Hi, Saturday (5 February 2005)
Here's a rough draft of some WIMS security requirements, with a brief
rationale for each requirement.
In the past, we had decided that WIMS must create and maintain users,
groups, accounts, roles, etc. (at least to the extent of the End User,
Operator, Administrator roles used in IPP/1.1 security requirements).
That is clearly out-of-scope for basic WIMS v1.0.
The following minimum WIMS security requirements are in-scope:
(1) WIMS Agents and WIMS Managers MUST NOT transfer any information
extra-enterprise (e.g., across the public Internet) without strong
mutual authentication of the source and target of every WIMS message
(either by message-level security or session-level security).
(2) WIMS Agents and WIMS Managers SHOULD NOT transfer any information
extra-enterprise (e.g., across the public Internet) without strong
encryption of the entire information content of every WIMS message
(either by message-level security or session-level security).
(3) WIMS Agents and WIMS Managers MUST NOT transfer any configuration
information intra-enterprise without strong mutual authentication
of the source and target of every WIMS configuration message
(either by message-level security or session-level security).
(4) WIMS Agents and WIMS Managers SHOULD NOT transfer any monitoring
information intra-enterprise without strong mutual authentication
of the source and target of every WIMS monitoring message
(either by message-level security or session-level security).
Rationale for each requirement above:
(1) IP source address spoofing and IP target address interception and
redirection are trivially easy, with freely available hacker tools,
so HTTP without TLS or SMTP without SMIME/PGP are unacceptable for
extra-enterprise communications.
(2) WIMS monitoring information transferred in cleartext over the public
Internet exposes considerable detail about the customer's network
that is useful to attackers.
(3) SNMPv1/v2 are NOT currently used for intra-enterprise configuration
because of the significant threat of network corruption - all
responsible security professionals recommend the restriction of
intra-enterprise configuration to protocols with strong mutual
authentication.
(4) The transfer of intra-enterprise accounting information without
strong mutual authentication makes verifiable billing impossible.
Comments?
Cheers,
- Ira
Ira McDonald (Musician / Software Architect)
Blue Roof Music / High North Inc
PO Box 221 Grand Marais, MI 49839
phone: +1-906-494-2434
email: imcdonald@sharplabs.com
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