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Has Covid-19 killed the password? 

Has Covid-19 killed the password? 

January 15, 2021

The pandemic has shone a spotlight on the weaknesses of the most common form of digital authentication.

Excerpt from: Has Covid-19 killed the password?

It is also important to remember that biometric devices have advanced significantly over the past decade, says Goerlich. Continuing to enhance these features – for example, by making it standard to make access to a system contingent on normal user behaviour patterns – will prove essential in shoring up public trust in the technology.

“Some of the set-ups that I’ve seen, a criminal would have to steal your fingerprint, steal your phone, steal your laptop, log in from a region that you’re usually working at… and then start accessing applications that you normally access,” says Goerlich. “That’s a lot of complexity and a lot of hurdles for a criminal to jump through.”

Even so, the end is far from nigh for the password itself. For one thing, upgrading corporate infrastructure to support passwordless authentication remains a gargantuan task. “You’re going to have this really long tail, which could go on [for] years, if not decades, of legacy systems that we’re going to continue to maintain, and we’re going to continue to maintain because they still provide business value,” says Goerlich.

Read the full article: https://techmonitor.ai/cybersecurity/has-covid-19-killed-the-password

This post is an excerpt from a press article. To see other media mentions and press coverage, click to view the Media page or the News category. Do you want to interview Wolf for a similar article? Contact Wolf through his media request form.

Tell a story with the project name – Design Monday

Tell a story with the project name – Design Monday

January 11, 2021

The city is a book of poetry writ large across buildings. Santiago, Chile.

During the mid-1990s, Santiago went through building boom. The game was simple. A development investment project would be conceived and pitched. If the enough investors were interested, the project was funded, and the building was built. An apartment building here, an office building there. And key to the success of getting funding? The name.

Rodrigo Rojas, a poet and professor, played a key role in naming these buildings. “Rodrigo was a kind of interpreter of dreams — he tapped into the psyche of what the people of Santiago wanted to become, and tried to give that a name.”

Every project needs a name. Unfunded real estate projects and security projects, doubly so. Here are a few things I’ve learned from naming projects.

Be playful and fun. In my consulting days, to protect confidentiality, we wrote a name generator. We dedicated a portion of the project kick-off to laughing over possibilities. With names like Iron Taco and Gubbins Dance, you can’t go wrong. Security needs a spirit of play.

Share the vision. “One system, one team” was what I called my DevOps and IT modernization project. The clarity of the name simplified sharing the vision and making downstream decisions.

Address concerns. When I received feedback that my approach to managing several consulting practices was too complex, I came up with a three year roadmap in three words. Simplify, optimize, expand. One word per year. We executed on this from 2017-2019, with quarterly goals reinforcing the overall journey.

We need to find the spirit of a poet when naming security projects and initiatives. Tell a story with the name. Make it fun, while communicating the vision and addressing any concerns. We can use the name to drive action.

Photography courtesy of Horst Engelmann, Pixabay

This article is part of a series on designing cyber security capabilities. To see other articles in the series, including a full list of design principles, click here.

Find your own way without brainstorming or crowdsourcing – Design Monday

Find your own way without brainstorming or crowdsourcing – Design Monday

January 4, 2021

Imagine you are getting onto a train. Drive. Park. Traverse the crowds. Find the train. Sounds simple and, in many places, it is simple. But Millbrae Station is a difficult space to navigate. In fact, locals would tell you to find somebody to guide you. At least, for the first couple times, because it is easy to get lost. Bring a friend. Recently, San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) brought in studio1500 to design a better way.

The challenge was bigger than the space. There is an information system which guides people through the BART public transportation system. Broadly, this known as wayfinding. Specifically, in San Francisco, this was a set of design choices made by different firms at different times. BART’s internal team would be implementing the wayfinding system at Millbrae Station. The colors, typeface, paint choices, all these and more had to come together in a design that coordinated and communicated with multiple parties. One final consideration was how the design would be kept up. Public transportation departments routinely touch-up and refresh signage over the lifetime of a project. 

Wayfinding is an analogy for thinking about how people navigate the various screens, sites, security systems, prompts, and challenges. Our workforce navigates wayfinding systems done by others (say, WorkDay and SalesForce) at the same time they’re working through what we control (say, VPN and SSO). An example of a wayfinding design, across multiple environments, with strong need for maintainability, such an example is fertile ground for cyber security lessons.

Returning to Millbrae Station, you might expect the story to begin with a brainstorming session with the studio1500 partners Julio Martinez and Erik Schmitt. You’d be wrong. It’s cool. I was wrong, too. In fact, Martinez himself wrote: “I assumed life in a design team would be full of brainstorming sessions — mythical, lively, fast-paced meetings with brilliant ideas bouncing off multiple heads until they were captured in someone’s notebook as shiny kernels of greatness. There would be roars of celebration and laughter, hugs and high-fives, uproarious chants.”

Several years ago, I took an improv course. During my time spent learning how to Zip-Zap-Zop, I realized I wasn’t fast at coming up with ideas. Someone would shout a premise, I would freeze, and others would jump in. This wasn’t surprising. After all, I took the course because I felt slow. I decided to take each improv class twice. Double down. Work through it. And here is where I ran into a surprise. Across different classes, with entirely different teammates, with different composition of ages and backgrounds, the exercises were remarkably the same. I froze. Others jumped in. But no matter who it was, in both classes, people made essentially the same joke.  

Free association isn’t all that free. It’s bound by shared experiences and cultural expectations. 

David Palermo and James Jenkins studied free association with words in the 1960s. Simon De Deyne is studying this today. (Check out https://smallworldofwords.org to participate.) If you give someone a word, you can be reasonably certain what word they’ll think of next. Likewise, if you give someone a premise, you can be reasonably certain what they’ll improvise. Our first instincts feel creative but actually repeat what most anyone else would do. 

Brainstorming tries and fails to avoid the work of preparation and contemplation.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who popularized the concept of flow, once said there are five stages in the creative process. This was after interviewing a hundred designers and artists, including Don Norman, so we can assume Csikszentmihalyi was on solid ground. The five steps are: preparation, incubation, insight, evaluation, and elaboration. Incubation can take days, weeks, or months. Scheduling a brainstorming session for a Tuesday at 4 o’clock, showing up, and jumping to insights feels tantalizingly innovative. But it ignores decades of research into how creative work gets done unconsciously.

Okay, but what does improv have to do with wayfinding, you ask?

“This dance between the conscious and the unconscious is important,” Martinez explained. Instead of brainstorming, they read the brief. They walked the site. Martinez made time for his observations and intuitions to gel. When studio1500 presented to BART, they came with a number of thoughtful options for the Millbrae Station. They came with ideas to discuss and build upon.

“Our approach is antithetical to the classical Paul Rand model of design. You have one idea. You show up. It is a God-given idea and it is done. Take it or leave it.” Martinez said, contrasting studio1500‘s approach. “We like to play. We like to think as we’re designing. It’s collaboration. It’s iteration. It’s actually how you figure the ideas out.”

The Millbrae Station wayfinding would go through a few iterations. The design firms working within and without gradually got onto the same page. Martinez worked to make sure the vision was translated and executed properly. This meant simplifying the design a bit, choosing colors that were more maintainable. It also meant some rework to get the typeface correct. Each change required thought, but none required a storm of ideas and flurry of sticky notes.  

Brainstorming is theater. As security theater makes us feel secure without actually increasing security, brainstorming makes us feel insightful without producing insights. 

Don’t feel pressured  to crowdsource or brainstorm ideas. Prepare by setting a vision, thinking through how to protect the organization and define the security capability. Give it time to seep into your subconscious. You’ll be ready the day comes for creatively defining architecture and controls.

When designing cyber security capabilities, find your own way.

Afterwards

In past articles in this series, I’ve covered four of my preferred ways for exploring problems and discovering new possible solutions. These are:

Julio Martinez recommends James L. Adams’ book, Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas. The book is now on my end table.

Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Map, Courtesy Wikipedia

This article is part of a series on designing cyber security capabilities. To see other articles in the series, including a full list of design principles, click here.

Let’s not Become Password Huggers: Passwordless Guest Post on SC

Let’s not Become Password Huggers: Passwordless Guest Post on SC

December 29, 2020

SC Magazine has a guest blog from me on passwordless authentication, and the importance of addressing usability, manageability, and defensibility.

Change happens at an uneven pace. Take the latest smartphone. The camera still has a lovely shutter click, though digital cameras have long since surpassed shutter cameras. The QWERTY keyboard was designed to solve the problem of jamming in 19th century typewriters. And yes, to open apps and websites alike, we’re still using an idea conceived of 60 years ago for mainframes: the password.

We cling to the password. It’s security’s first, and sometimes disastrously, last line of defense. As surely as we know the camera doesn’t have to click, we know the password can be replaced by stronger factors. In fact, with adaptive and contextual controls, replacing the password means greater security and user experience benefits.

What’s holding us back from moving forward with passwordless?

Read the full article here: Three ways we can move the industry to passwordless authentication

Cyber Security Design Studies, Papers, Books, and Resources

Cyber Security Design Studies, Papers, Books, and Resources

December 19, 2020

The cyber security design principles emphasize psychology over technology. Here is a collection of scientific studies, research papers, design books, and related resources.

This is part of a series on designing cyber security capabilities. To see other articles in the series, including a full list of design principles, click here.

Paths They Take

Number of steps; Familiarity of each step; Friction at each step.

Introduction to Customer Journey Mapping (ebook)

Flow Design Processes – Focusing on the Users’ Needs

Scientific Articles

Shosuke Suzuki, Victoria M. Lawlor, Jessica A. Cooper, Amanda R. Arulpragasam, Michael T. Treadway. Distinct regions of the striatum underlying effort, movement initiation and effort discounting. Nature Human Behaviour, 2020; DOI: 10.1038/s41562-020-00972-y

G. Suri, G. Sheppes, C. Schwartz, J. J. Gross. Patient Inertia and the Status Quo Bias: When an Inferior Option Is Preferred. Psychological Science, 2013; DOI: 10.1177/0956797613479976

Julia Watzek, Sarah F. Brosnan. Capuchin and rhesus monkeys show sunk cost effects in a psychomotor task. Scientific Reports, 2020; 10 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-77301-wBongiorno,

Basu, R., Gebauer, R., Herfurth, T. et al. The orbitofrontal cortex maps future navigational goals. Nature, 2021 // How do goal maps guide the brain toward a destination? 

C., Zhou, Y., Kryven, M. et al. Vector-based pedestrian navigation in cities. Nat Comput Sci, 2021 DOI: 10.1038/s43588-021-00130-y. // People don’t follow the shortest path. They follow the easiest path to recall and follow. That is, the pointiest path.

Li Zheng, Zhiyao Gao, Andrew S. McAvan, Eve A. Isham, Arne D. Ekstrom. Partially overlapping spatial environments trigger reinstatement in hippocampus and schema representations in prefrontal cortex. Nature Communications, 2021 // Navigating an environment that’s sort of similar but not, is harder than navigating an entirely new environment.

 

Choices They Make

Number of choices; Predictability of the choice; Cognitive load of each choice.

Nudge to Health: Harnessing Decision Research to Promote Health Behavior

Sludge: “activities that are essentially nudging for evil”

Intentional and Unintentional Sludge

Books

Choosing Not to Choose, by Cass Sunstein

How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices, by Annie Duke

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, by Kathryn Schulz

Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, by Adam Grant

Scientific Articles

Sunstein, C. (2020). Sludge Audits. Behavioural Public Policy, 1-20. doi:10.1017/bpp.2019.32

Soman, Dilip and Cowen, Daniel and Kannan, Niketana and Feng, Bing, Seeing Sludge: Towards a Dashboard to Help Organizations Recognize Impedance to End-User Decisions and Action (September 27, 2019). Research Report Series Behaviourally Informed Organizations Partnership; Behavioural Economics in Action at Rotman, September 2019

Chadd, I., Filiz-Ozbay, E. & Ozbay, E.Y. The relevance of irrelevant information. Exp Econ (2020). // Unavailable options and irrelevant information often cause people to make bad choices. The likelihood of poor decisions is even greater when people are presented with both.

Thomas L. Saltsman, Mark D. Seery, Deborah E. Ward, Veronica M. Lamarche, Cheryl L. Kondrak. Is satisficing really satisfying? Satisficers exhibit greater threat than maximizers during choice overload. Psychophysiology (2020). // To get past frustration, satisficers make a speedy choice instead of thinking too deeply about the choices being presented.

Stuart Mills. Personalized Nudging. Cambridge University Press (2020). // Choice architects can personalize both the choices being nudged towards (choice personalization) and the method of nudging itself (delivery personalization).

Stephanie Mertens, Mario Herberz, Ulf J. J. Hahnel, Tobias Brosch. The effectiveness of nudging: A meta-analysis of choice architecture interventions across behavioral domains. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2022. // Over 450 strategies analyzed, with nudges across three groups: “information,” “structure” and “assistance.” Strong proof of nudging over mandates for leading to behavior change.

Gabrielle S. Adams, Benjamin A. Converse, Andrew H. Hales, Leidy E. Klotz. People systematically overlook subtractive changes. Nature, 2021. // People approaching a problem rarely think removing something as a solution. People almost always add something whether it helps or not.

Cary Frydman, Ian Krajbich. Using Response Times to Infer Others’ Private Information: An Application to Information Cascades. Management Science, 2021. // If people in a group pause when making a decision, other people are twice as likely to break from the group to make their own choice.

Narayan Ramasubbu and Indranil R. Bardhan. Reconfiguring for Agility: Examining the Performance Implications for Project Team Autonomy Through an Organizational Policy Experiment. MIS Quarterly, 2021. // More freedom means greater productivity and better customer satisfaction. By contrast, more top-down governance results in lower productivity and customer satisfaction.

Blair R. K. Shevlin, Stephanie M. Smith, Jan Hausfeld, Ian Krajbich. High-value decisions are fast and accurate, inconsistent with diminishing value sensitivity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2022.

Nancy Padilla-Coreano, Kanha Batra, Makenzie Patarino, Zexin Chen, et al. Cortical ensembles orchestrate social competition through hypothalamic outputs. Nature, 2022. // Study on mice to determine how the brain encodes social rank and “winning mindset”.

Behavior

The behavior we want people to perform.

Scientific Articles

Hall, Jonathan D. and Madsen, Joshua, Can Behavioral Interventions Be Too Salient? Evidence From Traffic Safety Messages (September 16, 2020).

Robison, M. K., Unsworth, N., & Brewer, G. A. Examining the effects of goal-setting, feedback, and incentives on sustained attention. (August 7, 2021). // Providing feedback on performance is a strong motivator and sustains attention over a longer-term than goal-setting alone.

Kevin P. Grubiak, Andrea Isoni, Robert Sugden, Mengjie Wang, Jiwei Zheng. Taking the New Year’s Resolution Test seriously: eliciting individuals’ judgements about self-control and spontaneity. Behavioural Public Policy, 2022. // “Individuals often make resolutions in January to maintain healthy lifestyle regimes — for example to eat better or exercise more often — then fail to keep them. Behavioural scientists frequently interpret such behaviour as evidence of a conflict between two ‘selves’ of a person — a Planner (in charge of self-control) and a Doer (who responds spontaneously to the temptations of the moment). Public policies designed to ‘nudge’ people towards healthy lifestyles are often justified on the grounds that people think of their Planners as their true selves and disown the actions of their Doers. However, the authors argue this justification overlooks the possibility that people value spontaneity as well as self-control, and approve of their own flexible attitudes to resolutions.”

Qi Su, Alex McAvoy and Joshua B. Plotkin. Evolution of cooperation with contextualized behavior. Science Advances, 2022.

Gareth J. Hollands, Juliet A. Usher-Smith, Rana Hasan, Florence Alexander, Natasha Clarke, Simon J. Griffin. Visualising health risks with medical imaging for changing recipients’ health behaviours and risk factors: Systematic review with meta-analysis. PLOS Medicine, 2022. // Improved visualization leads to risk-reducing behaviors. 

Barriers

Barriers preventing people from completing the behavior.

Scientific Articles

Helen Demetriou, Bill Nicholl. Empathy is the mother of invention: Emotion and cognition for creativity in the classroom. Improving Schools (2021).

Rachel C. Forbes and Jennifer E. Stellar. When the Ones We Love Misbehave: Exploring Moral Processes Within Intimate Bonds. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2021 // This applies to security champion and security advocate programs. Tighter relationships mean more forgiveness, which in turn provides more room for the security team to maneuver. 

Benefits

Benefits of completing the behavior.

Scientific Articles

Nicole Abi-Esber, Jennifer Abel, Francesca Gino, Juliana Schroeder. Just Letting You Know: Underestimating Others Desire for Constructive Feedback. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2022. // A series of five experiments involving 1,984 participants to measure how much people underestimate others’ desire for constructive feedback. People want feedback.

Flow (Concentration) 

Benefits of completing the behavior.

Scientific Articles

loria Mark, Mary Czerwinski, and Shamsi T. Iqbal. Effects of Individual Differences in Blocking Workplace Distractions. Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2018. // Security needs to be extremely careful not to overload people’s already overloaded attention. Check this for strategies people use to manage (ignore?) notifications. 

Richard Huskey, Justin Robert Keene, Shelby Wilcox, Xuanjun (Jason) Gong, Robyn Adams, Christina J Najera, Flexible and Modular Brain Network Dynamics Characterize Flow Experiences During Media Use: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study, Journal of Communication, 2021. // The sweet spot is when “activities are engaging enough to fully involve someone to the point of barely being distracted, but not so difficult that the activity becomes frustrating.”

Training (Ignorance)

Scientific Articles

Nesra Yannier, Scott E. Hudson, Kenneth R. Koedinger, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Yuko Munakata, Sabine Doebel, Daniel L. Schwartz, Louis Deslauriers, Logan McCarty, Kristina Callaghan, Elli J. Theobald, Scott Freeman, Katelyn M. Cooper, Sara E. Brownell. Active learning: “Hands-on” meets “minds-on”. Science, 2020 // It’s no surprise that hands-on training exceeds lecture. But who does that in security? These researchers evaluate and share ways to make learning active. 

Irrationality

40 Clever and Creative Bus Stop Advertisements

Scientific Articles

Vadiveloo, M. K., Dixon, L. B., & Elbel, B. (2011). Consumer purchasing patterns in response to calorie labeling legislation in New York City. The International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, 8(1), 51-51.

Fernandes, D., Lynch, J. G., & Netemeyer, R. G. (2014). Financial literacy, financial education, and downstream financial behaviors. Management Science, 60(8), 1861-1883.

Beisswingert, B. M., Zhang, K., Goetz, T., Fang, P., & Fischbacher, U. (2015). The effects of subjective loss of control on risk-taking behavior: the mediating role of anger. Frontiers in psychology, 6, 774.

Yana Fandakova, Elliott G Johnson, Simona Ghetti. Distinct neural mechanisms underlie subjective and objective recollection and guide memory-based decision making. eLife, 2021. // Memory involves both recall of specific details (who, where, when) and feelings of remembering and reliving past events. New research shows that these objective and subjective memories function independently, involve different parts of the brain, and that we make decisions based on subjective memory.

Elizabeth A. Minton, T. Bettina Cornwell, Hong Yuan. I know what you are thinking: How theory of mind is employed in product evaluations. Journal of Business Research, 2021

Adrian R. Walker, Danielle J. Navarro, Ben R. Newell, Tom Beesley. Protection from uncertainty in the exploration/exploitation trade-off. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2021.

Investments

More people, better technology.

Scientific Articles

Incentives

Books

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, by Daniel H. Pink

Scientific Articles

Gneezy, U., & Rustichini, A. (2000). A Fine is a Price. The Journal of Legal Studies, 29(1), 1–17. doi: 10.1086/468061

Rey-Biel, Pedro & Gneezy, Uri & Meier, Stephan. (2011). When and Why Incentives (Don’t) Work to Modify Behavior. Journal of Economic Perspectives. 25. 191-210. 10.2307/41337236.

University of Pennsylvania. (2021, January 19). Money matters to happiness–perhaps more than previously thought. 

Johnny Långstedt. How will our Values Fit Future Work? An Empirical Exploration of Basic Values and Susceptibility to Automation. Labour & Industry: a journal of the social and economic relations of work, 2021. // A look at the intrinsic value people feel from doing the work.

Georgia Clay, Christopher Mlynski, Franziska M. Korb, Thomas Goschke, and Veronika Job. Rewarding cognitive effort increases the intrinsic value of mental labor. PNAS, 2022. // If people are rewarded for their effort, it motivates them to seek further challenging tasks that are not rewarded.

Metrics

Books

How to Measure Anything in Cybersecurity Risk, by Douglas W. Hubbard, Richard Seiersen

Scientific Articles

Adam Beautement, Ingolf Becker, Simon Parkin, Kat Krol, and M. Angela Sasse. 2016. Productive security: a scalable methodology for analysing employee security behaviours. In Proceedings of the Twelfth USENIX Conference on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS ’16). USENIX Association, USA, 253–270.

Behavior Economics

From “Economic Man” to Behavioral Economics

Related Books

  • The design of everyday things, by Don Norman
  • Designing for the digital age: How to create human-centered products and services, by Kim Goodwin
  • Design research: Methods and perspectives, by Brenda Laurel
  • User experience revolution, by Paul Boag

Presentations

Does security have a design problem? Designing Security for Systems that are Bigger on the Inside.

How does design apply to securing application development and DevOps? Securing without Slowing.

How does design apply to BYOD and Cloud apps? Security Design Strategies for the Age of BYO.

How does design apply to blue teaming? Design Thinking for Blue Teams.

Design Thinking for Blue Teams at Converge Detroit

Design Thinking for Blue Teams at Converge Detroit

December 6, 2020

Usability versus security is stupid. It forces us to choose one or the other. It excuses security breaches under the guise of usability. It automatically pits us against them, builders against breakers, developers against defenders. A better approach is to view security like usability: they happen where man meets machine. At that moment of meeting, what factors in human psychology and industrial design are at play? And suppose we could pause time. Suppose we could tease out those factors. Could we design a better experience, design a better outcome, design a better path to the future?

Recorded for Converge Detroit 2020

Watch more videos on my YouTube channel.

Killing Passwords with Infosecurity Magazine

Killing Passwords with Infosecurity Magazine

December 1, 2020

Back in September, Gartner detailed its top eight security projects for the coming year. Among those was the concept of ‘passwordless’ authentication, where a second factor such as a known asset like a phone, tablet, keyfob or smart watch can be used instead of a password.

Excerpt from: Interview: J Wolfgang Goerlich, Advisory CISO, Duo Security (Cisco)

Speaking to Infosecurity, Goerlich cited a talk at the 2004 RSA Conference, where Bill Gates said that the password is dead, and Goerlich commented that “16 years later we’re still trying to kill it.” He said that to enable a passwordless strategy, you need both the equipment and technology to enable it, but mostly you need “to have momentum in the organization and a reason to do it.”

However, now that everyone carries a biometric authenticator in their pocket, has hardware in place and given the fact that security wants to enable users, why do passwords still exist? 

Read the full article: https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/interviews/interview-wolfgang-cisco-duo/

Wolf’s Additional Thoughts

What leads one innovation to succeed? What leads another innovation to stall? We need standards, infrastructure, and critical mass. But these come often out of order and require a spark to bring it all together. Sixteen years after Bill Gates declared the password dead, we’ve reached the inflection point. It’s about to get exciting.

The final thought in the article is “He concluded by saying that increasing trust in authentication is vital for passwordless to succeed, as today’s good factor is bypassed tomorrow. “

My strong recommendation is pairing passwordless with additional anti-fraud measures. Include the device identification in the authentication. Include behavior analytics (where, when, how) to further bolster trust in the authentication. We can predict criminals will work around these authentication methods, so let’s move now to put in place compensating controls to detect and prevent their next move.

This post is an excerpt from a press article. To see other media mentions and press coverage, click to view the Media page or the News category. Do you want to interview Wolf for a similar article? Contact Wolf through his media request form.

Minimum Viable Security – Design Monday

Minimum Viable Security – Design Monday

November 30, 2020

My focus on IT security began in 1997 with a malware outbreak. To get a sense of how much has changed, I checked out the (ISC)² website as it existed back then. Whoa. It’s ugly. The website and the views on cyber security have drastically improved since the nineties.

These days I regularly get asked, “where do we begin?” Privileged Access Management is supposed to look like this. Zero Trust Architecture is supposed to look like that. We only have a these two things, a paperclip, some duct tape, an overworked staff, and an intern. Where do we even start?

Borrowing from the product design world, take a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) strategy. Take a limited number of security controls. Take a limited scope of people and systems. Design a security capability, implement it, and get feedback on what works and where improvements are needed. Then, rinse and repeat with refined controls and in a new area of the organization.

A concern is that this process may lead to a patchwork of controls assembled from a tangle of point solutions. Valid concern. We’ve all seen such environments. A few of us have been lucky enough to build such mistakes, and learn from them. The way to avoid this is to use a consistent set of architecture patterns and project templates. Each sprint begins with these patterns and plans. Each one ends with updating the architecture and PMO libraries. It’ll be ugly, but with a controlled process, it’ll improve rapidly.

Criminals don’t care that we got the capability perfect. Adversaries aren’t impressed with the beauty of our control framework. So toss out the textbook.

Start where you are. Dare to be ugly. Iterate and improve.

The (ISC)² CISSP webpage from 1997, courtesy of The Internet Archive.

This article is part of a series on designing cyber security capabilities. To see other articles in the series, including a full list of design principles, click here.

Hold a value, make a decision, change a life – Design Monday

Hold a value, make a decision, change a life – Design Monday

November 23, 2020

“Develop people, develop security.” That was our tagline for the SimWitty team. The order reflected our values and simplified decisions. What to prioritize, developing a skill in a teammate or getting a release out the door? When develop people comes first, the answer is clear.

“Make a loan, change a life.” That’s Kiva’s tagline. Kiva has significantly more impact on broader social issues than SimWitty ever had, and it’s barely a comparison. There is one thing both have in common: values reflected in slogans resulting in decisions.

Kiva had a challenge. While its goal was to change lives through loans to small businesses, most businesses weren’t completing the application. The conversion rate was less than 1 in 5. Kiva looked to make design changes to simplify the application process. Many suggestions were made. One suggestion was particularly counter-intuitive to the point of being controversial: give small businesses a deadline.

“The founder was appalled. By giving customers a deadline, the company would have to deny service to people who missed that deadline. Denying service, the founder argued, was not a part of their company values,” wrote Kristen Berman, founder of Common Cents and Irrational Labs, who championed the design work for Kiva.

Security leaders must bring a degree of clarity to their team. Our values must be clear. Our criteria must be clear. And how we’ll try things and evaluate decisions must be clear. For Kiva, that meant changing lives through access to capital, with the number of people who complete loan applications as one measure. What does it mean for a security team?

Berman’s team went to work and experimented with deadlines. The number of completed applications went up. They experimented with incentives for early completion. Application rates went up further. More small businesses than ever were completing applications, resulting in changing more lives than ever. The decision to move ahead with the approach was clear.

This series has covered security programs reflecting strongly held corporate values. It’s equally important that a security leader have strong personal values, and that these values are reflected within the team. As Kiva’s example illustrates, there are times when options, on the surface, run contrary to our values. The path forward is to have a clear definition of success within those values.

Clarity enables experimentation and innovation while remaining true to what we believe in. Security leaders design capabilities and lead teams that reflect their personal values.

A case study in behavior design to reflect values. Read about the Kiva app redesign here.

This article is part of a series on designing cyber security capabilities. To see other articles in the series, including a full list of design principles, click here.

Anti-patterns and Patterns for Directing Security Projects – Design Monday

Anti-patterns and Patterns for Directing Security Projects – Design Monday

November 16, 2020

An implementation is like a movie, directed by leadership and produced by project management. Successful security implementation projects start strong, start with style, start like movies. As projects are running, what else can cinema teach us?

I began this series of cyber security design principles with an insight: to see things differently, look at different things. Spend a week with an artist, designer, or director. Find a security lesson. Share what I find. Sometimes my process is easy, sometimes difficult. Yet no one has challenged me more than Federico Fellini.

Federico Fellini. Distinctive, acclaimed, the Italian filmmaker was legendary in the twentieth century. He directed thirty-one films, “was nominated for twelve Academy Awards, and won four in the category of Best Foreign Language Film, the most for any director in the history of the Academy.” You’ve seen a movie scene inspired by (or directly copied from) a Fellini film. It’s guaranteed. Let’s take one example: Fellini’s Casanova. The film follows the titular Casanova on an adventure across Europe, while highlighting what makes Fellini a legendary director and a example for cyber security.  

Anti-patterns in project management from Fellini’s Casanova:

  • Micro-manage your people. “Puppets are happy to be puppets if the puppeteer is good,” Fellini said of his relationship with his actors. Donald Sutherland, who played Casanova, described it as being the worst experience of his filmmaking career. Every action micro-managed and scripted, until nothing of the talented actor remained.
  • Force your people to fit your stereotype of talent. Sutherland is unrecognizable as Casanova. Fellini has him wearing a false chin and nose. He raised Sutherland’s hairline, which then necessitated false eyebrows to even the look out.
  • Over-engineer details that don’t affect the final result. Fellini, unsatisfied with the color and waves from the water, had a plastic simulated lake created for Sutherland to row across. Almost a decade later, furious the color blue wasn’t the right color blue, Fellini would delay production while an entire faux ocean shore was created with plastic sheets for And the Ship Sails On.    

James P. Carse popularized the idea of finite and infinite games. Most games we are familiar with are finite: you play to win, you play to maximize your results at the expense of the other players. Infinite games ongoing: you play to continue others to play. Federico Fellini films were finite games. Sutherland never worked with Fellini again. By contrast, the Golden Age of cinema was an infinite game. (Well, infinite, until it stopped in the 1950s.) Major film studios had in-house production crews and contracted actors. While the roles varied and films came and went, the directors were incentivized to keep the best people playing with them.   

Cyber security in an organization is like the Golden Age of cinema. The leader’s role is encouraging people to want to play with us again and again, implementation after implementation.

Don’t be Fellini. Manage projects with the following patterns:

  • Set the vision and collaborate with people on execution. Listen.
  • Personalize the approach and tasks for the people on the project. Individualize.  
  • Maximize efforts where they matter by minimizing where they don’t. Simplify.

Directing implementation projects is both an art and a game. It is the art of engaging people in an infinite game. Good security projects leave people hungry to play again.

Afterwards

Security is often a story about crime, and criminals often make mistakes even while succeeding. Imagine someone stealing backup tapes to get at stored credit cards, not realizing they were also stealing people’s spreadsheets. In 1975, thieves broke into Technicolor labs and made off with film from 120 Days of Sodom. The heist also swooped up seventy reels of film from Casanova, forcing Fellini to reshoot weeks of material.

A good reminder to classify and protect data according to what criminals value … rather than what a snarky blogger might value.

This article is part of a series on designing cyber security capabilities. To see other articles in the series, including a full list of design principles, click here.