Book Review: AWS System Administration

First of all I would note that my review of this book is based on the rough cuts edition published on Safari and as such is not a fully final version of the text.

However, even at this stage, I'd highly recommend this book to anyone looking to get started with AWS. While there is huge amounts of material already on the web about AWS, it can be overwhelming for a newbie due to the huge range of services offered by AWS and this book is a create summary and introduction.

The author starts off by introducing the basic concepts around EC2, which is pretty much the first thing everyone with an AWS account looks at. The book touches very briefly on the GUI aspects of the AWS management console but very quickly forgoes this quickly to focus exclusively on how to programatically administer AWS.

The book then starts looking at instances, CloudFormation (a rather neat provisioning tool covering a lot of AWS services) and AMIs, before explaining the fundamentals around securing access with IAM and network security with security groups.

Following this the author then touches on configuration management using Puppet, and then ties all this together by walking through an example setup of a web based application within AWS that utilises the majority of the most common AWS services.

The final few chapters touch on log management, DNS, monitoring and backups, but these chapters at present are much lighter than the others. The focus of these chapters seem to be really about helping the sys admin understand some of the main caveats when considering these activities in AWS, rather than being a detailed discussion on how each can be implemented within AWS. I'm not sure if this is a result of the book not being fully finalised or simply due to the potentially huge scope that would exist if the author tried to cover these topics in more detail.

Throughout the book I particularly liked how the author highlights not only the good points of AWS, but also where there are gaps in the various services and the potential issues that a sys admin may hit when trying to work around there. It's these bits of info that I think differentiate the book from the material you'll get online as obviously sometimes that published material on AWS can be very focused on how everything "just works".

If you're looking for a high level introduction to the fundamentals of AWS system administration, then I'd definitely recommend this book.

Combining this book with a higher level cloud architecture book such as Cloud Architecture Patterns, make for an ideal quick intro to cloud computing and AWS.

I really hope the author goes on to develop a further more advanced book covering some of the other AWS services and more complex use cases within enterprises as I think this would be a great addition to my library!

Links:
Safari: http://techbus.safaribooksonline.com/book/operating-systems-and-server-administration/9781449342562/

Book Review: Measuring and Managing Information Risk

I first came across Factor Analysis of Information Risk (FAIR) in around 2007 when I was looking into various risk analysis methods but couldn't find too much about it other than a white paper and a high level Cisco presentation.

Then in 2010, I did my MSc thesis on investigating quantifying information security investment decisions and this led me closer and closer towards FAIR and the approaches used by it such as quantified estimates, subject matter expert calibration and Monte Carlo simulations.

At the time I had a great chat with Jack Jones (one of the authors of this book and original creator of FAIR) and even attended the FAIR Basic Analyst training course delivered by CXOWARE.

However, most people aren't this lucky and while FAIR has been adopted by the Open Group and even has a certification in place with the OpenFAIR program, there hasn't been great material to self study for the exam. So when I heard this book was going to be published, I was really excited.

The book starts off by first explaining what FAIR is, walks through the FAIR model  and explains each variable within the model. The authors highlight some of the changes to the model since the original whitepaper on FAIR and cover why the changes have taken place.

It then moves on to provide a number of different worked scenarios using the FAIR approach, covering discussions on assets, threat communities, threat profiles, scenario building and actual analysis. This is the first time I've seen someone other than myself really walk through some FAIR analysis examples and these are great to see if you've never touched on FAIR before.

The book then shifts tact a little and looks at how controls are viewed from the authors' perspectives; covering asset level controls, variance controls and decision making controls. The sections on variance and decision controls will definitely require a second read before I fully get to grips with the nuances of what the authors were highlighting. However, these chapters bring a level of depth of discussion on controls that I've never seen elsewhere, and something that I think would feed very well into ISACA or other similar groups with a strong control focus.

The book then goes on to cover risk management briefly, and the moves to risk metrics, using the Goal, Question, Metric approach. What I liked particularly about the metrics section is that they didn't simply just list a long number of metrics, but approached is more like a worked example of the approach to defining the metrics. First they look at the goals of risk management, then break these down into sub-goals in order find the questions that match these sub-goals, and finally identify the metrics that you may wish to gather. This chapter also introduces probably the best description of the difference between risk appetite and risk tolerance; comparing risk appetite with the speed limit on a motorway, and risk tolerance the variance around that speed limit in which the police would accept.

What's fantastic is that throughout the book there's a real sense of practical, real world application of this risk analysis approach. There are practical examples of analysis scenarios and even an entire chapter outlying where you can go wrong. This is something that I've often seen lacking other books on information or IT risk analysis, which are often full of theoretical approaches, but which lack any relevant examples and definitely don't outline where you'll have problems. This gives the book a practical credibility that I believe will find favor with info sec professionals who normally would shy away from risk management books.

I would say that the book definitely assumes some prior knowledge in approaches such as Monte Carlo simulations and why you may use them, but if you haven't come across these before, then I'd highly recommend The Failure of Risk Management by Doug Hubbard to get you up to speed.

Overall, this is the book I was looking for on information risk analysis four years ago… and I'm thrilled to see it's finally arrived. Even if you never plan to use FAIR as your risk analysis methodology, there's enough in this book that it will help anyone's critical thinking in relation to information security and I can't recommend it highly enough. Everyone in info sec should read it!


Links:
Elsevier http://store.elsevier.com/product.jsp?isbn=9780124202313
Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Measuring-Managing-Information-Risk-Approach/dp/0124202314/

Book Review: IPv6 Security

Last February, RFC 7123 was published which outlines a number of key security issues with IPv6 and some of the potential approaches to mitigating them. Seeing as I haven't come across many IPv6 networks yet in my travels, I figured it was as good a time as any to get up to speed on IPv6 security in general.

As I started out working on networking with Cisco kit, I've always gone back to their books whenever I need a re-fresher on what's feasible in the world of networking and not surprisingly when I checked the Cisco Press website, IPv6 Security sounded like exactly what I was looking for! Also, after a bit more research I saw that it got an excellent review from Richard Bejtlich a few years ago, which is always a good sign!

The book starts off by introducing the fundamental security issues within IPv6 and then walks through in detail the issues at the protocol header layer before moving to discuss security issues at the local link level, perimeter security and filtering

During the first few chapters there were two aspects that I really liked. Firstly, the authors constantly try to link IPv6 vulnerabilities and attacks to similar IPv4 issues, which makes it very easy to get your head around the issues if you're familiar with attacks against IPv4. Secondly, for each vulnerability the authors demonstrate the attack using tools such as scapy6, phonoelit, thc-ipv6 and then show how various features within IOS can be used to mitigate or reduce the impact of the issue. This really drives home how feasible the attacks are and also shows what logs you should look out for to detect attacks.

However, for me the book lost it's way a bit in chapters 6 to 8 which cover network device hardening, host based security and IPSec. For me these chapters covered too much of an overview of each topic and not enough specifics for IPv6 security issues.

Thankfully, things get very much back on track for the remainder of the book, which security issues within IPv6 Mobility, dual stack systems, tunnels and monitoring, all of which are great chapters.

Overall, if you're familiar with the basics of IPv6 and Cisco IPv4 network security functionality within IOS, this is an easy and light read that will get you up to speed very quickly both on the fundamental security issues with IPv6 and the controls that Cisco have available on their kit.

As such, I highly recommend it if you're looking for a solid intro to IPv6 security. I really enjoyed it.

Following on from this book, I'd recommend having a look at the presentations from last years IPv6 Hacker's meeting in Berlin and I'm hearing great things about the Hacking IPv6 Networks course home from SI6 networks so may have to give that a look!

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/IPv6-Security-Scott-Hogg/dp/1587055945
Cisco Press: http://www.ciscopress.com/store/ipv6-security-9781587055942

Book Review: Data-Driven Security - Analysis, Visualization and Dashboards

Ever since I read The New School of Information Security back in 2008, I've been interested to looking at how data can drive better decision making in information security.

At first this started with looking at security metrics and then progressed into looking at economics of information security and quantitative risk assessment, touching on statistics and machine learning along the way and leading towards the whole concept of data science.

During these years, I've come across both the authors of this book (Jay Jacobs and Bob Rudis) through forums such as SIRA and Security Metrics so when I heard back in January that they were releasing this book I knew it was going to be worth a read!

By pure chance I ended up attending RSA this year and so had the pleasure of meeting both Jay and Bob where they were signing copies of Data Driven Security so I am the very happy owner of a signed copy.. thanks guys!

The book covers the concepts, tools and techniques that can be used to analyze different types of information security data sets and explains many of the common pitfalls in both approach and interpretation of the results of this analysis. It's effectively a perfect introduction to data science/analysis for information security!

The book starts off by introducing the reader to what data analysis is, covering historical concepts and how to create a good question to answer with analysis, rather than simply analysing data for the sake of it.

It then moves on to provide an introduction to the R programming language, a free statistical programming language, and also how they us Python in conjunction with R to analyze data.

The book is very practically oriented, encouraging the reader to start playing around with both Python and R by providing full coded examples of all the analysis performed in each chapter. To make life easier, all the code examples can be downloaded from the books website and any data sets used for analysis are either publicly available already or can be downloaded with the source code.

Once you get your head around the basics of using the tools for analysis, the book then walks through examples of the different types of analysis that information security data sets may require, covering things like exploring data sets of malware infections, performing regression analysis on malware data and applying machine learning to breach data. Throughout the examples, the book puts a strong emphasis on visualization of data including both the common mistakes in presenting data analysis and also looks both at static and interactive visualization.

The book also briefly touches on NoSQL databases but this is very much just to show that they exist and where they may be used. I'd highly recommend Seven Databases in Seven Weeks if you're looking for a bit more info on this side of things.

The book finishes off with a look at what a data driven approach means for information security, what core skillsets are needed and how a team can be built. It ends on a very interesting example of how Bob's team started off focusing on just one single question to answer "Have we seen this IP before in our external perimeter logs", which is a perfect illustration of finding a single framed question to answer through analysis, rather than trying to boil the ocean on your first attempt at analysis.

One other excellent aspect of the book is that at the end of each chapter, a number of other books are highlighted as further reading, but with brief summary of why each book is interesting in relation to the chapter. What was very interesting for myself was that I'd actually read many of the books referenced, but hadn't put it all together in the context of information security.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and while I haven't had the time to start looking at applying the ideas in the book to my own data sets, it's opened up a whole world of analysis tools and techniques and has effectively shortcutted my learning in the area dramatically.

The biggest benefit I see from this book is the highly practical oriented approach, which allows anyone with an interest in information security data analysis to quickly get up to speed in the basics, allowing for them to at least have the tools and knowledge to start trying to ask interesting questions and get results, without having to re-invent the wheel.

If you've ever been sitting in front of a huge set of firewall or webserver logs during an incident trying to figure things out by greping, cuting and counting results you're going to get a lot from this book!

Links:
Wiley http://www.wiley.com/go/datadrivensecurity/
Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Data-Driven-Security-Analysis-Visualization-Dashboards/dp/1118793722