? >> That is one of the biggest challenges that we describe in the software world as technical debt. Some IT organizations may as well. It's just the way things happen in the process by which people adhere to things. We find all to often that people will use the password vault for example and go check out the administrator password or their Dash-A account. It's authorized to log on to any Windows computer in the entire network that has an admin. And if they check it out, and they get to use it all day long, like okay did you put it in Clipboard? Malware knows how to get to your clipboard. Did you put it in a notepad document stored on your desktop? Guess what? Malware knows how to get to that. So now we've got a system might which people might check out a password and Malware can get to that password and use it for the whole day. Maybe at the end of the day the password vault can rotate the password so that it is not long lived. The process is what's wrong there. We allow humans to continue to do things in a bad way just because it's easy. >> The human error is a huge part in this. Administrators have their own identity. Systems have a big problem. We are with David McNeely, the vice president of product strategy with Centrify. I've got to get your take on Jim Ruth's, the chief security officer for Etna that was on the stage, great presentation. He's really talking about the cutting edge things that he's doing unconventionally he says, but it's the only way for him to attack the problem. He did do a shout out for Centrify. Congratulations on that. He was getting at a whole new way to reimagine security and he brought up that civilizations crumble when you lose trust. Huge issues. How would you guys seeing that help you guys solve problems for your customers? Is Etna a tell-sign for which direction to go? >> Absolutely, I mean if you think about problem we just described here the SysAdmin now needs to make a workflow style request to gain access to a machine, the problem is that takes time. It involves humans and process change. It would be a whole lot nicer, and we've already been delivering solutions that do this Machine learning behavior-based access controls. We tied it into our multifactor authentication system. The whole idea was to get the computers to make a decision based on behavior. Is it really David at the keyboard trying to gain access to a target application or a server? The machine can learn by patterns and by looking at my historical access to go determine does that look, and smell, and feel like David? >> The machine learning, for example. >> Right and that's a huge part of it, right? Because if we can get the computers to make these decisions automatically, then we eliminate so much time that is being chewed up by humans and putting things into a queue and then waiting for somebody to investigate. >> What's the impact of machine-learning on security in your opinion? Is it massive in the sense of, obviously it's breached, no it's going to be significant, but what areas is it attacking? The speed of the solution? The amount of data it can go through? Unique domain expertise of the applications? Where is the a-ha, moment for the machine learning value proposition? >> It's really going to help us enormously on making more intelligent decisions. If you think about access control systems, they all make a decision based on did you supply the correct user ID and password, or credential, or did you have access to whatever that resource is? But we only looked at two things. The authentication, and the access policy, and these behavior based systems, they look at a lot of other things. He mentioned 60 different attributes that they're looking at. And all of these attributes, we're looking at where's David's iPad? What's the location of my laptop, which would be in the room upstairs, my phone is nearby, and making sure that somebody is not trying to use my account from California because there's no way I could get from here to California at a rapid pace. >> Final question for you while we have a couple seconds left here. What is the value propositions for Centrify? If you had the bottom line of the product strategy in a nutshell? >> Well, kind of a tough one there. >> Identity? Stop the Breach is the tagline. Is it the identity? Is it the tech? Is it the workflow? >> Identity and access control. At the end of the day we are trying to provide identity and access controls around how a user accesses an application, how we access servers, privileged accounts, how you would access your mobile device and your mobile device accesses applications. Basically, if you think about what defines an organization, identity, the humans that work at an organization and your rights to go gain access to applications is what links everything together because as you start adopting cloud services as we've adopted mobile devices, there's no perimeter any more really for the company. Identity makes up the definition and the boundary of the organization. >> Alright, David McNeely, vice president of product strategy, Centrify. More live coverage, here in New York City from theCUBE, at CyberConnect 2017. The inaugural event. Cube coverage continues after this short break. (upbeat music)
SUMMARY :
Brought to you by Centrify and and the computer industry that is security. I'm really impressed by Centrify's approach here. This is about the core issues of the community You are the product. Well, I think a lot of it has to do with if you look is that the independent credentials of a user is David that is logged onto the account? finish your thoughts. Tools like their HashCat can break passwords. that runs the processes of the phone so the applications have to be sitting on top of So separate the workload from some of your infostructure. is not the machine or the computer, You have the keys to the kingdom at Centrify, For the longest time we used LDAP and Kerberos the desire to get short term profits and the developer at the customer organizations has the ability to use your account from the user base or can you make that transparent? It does slow things down. have to make if you care about the long term That is one of the biggest challenges that we describe seeing that help you guys solve problems for your customers? Is it really David at the keyboard Because if we can get the computers to make these decisions The authentication, and the access policy, What is the value propositions for Centrify? Is it the identity? and the boundary of the organization. of product strategy, Centrify.
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