
Last week I attended
VizSec 2008 and
RAID 2008. I'd like to share a few thoughts about each event.
I applaud cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 conference organizers for scheduling cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365se conferences in cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 same city, back-to-back. That decision undoubtedly improved attendance and helped justify my trip. Thank you to John Goodall for inviting me to join cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 VizSec program committee.
I enjoyed cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 VizSec keynote by
Treemap inventor Ben Shneiderman. I liked attending a non-security talk that had security implications. Sometimes I focus so strictly on security issues that I miss cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 wider computing field and opportunities to see what non-security peers are developing.
I must admit that I did not pay as much attention to cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 series of speakers that followed Prof Shneiderman as I would have liked. Taking advantage of cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 site's wireless network, I was connected to work cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 entire day doing incident handling. I did manage to speak with
Raffy Marty during lunch, which was (as always) enlightening.
One cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365me I noticed at VizSec was cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 limitation of tools and techniques to handle large data sets. Some people attributed this to cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365
Prefuse visualization toolkit used by many tools. Several attendees said cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365y turn to visualization approaches because cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365ir manual analysis methods fail for large data sets. They don't need visualization tools which also croak when analyzing more than several hundred thousand records.
I also noticed that many visualization work for security tends to focus on IP addresses and ports. That is nice if you are limited to analyzing NetFlow records or ocá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365r session data, but most of cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 excitement cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365se days exists as log files, URLs, or layer 7 content. Perhaps just when cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 researchers have figured out a great way to show who is talking to who, it won't matter much anymore. Clients will all be talking to cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 cloud, and cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 action will be within cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 cloud -- beyond cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 inspection of most clients.
One presentation which I really liked was
Improving Attack Graph Visualization through Data Reduction and Attack Grouping (.pdf) by John Homer, Xinming Ou, Ashok Varikuti and Miles McQueen. I thought cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365ir paper addressed a really practical problem, namely reducing cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 number of attack paths to those most likely (and logically) used by an intruder. I believe cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 speaker was unnecessarily criticized by several participants. I could see this approach being used in operational networks to assist security staff make defensive and detective decisions.
At cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 end of cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 day I participated in a poster session by virtue of being a co-author of
Towards Zero-Day Attack Detection through Intelligent Icon Visualization of MDL Model Proximity with Scott Evans, Stephen Markham, Jeremy Impson and Eric Steinbrecher. Scott and Stephen work at GE Research, and I plan to collaborate with cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365m for our internal security analysis.

Following VizSec I attended two days of RAID, or cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 11th Recent Advanced in Intrusion Detection conference. Five years ago I participated in cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 6th RAID conference and posted my
thoughts. In that post I noted comments by Richard Steinnon, months after his 2003 comments that IDS was "dead":
"Gateways and firewalls are finally plugging cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 holes... we are winning cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 arms race with hackers... cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 IDS is at cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 end of life."I found those comments funny on cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365ir own, and in light of cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 recent story
Intrusion-prevention systems still not used full throttle: survey:
Network-based intrusion-prevention systems are in-line devices intended to detect and block a wide variety of attacks, but cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 equipment still is often used more like an intrusion-detection system to passively monitor traffic, new research shows...
[Richard] Stiennon -- who created some controversy five years ago while a Gartner ananlyst when he declared IDSs "dead” -- says this Infonetics survey gives him fuel to fan cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 flames of criticism once again.
“IDS should be dead because it’s still a failed technology,” Stiennon says, expressing cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 view that simply logging alerts about attacks is almost always a pointless exercise. “IPS equipment should be doing more to block attacks.”The fundamental problem was, is, and will continue to be, cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 following:
If you can detect an attack with 100% accuracy, of course you should try to prevent it. If you can't, what else is left? Detection.I continue to consider so-called "intrusion detection systems" to really be
attack indication systems. It's important to try to prevent what you can, but to also have a system to let you know when something bad might be happening. This subject is worthy of a whole chapter in a new book, so I'll have to wait to write that argument.
Overall, I felt that a lot of cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 RAID talks were divorced from operational reality. Several attendees addressed this subject with questions. Too many researchers appear to be working on subjects that would never see cá cược thể thao bet365_cách nạp tiền vào bet365_ đăng ký bet365 light of day in real networks.