Technical Debt and Security Debt

Technical debt (also known as tech debt or code debt) describes what results when development teams take actions to expedite the delivery of a piece of functionality or a project which later needs to be refactored. In other words, it’s the result of prioritizing speedy delivery over perfect code.

It is like borrowing money to get something done faster than one typically can. Of course that comes at an interest, which in case of technical debt would be difficulty of managing code, "good" end user experience rather than a "great" experience.

Technical debt is not a mess! A mess is a mess.. Technical debt is simply a choice taken to expedite development in response to real project constraints.

By extension Security debt is simply an accumulation of security vulnerabilities that have not been addressed time to time. Security debit is a more serious problem as compared to the generic technical debt as it makes the infrastructure susceptible to the attackers. The older the vulnerabilities, larger the number of known exploits and easier for the attackers to exploit the vulnerabilities.

DevSecOps, if deployed well, should provide better opportunities to fix the vulnerabilities regularly and thereby bring down the security debt of the system.

Comments

MITRE ATT&CK - Kerberos Vulnerabilities and Security

From the previous post, the summary of Kerberos authentication process is as below: For the initial authentication, the user’s client machine sends a request to the KDC Authentication Service (AS) . The request includes details like the user’s username, and the date and time. All information except the username is encrypted using the hash of the user’s password. The KDC AS uses the username to look up its copy of the user’s password hash and uses it to decrypt the rest of the request. If the decryption is successful, that means the client used the correct password hash and the user has successfully authenticated. Once the user is authenticated, the KDC AS sends the user’s client a ticket granting ticket (TGT) . The TGT includes a unique session key and a timestamp that specifies how long that session is valid (normally 8 or 10 hours). Importantly, before sending the TGT, the KDC encrypts it using the password hash for a special account, the KRBTGT account. ...

Checkpoint - Exporting Objects in CSV format

Be it a Network Operations Manager, Security Architect or a Security Auditor, the people up the hierarchy always harangue the Security Engineers to compile the list of firewall objects or rules or policies or the traffic statistics and so on.. This can turn out to be quite hectic especially if there are no built in features to systematically provide the output in a "layman-readable" format. Come, Checkpoint's "Object Explorer..." which not only provides the output in the "layman-readable" format, but also provides in-built filtering mechanisms, thereby ensuring that the Security Engineer doesn't have to rely on Google for building his scarce Microsoft Excel data filtering skills. The following screenshots will show how easy it is, with Checkpoint R80.10 to generate the firewall configuration inventory. On the SmartConsole Unified Portal, navigate to Menu >> Open Object Explorer... Select the Categories you wish to see in your output: Click o...

MITRE ATT&CK - Understanding Kerberos (for Golden Ticket Attack)

Kerberos = Network Authentication Protocol used by AD environments Provides authentication by issuing tickets to authenticate users and allow them access to the services Tickets are distibuted by KDC (Key Distribution Center), which is typically a Domain Controller (DC) During initial authentication, a TGT (Ticket Granting Ticket) is a ticket asigned to a user by KDC. TGT is later used to authenticate the user to the KDC in order to request a service ticket from TGS (Ticket Granting Service). Service tickets are granted for authentication against services. List of steps / negotiations for Kerberos authentication (of the user with the service): The user requests (AS-REQ) a TGT from the KDC and the KDC verifies and validates the credentials and user information. This request if often done automatically at login. After authenticating the user, the KDC sends an encrypted TGT back to the requester (AS-REP) . The user presents the TGT to the DC and requests a TGS (TGS-...

Tejas Jain

Search This Blog