ICIW2008: Opening Keynote

Persistence, Ambiance, and New Maps
Brian Lopez, Lawrence Livermore Laboratories
(Led security for Utah winter Olympics)

  • 1200 comp sci folks @ LLL
  • LLL has world’s largest laser & world’s fastest supercomputer
  • Vulnerability and Risk Assessment Program founder
  • field assessment
    • threat
    • vulnerability
    • consequences
  • actionable findings
  • 1996 Presidents Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection (PCCIP)
  • 1998 Presidential Decision Directive 63: Policy on Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP)
  • Moved to DHS in 2003
  • DHS seeme to be “perpetually reorganized” (audience snickers)
  • Energy infrastructures
    • electric power
    • oil
    • natural gass
    • Most owned by private corporations
  • Assessment activities completed in 30 states
  • Look for isomorphisms
  • Red Hat, Black Ice exercises
  • US Computer Emergency Readiness Team
    • training annalists on protocols & systems
  • Classified work
    • Intel, VAs/Red Teaming, SNM,DBT
  • Methodology Development
  • Emerging vulnerabliities
    • 802.11i & Zigbee
  • Smart border initiative
    • attacks in canada & mexico can affect CI here in the US
  • “Critical Infrastructure is the one place where the computers touch the physical world”
  • Terrorist simulations folks use OpenSource tools
    • dumpster diving too
  • Philosophy
    • combine strong security and domain expertise
    • field experience and capabiities
    • multi-diciplnaty teams
    • work at three levels
      • strategic
      • tatical
      • technical
    • approach – listen, learn, teach, collaborate
    • actionable findings
    • customers make all decisions
    • continuous support
  • Broke into state power grid in 20 minutes. Board’s response was “great, who do we fire”
  • “Information” warfare, not computer science warfare
  • Three themes
    • Ambiance – what’s ambient that we can leverage
    • New Maps – seeing though new lenses
    • Persistence – tools to make those maps
  • Beware of photocopiers, especially those with network connections and hard drives
  • Has the mic on the videoconferencing system on even when they’re not using the room for a video conference?
  • “OpenSource reconnaissance” / Social Engineering
  • “How to initiate a fire drill other than the obvious starting a fire?” (laughs) “Hey, the terrorists aren’t beyond starting fires.”
  • “The electric power grid runs on water.” so blow up the water main two blocks away from. (Second order effect)
  • The Problem with Persistence
    • photo of a theatre
    • single exposure of a whole film
    • Too much information creates no information
    • “The sum of everything is nothing”
  • “Honey Nets”
    • Replicate a system to attract the bad guys
    • “instrument the heck out of it” / “instrumented to beat the band”
    • learn from what they try to do to it
    • Now they’re building the map for you
  • Research ideas for the attendees
    • Ambiance
      • expand field of vision of the target
      • expand the avenues of attack
      • cascading failure – infrastructure interdependence
      • cascading support – leverage the dark fiber when other standard connections fail
      • auto-characterizing environments tools
      • ex-filtration
      • what can you inject to induce signatures?
    • New Maps
      • “Good maps help win the war”
      • map of the air – value cocaine from measuring the air
      • maps of sound – IEDs & “what the locals know” – when the marketplace goes more quiet than normal
      • biometrics – gait analysis, veins in the face, “we need BIG biometrics map”
      • “maps used to represent the data, everything you know. now a map is a viewpoint, not everythng you know”
      • establish new baselines & establish tools to organize that data
      • mapping the physical to the cyber – where are the people in the virtual world located in the real world?
    • Persistence
      • More complex sensors
      • More signal sensors
      • We need tools to peer into all that data & pull out actionable items
    • bioengineer plants to react to certain elements
    • All this is dual-use i.e. commercial and governmental
  • CS graduates are down 50%
    • this is a crisis for the country
    • There are tons of CS jobs available right now
    • encourage Americans to go into science, esp CS
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