Tag: users

A User Advisory Council for the CCC

The CCC is currently working to create a User Advisory Council (UAC)

Disclaimer: the views expressed in this article (and this blog) do not necessarily reflect those of any of the organisations or companies mentioned, including my employer (Red Hat) or the Confidential Computing Consortium.

The Confidential Computing Consortium was officially formed in October 2019, nearly a year and a half ago now. Despite not setting out to be a high membership organisation, nor going out of its way to recruit members, there are, at time of writing, 9 Premier members (of which Red Hat, my employer, is one), 22 General members, and 3 Associate members. You can find a list of each here, and a brief analysis I did of their business interests a few weeks ago in this article: Review of CCC members by business interests.

The CCC has two major committees (beyond the Governing Board):

  • Technical Advisory Board (TAC) – this coordinates all technical areas in which the CCC is involved. It recommends whether software projects should be accepted into the CCC (no hardware projects have been introduced so far, thought it’s possible they might be), coordinates activities like special interest groups (we expect one on Attestation to start very soon), encourages work across projects, manages conversations with other technical bodies, and produces material such as the technical white paper listed here.
  • Outreach Committee – when we started the CCC, we decided against going with the title “Marketing Committee”, as we didn’t think it represented the work we hoped this committee would be doing, and this was a good decision. Though there are activities which might fall under this heading, the work of the Outreach Committee is much wider, including analyst and press relations, creation of other materials, community outreach, cross-project discussions, encouraging community discussions, event planning, webinar series and beyond.

These two committees have served the CCC well, but now that it’s fairly well established, and has a fairly broad industry membership of hardware manufacturers, CSPs, service providers and ISVs (see my other article), we decided that there was one set of interested parties who were not well-represented, and which the current organisational structure did not do a sufficient job of encouraging to get involved: end-users.

It’s all very well the industry doing amazing innovation, coming up with astonishingly well-designed, easy to integrate, security-optimised hardware-software systems for confidential computing if nobody wants to use them. Don’t get me wrong: we know from many conversations with organisations across multiple sectors that users absolutely want to be able to make use of TEEs and confidential computing. That is not that same, however, as understanding their use cases in detail and ensuring that what we – the members of the CCC, who are focussed mainly on creating services and software – actually provide what users need. These users are across many sectors – finance, government, healthcare, pharmaceutical, Edge, to name but a few – and their use cases and requirements are going to be different.

This is why the CCC is currently working to create a User Advisory Council (UAC). The details are being worked out at the moment, but the idea is that potential and existing users of confidential computing technologies should have a forum in which they can connect with the leaders in the space (which hopefully describes the CCC members), share their use cases, find out more about the projects which are part of the CCC, and even take a close look at those projects most relevant to them and their needs. This sort of engagement isn’t likely, on the whole, to require attendance at lots of meetings, or to have frequent input into the sorts of discussions which the TAC and the Outreach Committee typically consider, and the general feeling is that as we (the CCC) are aiming to service these users, we shouldn’t be asking them to pay for the privilege (!) of talking to us. The intention, then, is to allow a low bar for involvement in the UAC, and for there to be no membership fee required. That’s not to stop UAC members from joining the CCC as members if they wish – it would be a great outcome if some felt that they were so keen to become more involved that membership was appropriate – but there should be no expectation of that level of commitment.

I should be clear that the plans for the UAC are not complete yet, and some of the above may change. Nor should you consider this a formal announcement – I’m writing this article because I think it’s interesting, and because I believe that this is a vital next step in how those involved with confidential computing engages with the broader world, not because I represent the CCC in this context. But there’s always a danger that “cool” new technologies develop into something which fits only the fundamentally imaginary needs of technologists (and I’ll put my hand up and say that I’m one of those), rather than the actual needs of businesses and organisations which are struggling to operate around difficult issues in the real world. The User Advisory Council, if it works as we hope, should allow the techies (me, again) to hear from people and organisations about what they want our technologies to do, and to allow the CCC to steer its efforts in these directions.

They won’t get security right

Save users from themselves: make it difficult to do the wrong thing.

I’m currently writing a book at Trust in computing and the cloud – I’ve mentioned it before – and I confidently expect to reach 50% of my projected word count today, as I’m on holiday, have more time to write it, and got within about 850 words of the goal yesterday. Little boast aside, one of the topics that I’ve been writing about is the need to consider the contexts in which the systems you design and implement will be used.

When we design systems, there’s a temptation – a laudable one, in many cases – to provide all of the features and functionality that anyone could want, to implement all of the requests from customers, to accept every enhancement request that comes in from the community. Why is this? Well, for a variety of reasons, including:

  • we want our project or product to be useful to as many people as possible;
  • we want our project or product to match the capabilities of another competing one;
  • we want to help other people and be seen as responsive;
  • it’s more interesting implementing new features than marking an existing set complete, and settling down to bug fixing and technical debt management.

These are all good – or at least understandable – reasons, but I want to argue that there are times that you absolutely should not give in to this temptation: that, in fact, on every occasion that you consider adding a new feature or functionality, you should step back and think very hard whether your product would be better if you rejected it.

Don’t improve your product

This seems, on the face of it, to be insane advice, but bear with me. One of the reasons is that many techies (myself included) are more interested getting code out of the door than weighing up alternative implementation options. Another reason is that every opportunity to add a new feature is also an opportunity to deal with technical debt or improve the documentation and architectural information about your project. But the other reasons are to do with security.

Reason 1 – attack surface

Every time that you add a feature, a new function, a parameter on an interface or an option on the command line, you increase the attack surface of your code. Whether by fuzzing, targeted probing or careful analysis of your design, the larger the attack surface of your code, the more opportunities there are for attackers to find vulnerabilities, create exploits and mount attacks on instances of your code. Strange as it may seem, adding options and features for your customers and users can often be doing them a disservice: making them more vulnerable to attacks than they would have been if you had left well enough alone.

If we do not need an all-powerful administrator account after initial installation, then it makes sense to delete it after it has done its job. If logging of all transactions might yield information of use to an attacker, then it should be disabled in production. If older versions of cryptographic functions might lead to protocol attacks, then it is better to compile them out than just to turn them off in a configuration file. All of these lead to reductions in attack surface which ultimately help safeguard users and customers.

Reason 2 – saving users from themselves

The other reason is also about helping your users and customers: saving them from themselves. There is a dictum – somewhat unfair – within computing that “users are stupid”. While this is overstating the case somewhat, it is fairer to note that Murphy’s Law holds in computing as it does everywhere else: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”. Specific to our point, some user somewhere can be counted upon to use the system that you are designing, implementing or operating in ways which are at odds with your intentions. IT security experts, in particular, know that we cannot stop people doing the wrong thing, but where there are opportunities to make it difficult to do the wrong thing, then we should embrace them.

Not adding features, disabling capabilities and restricting how your product is used might seem counter-intuitive, but if it leads to a safer user experience and fewer vulnerabilities associated with your product or project, then in the end, everyone benefits. And you can use the time to go and write some documentation. Or go to the beach. Enjoy!

16 ways in which security folks are(n’t) like puppies

Following the phenomenal[1] success of my ground-breaking[2] article 16 ways in which users are(n’t) like kittens, I’ve decided to follow up with a yet more inciteful[3] article on security folks. I’m using the word “folks” to encompass all of the different types of security people who “normal”[4] people think of “those annoying people who are always going on about that security stuff, and always say ‘no’ when we want to do anything interesting, important, urgent or business-critical”. I think you’ll agree that “folks” is a more accessible shorthand term, and now that I’ve made it clear who we’re talking about, we can move away from that awkwardness to the important[5] issue at hand.

As with my previous article on cats, I’d like my readers to pretend that this is a carefully researched article, and not one that I hastily threw together at short notice because I got up a bit late today.

Note 1: in an attempt to make security folks seem a little bit useful and positive, I’ve sorted the answers so that the ones where security folks turn out actually to share some properties with puppies appear at the end. But I know that I’m not really fooling anyone.

Note 2: the picture (credit: Miriam Bursell) at the top of this article is of my lovely basset hound Sherlock, who’s well past being a puppy. But any excuse to post a picture of him is fair game in my book. Or on my blog.

Research findings

Hastily compiled table

Property Security folks Puppies
Completely understand and share your priorities
 No No
Everybody likes them
 No Yes
Generally fun to be around No Yes
Generally lovable No Yes
Feel just like a member of the family No Yes
Always seem very happy to see you No Yes
Are exactly who you want to see at the end of a long day No Yes
Get in the way a lot when you’re in a hurry
 Yes Yes
Make a lot of noise about things you don’t care about Yes Yes
Don’t seem to do much most of the time
 Yes Yes
Constantly need cleaning up after
 Yes Yes
Forget what you told them just 10 minutes ago Yes Yes
Seem to spend much of their waking hours eating or drinking Yes Yes
Wake you up at night to deal with imaginary attackers Yes Yes
Can turn bitey and aggressive for no obvious reason
 Yes Yes
Have tickly tummies Yes[6] Yes

1 – relatively.

2 – no, you’re right: this is just hype.

3 – this is almost impossible to prove, given quite how uninciteful the previous one was.

4 – i.e., non-security.

5 – well, let’s pretend.

6 – well, I know I do.

Merry “sorting out relatives’ IT problems” Day

Today’s the day – or the season – when your mother-in-law asks you to fix her five year old laptop, unclog the wifi (it’s usually her husband, “stealing it all”) or explain why her mouse mat is actually easily large enough – she just needs to lift the mouse up and place it back in the middle if she can’t get the cursor to go any further right.

Lucky me: I didn’t even have to wait till Christmas Day this year: my m-in-law called us at home a couple of days ago to complain that “the email thingy isn’t working on my tablet and the Chrome has gone”. After establishing that her Chrome Book (upstairs) was fine, and she just couldn’t be bothered to ascend the stairs to use it for the two days before we came to visit and I could debug her tablet problem in person, I proceeded to debug the problem over the crackly wireless DECT phone they keep attached to their land line, instead[1].

Despite the difficulty in making out approximately 25% of the words down the line, I became more and more convinced that even if her tablet was having problems, then a reboot of her router was probably due.

Me: so you know which one the router is?

Her: umm…

Me: it’s the little box where the Internet comes in.

Her: is it in the hall?

Me, to the wife, who’s smirking, since she managed to offload this call to me: could it be in the hall?

Wife: yes, it’s in the hall.

Me: yes, it’s in the hall.

Mother-in-law: OK.

Me: there should be a power button on the front or the back, or you can just pull the power lead out if that’s easiest.

Her, clearly bending over to look at it: shall I just turn it off at the wall? That might be simplest?

Me: well, OK.

Her: Right, I’m doing that n… BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP.

It turns out that her DECT phone hub is plugged into the same socket. Of course. This is my life. This is OUR life.

Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year to you all.

1 – this, folks, is how to stay married for 23 and a half years[2].

2 – and counting.

16 ways in which users are(n’t) like kittens

I’m going to exploit you all with an article about kittens and security.

It’s summer[1], it’s hot[2], nobody wants to work[3].  What we all want to do is look at pictures of cute kittens[5] and go “ahhh”.  So I’m going to exploit you all with an article about kittens and (vaguely about) security.  It’s light-hearted, it’s fluffy[6], and it has a picture of two of our cats at the top of it.  What’s not to like?

Warning: this article includes extreme footnoting, and may not be suitable for all readers[7].

Now, don’t get me wrong: I like users. realise the importance of users, really I do.  They are the reason we have jobs.  Unluckily, they’re often the reason we wish we didn’t have the jobs we do.  I’m surprised that nobody has previously bothered to compile a list comparing them with kittens[7.5], so I’ve done it for you.   For ease of reading, I’ve grouped ways in which users are like kittens towards the top of the table, and ways in which they’re unlike kittens towards the bottom[7.8].

Please enjoy this post, share it inappropriately on social media and feel free to suggest other ways in which kittens and users are similar or dissimilar.

Research findings

Hastily compiled table

Property Users Kittens
Capable of circumventing elaborate security measures
 Yes Yes
Take up all of your time Yes Yes
Do things they’re not supposed to
 Yes Yes
Forget all training instantly
 Yes Yes
Damage sensitive equipment Yes Yes
Can often be found on Facebook
 Yes Yes
Constantly need cleaning up after
 Yes Yes
Often seem quite stupid, but are capable of extreme cunning at inopportune moments Yes Yes
Can turn savage for no obvious reason Yes Yes
Can be difficult to tell apart[10] Yes Yes
Fluffy No[8] Yes
Fall asleep a lot No[8] Yes
Wake you up at night No[9] Yes
Like to have their tummy tickled
 No[8] Yes
Generally fun to be around No[8] Yes
Generally lovable No[8] Yes

1 – at time of writing, in the Northern Hemisphere, where I’m currently located.  Apologies to all those readers for whom it is not summer.

2 – see 1.

3 – actually, I don’t think this needs a disclaimer[4].

4 – sorry for wasting your time[4].

5 – for younger readers, “kittehs”.

6 – like the kittens.

7 – particularly those who object to footnotes.  You know who you are.

7.5 – actually, they may well have done, but I couldn’t be bothered to look[7.7]

7.7 – yes, I wrote the rest of the article first and then realised that I needed another footnote (now two), but couldn’t be bothered to renumber them all.  I’m lazy.

7.8 – you’re welcome[7.9].

7.9 – you know, this reminds me of programming BASIC in the old days, when it wasn’t easy to renumber your program, and you’d start out numbering in 10s, and then fill in the blanks and hope you didn’t need too many extra lines[7.95].

7.95 – b*gger.

8 – with some exceptions.

9 – unless you’re on support duty.  Then you can be pretty sure that they will.

10 – see picture.

11 – unused.

12 – intentionally left blank.

13 – unintentionally left blank.