Contrast the status quo with the new vision – Design Monday

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Contrast the status quo with the new vision – Design Monday

Posted by Wolf Goerlich

“I want to be Batman.” This is the greatest answer I’ve received to the interview question, “where do you see yourself in five years?” 

I hired him. Of course.

If only stopping criminals and villains was as simple as hiring superheroes. But we need equipment. We need partners and support. And before we get our batcave and police commissioner Gordon, we first need to reach people. 

Leaders excite and engage people to get things done. We use strong clear communication that cuts through debate and doubt, and provides a solution we can agree upon. It takes strong visual and verbal communication.

Superheroes

One more thing about superheroes, what happened to them visually? The Golden Age and Silver Age comic books were full of bright bursts of primary colors. These days, superheroes have been drained of color. DC’s Superman’s original bright blue and bright red are so muted, they look nearly black-and-grey. Marvel has taken a similar approach. Looking at you, WandaVision. The Scarlet Witch isn’t scarlet but a dark burgundy. Modern heroes are a study in dark contrast. 

Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy takes the blame. The films defined the noir look which has played out across all recent comic book movies. But who inspired Nolan?

Visual Contrast

The answer is Johannes Itten from the Bauhaus. That’s Bauhaus the design school, not Bauhaus the band. t’s final form was in Berlin, where Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was the director. Before that, the Bauhaus was in Dessau, getting its start in Weimar in 1919. Many great names, and many great designs, trace back to this time. But in Weimar? In the start? There was Johannes Itten. 

Johannes Itten taught art and color at the Bauhaus. Had a blast doing so, from what we can tell. “Play becomes joy, joy becomes work, work becomes play.”

While with the Bauhaus, Itten studied colors, establishing the fundamental categories for contrast: hue, light-dark, cold-warm, complementary, analogous, saturation, and extension. This work, specifically with contrasting seasonal color palettes, inspires painters and artists to this day. And nearly a century later, Christopher Nolan would turn to Itten’s desaturated and muted color palettes when establishing the mood of The Dark Knight Rises.

Contrast is what makes the visual beautiful.

Verbal Contrast

The communications expert Nancy Duarte studied storytelling and presentations. She looked at superhero movies, she looked at boardroom talks. “After all this study, it was a couple of years of study, I drew a shape,” Duarte recounted on the TED stage. “There is this commonplace of the status quo, and you need to contrast that with the loftiness of your idea.” 

Duarte details her contrast model and shape in her presentation, The secret structure of great talks, and in her Resonate book.

It was a pattern I followed when establishing the vision for my monitoring program. I explained the status quo of audits and manual efforts. I painted the picture of automation and visibility. I showed where we were weak, and pitched how my team could be stronger. I leaned into the contrast. In the end? I obtained the funding for the SIEM and equipped my team’s Batman.

Contrast is what makes the verbal actionable.

Sell the Vision

“The objective laws of form and color help strengthen a person’s powers and to expand his creative gifts,” Johannes Itten once said. Duarte’s research shows similar laws of form and content strengthen a person’s persuasive powers. 

Explain your vision by contrasting what is and what will be. Use this approach to gain buy-in, support, and budget. That’s how hire the Batman, and that’s how we get those wonderful toys.

A noir color study in contrast.

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.

Lateral thinking inspired by the Nintendo Game & Watch – Design Monday

Posted by Wolf Goerlich

Lack of sufficient budget and inadequate staffing, those are among the top challenges CISOs report when surveyed.

Oddly enough? No one ever asks CISOs what they have too much of.

With that one question, Gunpei Yokoi created the handheld video game console market. The Nintendo game designer was behind the Game & Watch and Game Boy. He called his combination of disciplined focus on play and radical use of legacy components “lateral thinking with withered technology.”

It’s a philosophy with repercussions for security leaders.

Withered Technology

When Yokoi spoke of withered technology, he meant technology which had matured to the point where it was plentiful, affordable, and well-understood.

The Nintendo Game & Watch series was built on an advantage in the market which Sharp and Casio’s competition created. These two companies emphasized leading edge technology. The result was older black-and-white LCD calculator screens where readily available at a very low cost. Yokoi embossed the screen to compensate for manufacturing imperfections. To get color? Yokoi had colored lines printed on the embossed screen. This also reduced the need for lighting up the entire display, saving battery and extending game play.

The first way to apply Game & Watch thinking is finding similarly seasoned technology in our security stack. We might not have budget for an advanced user behavior analytics platform with machine learning. But we do have a logging platform. How far can we take what we have? Find the correlation-and-alerting equivalent of embossed-and-painted calculator screens.

A deeper way to apply Yokoi’s philosophy returns to the question: what do we have in abundance? I once collaborated with an organization that had built out an access review and certification process in IT service management. Why? Well, they had extra ServiceNow licenses. Abundance isn’t only technology, however, it can also relationships. I know another organization with strong relationships with marketing and corporate communications, who used this to great effect, producing a slick internal campaign which drove adoption of password vaulting.

In one context, it is withered. In another context, it is ripe. The trick is to see a new context.

Lateral Thinking

As a discipline, lateral thinking offers several methods for seeing things differently. One that comes to mind when studying Yokoi is the provocation and movement technique.

The first step is stating a provocation. This statement can negate the status quo, change the logical order of things, or exaggerate an aspect of the strategy. If our current security model depends upon network visibility, for example, one provocation would be “our defense doesn’t require anything from the network.”

The second step is determining how we move from our current thinking towards a context which satisfies the provocation. The general path is to extract a principle, focus on the difference between the contexts, imagine a movement to close the gap. Using the above example, that may be “we shift monitoring from the network to the endpoint.”

The Game & Watch version of Donkey Kong offers a perfect example of provocation and movement. The arcade version of Donkey Kong required a joystick. The variable resistance joysticks used in arcades required bulky potentiometers. The provocation is an exaggerated arcade joystick taped onto a Game & Watch. The underlying principle is up/down and left/right movement.

The resulting move was to create the plus-shaped cross control pad. These controls require only four buttons, fit the Game & Watch, cost a thousandth of an arcade joystick, and became Yokoi’s most widely copied innovation.

Ripening on the Vine

Yokoi’s “lateral thinking with withered technology” principle culminated in the Nintendo Game Boy. Released in 1989, it had a cross control pad and a black-and-white LCD. The processor was from the 1970s. Specifically, Sharp’s response to the Intel 8080 and Zilog Z80. In every way, the Game Boy was under-powered compared to the competition.

The Game Boy went on take the market, and to sell 119 million units. It remained Nintendo’s highest selling game system for nearly two decades. Nintendo DS finally overtook the Game Boy in 2016. And withered technology? Withered won.

Gunpei Yokoi began at Nintendo as a maintenance man working the assembly line. He once said, “I don’t have any particular specialist skills. I have a sort of vague knowledge of everything.” His strength was finding strengths in areas others overlooked, then strategically applying them to great advantage.

When determining how best to protect the organization, think like Yokoi, and look for areas of abundance ripening on the vine. Calculator screens, surplus processors, existing technology, working processes, strong relationships. Identify strengths. Be provocative.

Nintendo Game & Watch: Donkey Kong. Photo courtesy WikimediaImages from 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.

Cybersecurity Predictions for 2021 (Johnny Mnemonic)

Posted by Wolf Goerlich

It’s 2021. Where is my encryption-breaking dolphin?

I admit it. I watched Johnny Mnemonic. Set in 2021, I wagered, there was no better way to prepare for my predictions blog. There will be spoilers ahead, both for the year to come and for the cyberpunk cult classic.

Any Device, Any Location, Any Service

From Beijing to Newark, Johnny never accesses the Internet from an office or a work computer.

Personal devices have long outnumbered corporate devices. In fact, it’s very common to deploy Duo and find people are using many more personal devices than expected. For example, take the case of the enterprise healthcare system discovering 30,000 unknown devices last year.

Personal workspaces outnumbered corporate offices in 2020. People working from home accounted for accounts for more than 66% of economic activity, and 42 percent of the labor force, in the U.S. in 2020 according to Stanford. Work isn’t done on-premises.

In 2021, the use of Cloud apps will overtake on-premises apps. For a while, Cloud services have outnumbered on-premises services. But in terms of strong authentication, as identified in the 2020 Duo Trusted Access Report, there’s a clear trend line which will result in Cloud apps as the primary way people are working.

Security teams continue to grapple with how to secure this any device, any location, any service way of working. Expect more work to be done on securing the endpoint devices themselves. Zero Trust initiatives, already underway in many organizations, will mature and provide assurances over context and conditions of authentication. With traffic not coming corporate offices and not going to corporate data centers, organizations will also look to move visibility and detection to the edge, perhaps with Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) initiatives.

Dropping Passwords

Johnny protects his data with three random images captured from a television screen. Much of the action centers around trying to gain access to these three images, including using the aforementioned cyber dolphin.

In the actual year 2021, we do have some recognition-based authentication. Select the images, and you’re in. Of course, some people also authenticate with QR codes, and smart links, PINs, smart cards, and certificates, biometrics, along with a multitude of other factors. If you want options, we have options.

Before we declare 2021 the year of passwordless, however, let’s acknowledge some of the concerns. The pandemic response pushed many IT initiatives off into 2021 and 2022. Organizations are cautiously evaluating passwordless to ensure improves usability, manageability, and defensibility. Given the factors and the impact on change, the emphasis is on increasing trust in authentication first, and changing the primary factor second.

Passwordless will be on the roadmap for 2021 in many organizations. Expect to see security teams running proof-of-concept projects and evaluating direction. To have the full confidence that changing the primary factor won’t adversely change the security posture, work will need to be done ahead of time on authentication trust.

Data Protection

Johnny stores 320 GB of medical data, the cure for the fictional nerve attenuation syndrome, in his head. This sets the clock because Johnny’s capacity is only 80 GB, 160 GB when compressed. If he doesn’t remove the extra data within a few days, Johnny will die.

Let’s address the one unrealistic detail in Johnny Mnemonic. No, not the dolphin. Not the cybernetically enhanced people. And I don’t mean the 3D Internet, either. I’m speaking, of course, about the storage capacity. First, anyone today can pick-up a 512 GB USB flash drive. No short-term human memory required. Second, no storage technology today, no RAID, no compression, would allow 320 GB to fit onto 160 GB and set a death clock. Finally, if the vaccine science is a baseline, that’s not nearly enough space for healthcare data.

Last year, it was reported that adversaries were attempting to steal COVID-19 vaccine data. Hundreds of terabytes of data.

We can expect the trends on data theft and ransom to continue. Ransomware will continue to hit organizations. Criminals will continue to steal and resell data. Security teams must continue to find better ways to provide data protection. Too often, the app is used as a placeholder for the data. For example, we say we are protecting healthcare data because we are protecting the Epic application. Standards and requirements will shift closer to requirements on data, leading security teams to reconsider their data governance.

Final Future Thoughts

The opening scenes have Johnny navigating protesters wearing masks. Throughout the movie, Johnny coordinates his next steps over video conferencing calls. These ring painfully accurate as we witness the unrest, discuss it over web meetings, and wear masks out in public. We will be many months into 2021 before it begins to feel normal again. I view this with hope. Some things have changed. Other things will return. Along the way, we have demonstrated the combined ingenuity of IT and security.

We have much to build, to clean-up, to correct. As they say in Johnny Mnemonic: Get your VCR’s ready! It’s go time.

Cross posted at Duo Security. For more science fiction inspired predictions, click to view the Predictions category.

Cyber Security Design Studies, Papers, Books, and Resources

Posted by Wolf Goerlich

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.

Killing Passwords with Infosecurity Magazine

Posted by Wolf Goerlich

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.

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

Posted by Wolf Goerlich

“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

Posted by Wolf Goerlich

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.

Verizon Taps Cisco, BlackBerry for Internet Security

Posted by Wolf Goerlich

Verizon’s new Business Internet Secure bundle for small businesses taps Cisco and BlackBerry security services to help protect customers’ routers and connected devices. A recent Verizon Business survey found 38% of small businesses moved to remote work because of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Excerpt from: Verizon Taps Cisco, BlackBerry for Internet Security

To support this transition, Verizon Business Internet Secure protects against threats at two points where attacks typically occur: employee devices with BlackBerry and the internet with Cisco Umbrella.

Even pre-pandemic, small businesses faced the same threats and potential damages from an attack, according to a Cisco security report based on a survey of almost 500 SMBs. The report also found that these companies take security preparedness every bit as seriously as their larger counterparts. And this matters because the security industry has traditionally been biased against SMBs, perpetuating the myth that they don’t prioritize cybersecurity, the report says.

“SMB executives, IT executives, security executives in these businesses have done their best to address the problem,” said Wolfgang Goerlich, advisory CISO at Cisco Duo in an earlier interview. What this means is that SMB IT and security leaders now have to ask themselves what’s next, he added. “Where do I go from here?”

Read the full article: https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/verizon-taps-cisco-blackberry-for-internet-security/2020/11/

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.

Security Culture needs Security Advocates – Design Monday

Posted by Wolf Goerlich

“Everything is design. Everything.” — Paul Rand (1914–1996)

Paul Rand is behind so many stories this series has covered. The Olivetti Valentine typewriter designed by Ettore Sottsass and used by Dieter Rams in his documentary? Paul Rand did Olivetti’s US advertising. Speaking of Deiter Rams, the Braun shavers that made Rams famous? Paul Rand bought every model. (Though Rand once said he would “buy just for their beauty and then put them in a drawer.”) IDEO, the birthplace of design thinking? Paul Rand did IDEO’s logo. He collaborated on a team with Charles Eames on IBM’s Design Program. I like to think some of that work was in the IBM plaza building that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed. The building, by the way, sported the iconic IBM logo which was, you guessed it, designed by Paul Rand.

Paul Rand was instrumental in creating the culture and discipline of graphic design. He taught the next generation at Yale from 1956 to 1985, with a break in the 1970s. Rand was visiting professor and critic at a number of other institutions. Check out the book Paul Rand: Conversations with Students for a view into that work. “What is design?” Paul would often ask. When he wasn’t creating, Rand was instructing, and through instruction, he was creating culture.

Like Paul Rand fostered designers who brought ideas to wider audiences, security leaders need to foster advocates who will bring security ideas to the wider workforce.

We don’t talk much about advocates. A security advocate is a member of the security team who focuses on getting practices into the hands of the workforce. It’s more common for us to talk about security champions. A security champion is a member of the business itself, who collaborates with the security team on best practices. A fully fleshed out security capability has advocates working with champions to interpret and implement security controls. In a well-run security capability, those controls will be usable and widely adopted, because of the partnership of advocates and champions.

To learn more about cyber security advocates and what they need to succeed, check out the “It’s Scary…It’s Confusing…It’s Dull” research paper. These professionals “advocate for systems and policies that are usable, minimize requisite knowledge, and compensate for the inevitability of user error.”

Here are four practices from Paul Rand that we can apply to designing a security advocacy program:

(1) Coach on tangible work, not abstract principles. Rand’s courses were practical not theoretical, with advice given based on the student’s work. He focused stories, literature, examples, and more through the lens of the work at hand.

(2) Coach one-on-one, avoid one size fits all. Paul Rand worked individually with students, and a session on their work “went on as long as was necessary to set the student on the right track and was laced with stories from Paul’s vast career as they were appropriate to the issue at hand. When he worked with students, he poured his heart and soul into it.”

(3) Use short cycle times. Typically, the criticism on individual work in Rand’s courses came weekly. Feedback was quick, specific, and direct. Compare this to many security programs where manager feedback comes at annual reviews.

(4) Encourage personalization. Rand taught designers to build their own set of techniques, their own visual vocabulary, to solve problems. That’s not for the sake of originality. “Don’t try to be original,” Rand often said, “just try to be good.” It’s to develop a sense of the designer’s personal needs and strengths and how to mesh those with the audience’s instincts and intuitions.

When designing a cyber security program, give thought into how leadership will coach advocates. Give thought to how advocates will cultivate security champions. With a nod to Paul Rand, prompt both with a deceptively simple question. “What is security?”

Abacus Photogram, Photography by Paul Rand

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.

A Pilot is Purposeful Play – Design Monday

Posted by Wolf Goerlich

A new technology is a new toy. “Toys are not really as innocent as they look. Toys and games are the prelude to serious ideas.”

So said Charles and Ray Eames. The Eames ran a design studio in California (1943–1988) producing architecture, films, furniture. Arguably their most well-known piece was the Eames Lounge Chair. The chair, produced by Herman Miller, ushered in a new era of materials and is a valuable collector’s item today. It’s impossible to overstate this. It was impossible to make furniture that way before Eames. But this story isn’t about a chair.

This story is about a toy elephant.

A decade before the Eames molded wood for a Herman Miller chair, they were playing with molding processes in toys. The result? The Eames Elephant, a toy intricately crafted from molded plywood. The complexity of the elephant was foretold by dozens of unnamed playful experiments. The elephant itself foreshadowed the lounge chair. Without play, without toys, the Eames would never have mastered the underlying skills that produced the later masterpiece.

Playtime is fertile ground for innovation.

The power and necessity of play is a cross-discipline truth. In music, Miles Davis once said “I’ll play it first and tell you what it is later.” In biology, Alexander Fleming often said “I like to play with microbes.” Physics? Andre Geim stated the “playful attitude has always been the hallmark of my research.” The final word on this human condition goes, appropriately enough, to the psychologist Carl Jung. “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect, but by the play instinct arising from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the object it loves.”

A pilot is purposeful play. We need to pilot ideas and technologies as we frame up the security capability. To get the best work, people doing the pilot must be dedicated, be engaged, and enjoying themselves. As leaders, we clear calendars and make space. We also need to clear bureaucracy and other hinderance to fun. As implementers, we need to clear our heads and reach a state of flow. The purpose of a pilot is to improve our understanding of how things work, and to build underlying skills for what we’ll build next.

See Scale with Philosophy and Methodology for insights on managing the chaos. In the article, I compared Charles and Ray Eames to hackers. I easily imagine them at home in hackerspaces or hacker cons. The Eames embodied the hacker ethic years before “hacker” was even a term. Hands-on. Learning by doing. A strong sense that work, be it design or be it computing, changes the world when we love what we are doing.

The elephant in the room is the best pilot projects won’t look anything like work.

Eames Elephant, Charles and Ray Eames, 1945

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.