Waaaaay back in 2018 (which seems a couple of decades ago now), I wrote an article called Security patching and vaccinations: a surprising link. In those days, Spectre and Meltdown were still at the front of our minds, and the impact of something like Covid-19 was, if not unimaginable, then far from what most of us considered in our day-to-day lives. In the article, I argued that patching of software and vaccination (of humans or, I guess, animals[1]) had some interesting parallels (the clue’s in the title, if I’m honest). As we explore the impact of new variants of the Covid-19 virus, the note that “a particular patch may provide resistance to multiple types of attack of the same family, as do some vaccinations” seems particularly relevant. I also pointed out that although there are typically some individuals in a human population for whom vaccination is too risky, a broad effort to vaccinate the rest of the population has positive impact for them; in a similar way to how patching most systems in a deployment can restrict the number of “jumping off points” or attack.
I thought it might be interesting to explore other similarities between disease management in the human sphere with how we do things in cybersecurity, not because they are exact matches, but because they can be useful metaphors to explain to colleagues, family and friends what we do.
Vaccinations
We’ve looked a vaccinations a bit above: the key point here is that once a vulnerability is discovered, software vendors can release patches which, if applied correctly, protect the system from those attacks. This is not dissimilar in effect to the protection provided by vaccinations in human settings, though the mechanism is very different. Computer systems don’t really have an equivalent to anti-bodies or immune systems, but patches may – like vaccines – provide protection for more than one specific attack (think virus strain) if others exploit the same type of weakness.
Infection testing
As we have discovered since the rise of Covid-19, testing of the population is a vital measure to understand what other mechanisms need to be put in place to control infection. The same goes for cybersecurity. Testing the “health” of a set of systems, monitoring their behaviour and understanding which may be compromised, by which attacks, leveraging which vulnerabilities, is a key part of any cybersecurity strategy, and easily overlooked when everything seems to be OK.
Masks
I think of masks as acting a little like firewalls, or mechanisms like SELinux which act to prevent malicious programs from accessing parts of the system which you want to protect. Like masks, these mechanisms reduce the attack surface available to bad actors by stopping up certain “holes” in the system, making it more difficult to get in. In the case of firewalls, it’s network ports, and in the case of SELinux, it’s activities like preventing unauthorised system calls (syscalls). We know that masks are not wholly effective in preventing transmission of Covid-19 – they don’t give 100% protection from oral transmission, and if someone sneezes into your eye, for instance, that could lead to infection – but we also know that if two people are meeting, and they both wear masks, the chance of transmission from an infected to an uninfected person is reduced. Most cybersecurity controls aim mainly to protect the systems on which they reside, but a well thought-out deployment may also aim to put in controls to prevent attackers from jumping from one system to another.
Social distancing
This last point leads us to our final metaphor: social distancing. Here, we put in place controls to try to make it difficult for an attacker (or virus) to jump from one system to another (or human to another). While the rise of zero trust architectures has led to something of a down-playing of some of these techniques within cybersecurity, mechanisms such as DMZs, policies such as no USB drives and, at the extreme end, air-gapping of systems (where there is no direct network connection between them) all aim to create physical or logical barriers to attacks or transmission.
Conclusion
The mapping between controls in the realms of cybersecurity and epidemiology is not perfect, but metaphors can be useful in explaining the mechanisms we use and also in considering differences (is there an equivalent of “virus load” in computer systems, for instance?). If there are lessons we can learn from the world of disease managemet, then we should be keen to do so.
1 – it turns out that you can actually vaccinate plants, too: neat.
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