Industry Moves to Fill Gap for Building Trusted Supply Chain Technology Accreditation

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from The Open Group Conference on The Open Group Trusted Technology Forum and setting standards for security and reliability.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion in conjunction with The Open Group Conference in Austin, Texas, the week of July 18, 2011.

We've assembled a distinguished panel to update us on The Open Group Trusted Technology Forum, also known as the OTTF, and an accreditation process to help technology acquirers and buyers safely conduct global procurement and supply chain commerce. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a Sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

We'll examine how the security risk for many companies and organizations has only grown, even as these companies form essential partnerships and integral supplier relationships. So, how can all the players in a technology ecosystem gain assurances that the other participants are adhering to best practices and taking the proper precautions?

Here to help us better understand how established standard best practices and an associated accreditation approach can help make supply chains stronger and safer is our panel.

We're here with Dave Lounsbury, the Chief Technical Officer at The Open Group. Welcome back, Dave.

Dave Lounsbury: Hello Dana. How are you?

Gardner: Great. We are also here with Steve Lipner, Senior Director of Security Engineering Strategy in the Trustworthy Computing Security at Microsoft. Welcome back, Steve.

Steve Lipner: Hi, Dana. Glad to be here.

Gardner: We're here also with Joshua Brickman, Director of the Federal Certification Program Office at CA Technologies. Welcome, Joshua.

Joshua Brickman: Thanks for having me.

Gardner: And, we're here too with Andras Szakal. He's the Vice President and CTO of IBM’s Federal Software Group. Welcome back, Andras.

Andras Szakal: Thank you very much, Dana. I appreciate it.

Gardner: Dave, let's start with you. We've heard so much lately about "hacktivism," break-ins, and people being compromised. These are some very prominent big companies, both public and private. How important is it that we start to engage more with things like the OTTF?

No backup plan

Lounsbury: Dana, a great quote coming out of this week’s conference was that we have moved the entire world’s economy to being dependent on the Internet, without a backup plan. Anyone who looks at the world economy will see, not only are we dependent on it for exchange of value in many cases, but even information about how our daily lives are run, traffic, health information, and things like that.

It's becoming increasingly vitally important that we understand all the aspects of what it means to have trust in the chain of components that deliver that connectivity to us, not just as technologists, but as people who live in the world.

Gardner: Steve Lipner, your thoughts on how this problem seems to be only getting worse?

Lipner: Well, the attackers are becoming more determined and more visible across the Internet ecosystem. Vendors have stepped up to improve the security of their product offerings, but customers are concerned. A lot of what we're doing in The Open Group and in the OTTF is about trying to give them additional confidence of what vendors are doing, as well as inform vendors what they should be doing.

Gardner: Joshua Brickman, this is obviously a big topic and a very large and complex area. From your perspective, what is it that the OTTF is good at? What is it focused on? What should we be looking to it for in terms of benefit in this overall security issue?

Brickman: One of the things that I really like about this group is that you have all of the leaders, everybody who is important in this space, working together with one common goal.

Today, we had a discussion where one of the things we were thinking about is, whether there's a 100 percent fail-safe solution to cyber? And there really isn't. There is just a bar that you can set, and the question is how much do you want to make the attackers spend, before they can get over that bar? What we're going to try to do is establish that level, and working together, I feel very encouraged that we are getting there, so far.

Gardner: Andras, we are not just trying to set the bar, but we're also trying to enforce, or at least have clarity into, what other players in an ecosystem are doing. So that accreditation process seems to be essential.

Szakal: We're going to develop a standard, or are in the process of developing a specification and ultimately an accreditation program, that will validate suppliers and providers against that standard.

It's focused on building trust into a technology provider organization through this accreditation program, facilitated through either one of several different delivery mechanisms that we are working on. We're looking for this to become a global program, with global partners, as we move forward.

Gardner: It seems as if almost anyone is a potential target, and when someone decides to target you, you do seem to suffer. We've seen things with Booz Allen, RSA, and consumer organizations like Sony. Is this something that almost everyone needs to be more focused on? Are we at the point now where there is no such thing as turning back, Dave Lounsbury?

Global effort

Lounsbury: I think there is, and we have talked about this before. Any electronic or information system now is really built on components and software that are delivered from all around the globe. We have software that’s developed in one continent, hardware that’s developed in another, integrated in a third, and used globally.

So, we really do need to have the kinds of global standards and engagement that Andras has referred to, so that there is that one bar for all to clear in order to be considered as a provider of trusted components.

Gardner: As we've seen, there is a weak link in any chain, and the hackers or the cyber criminals or the state sponsored organizations will look for those weak links. That’s really where we need to focus.

Lounsbury: I would agree with that. In fact, some of the other outcomes of this week’s conference have been the change in these attacks, from just nuisance attacks, to ones that are focused on monetization of cyber crimes and exfiltration of data. So the spectrum of threats is increasing a lot. More sophisticated attackers are looking for narrower and narrower attack vectors each time. So we really do need to look across the spectrum of how this IT technology gets produced in order to address it.

Gardner: Steve Lipner, it certainly seems that the technology supply chain is essential. If there is weakness there, then it's difficult for the people who deploy those technologies to cover their bases. It seems that focusing on the technology providers, the ecosystems that support them, is a really necessary first step to taking this to a larger, either public or private, buyer side value.

Lipner: The tagline we have used for The Open Group TTF is "Build with Integrity, Buy with Confidence." We certainly understand that customers want to have confidence in the hardware and software of the IT products that they buy. We believe that it’s up to the suppliers, working together with other members of the IT community, to identify best practices and then articulate them, so that organizations up and down the supply chain will know what they ought to be doing to ensure that customer confidence.

Gardner: Let's take a step back and get a little bit of a sense of where this process that you are all involved with is. I know you're all on working groups and in other ways involved in moving this forward, but it's been about six months now since The OTTF was developed initially, and there was a white paper to explain that.

Perhaps, one of you will volunteer to give us sort of a state of affairs where things are,. Then, we'd also like to hear an update about what's been going on here in Austin. Anyone?

Szakal: Well, as the chair, I have the responsibility of keeping track of our milestones, so I'll take that one.

A, we completed the white paper earlier this year, in the first quarter. The white paper was visionary in nature, and it was obviously designed to help our constituents understand the goals of the OTTF.

However, in order to actually make this a normative specification and design a program, around which you would have conformance and be able to measure suppliers’ conformity to that specification, we have to develop a specification with normative language.

First draft

We're finishing that up as we speak and we are going to have a first draft here within the next month. We're looking to have that entire specification go through company review in the fourth quarter of this year.

Simultaneously, we'll be working on the accreditation policy and conformance criteria and evidence requirements necessary to actually have an accreditation program, while continuing to liaise with other evaluation schemes that are interested in partnering with us. In a global international environment, that’s very important, because there exist more than one of these regimes that we will have to exist, coexist, and partner with.

Over the next year, we'll have completed the accreditation program and have begun testing of the process, probably having to make some adjustments along the way. We're looking at sometime within the first half of 2012 for having a completed program to begin ramping up.

Gardner: Is there an update on the public sector's, or in the U.S., the federal government’s, role in this? Are they active? Are they leading? How would you characterize the public role or where you would like to see that go?

Szakal: The forum itself continues to liaise with the government and all of our constituents. As you know, we have several government members that are part of the TTF and they are just as important as any of the other members. We continue to provide update to many of the governments that we are working with globally to ensure they understand the goals of the TTF and how they can provide value synergistically with what we are doing, as we would to them.

PWe continue to provide update to many of the governments that we are working with globally to ensure they understand the goals of the TTF.

Gardner: I'll throw this back out to the panel? How about the activities this week at the conference? What have been the progress or insights that you can point to from that?

Brickman: We've been meeting for the first couple of days and we have made tremendous progress on wrapping up our framework and getting it ready for the first review.

We've also been meeting with several government officials. I can’t say who they are, but what’s been good about it is that they're very positive on the work that we're doing, they support what we are doing and want to continue this discussion.

It’s very much a partnership, and we do feel like it’s not just an industry-led project, where we have participation from folks who could very much be the consumers of this initiative.

Gardner: Clearly, there are a lot of stakeholders around the world, across both the public and private domains.

Dave Lounsbury, what’s possible? What would we gain if this is done correctly? How would we tangibly look to improvements? I know that’s hard with security. It’s hard to point out what doesn’t happen, which is usually the result of proper planning, but how would you characterize the value of doing this all correctly say a year or two from now?

Awareness of security

Lounsbury: One of the trends we'll see is that people are increasingly going to be making decisions about what technology to produce and who to partner with, based on more awareness of security.

A very clear possible outcome is that there will be a set of simple guidelines and ones that can be implemented by a broad spectrum of vendors, where a consumer can look and say, "These folks have followed good practices. They have baked secure engineering, secure design, and secure supply chain processes into their thing, and therefore I am more comfortable in dealing with them as a partner."

Of course, what the means is that, not only do you end up with more confidence in your supply chain and the components for getting to that supply chain, but also it takes a little bit of work off your plate. You don’t have to invest as much in evaluating your vendors, because you can use commonly available and widely understood sort of best practices.

From the vendor perspective, it’s helpful because we're already seeing places where a company, like a financial services company, will go to a vendor and say, "We need to evaluate you. Here’s our checklist." Of course, the vendor would have to deal with many different checklists in order to close the business, and this will give them some common starting point.

Of course, everybody is going to customize and build on top of what that minimum bar is, depending on what kind of business they're in. But at least it gives everybody a common starting point, a common reference point, some common vocabulary for how they are going to talk about how they do those assessments and make those purchasing decisions.

This is a living type of an activity that you never really finish. There’s always something new to be done.

Gardner: Steve Lipner, do you think that this is going to find its way into a lot of RFPs, beginning a sales process, looking to have a major checkbox around these issues? Is that sort of how you see this unfolding?

Lipner: If we achieve the sort of success that we are aiming for and anticipating, you'll see requirements for the TTF, not only in RFPs, but also potentially in government policy documents around the world, basically aiming to increase the trust of broad collections of products that countries and companies use.

Gardner: Joshua Brickman, I have to imagine that this is a living type of an activity that you never really finish. There’s always something new to be done, a type of threat that’s evolving that needs to be reacted to. Would the TTF over time take on a larger role? Do you see it expanding into larger set of requirements, even as it adjusts to the contemporary landscape?

Brickman: That’s possible. I think that we are going to try to get something achievable out there in a timeframe that’s useful and see what sticks.

One of the things that will happen is that as companies start to go out and test this, as with any other standard, the 1.0 standard will evolve to something that will become more germane, and as Steve said, will hopefully be adopted worldwide.

Agile and useful

It’s absolutely possible. It could grow. I don’t think anybody wants it to become a behemoth. We want it to be agile, useful, and certainly something readable and achievable for companies that are not multinational billion dollar companies, but also companies that are just out there trying to sell their piece of the pie into the space. That’s ultimately the goal of all of us, to make sure that this is a reasonable achievement.

Lounsbury: Dana, I'd like to expand on what Joshua just said. This is another thing that has come out of our meetings this week. We've heard a number of times that governments, of course, feel the need to protect their infrastructure and their economies, but also have a realization that because of the rapid evolution of technology and the rapid evolution of security threats that it’s hard for them to keep up. It’s not really the right vehicle.

There really is a strong preference. The U.S. strategy on this is to let industry take the lead. One of the reasons for that is the fact that industry can evolve, in fact must evolve, at the pace of the commercial marketplace. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be in business.

So, we really do want to get that first stake in the ground and get this working, as Joshua said. But there is some expectation that, over time, the industry will drive the evolution of security practices and security policies, like the ones OTTF is developing at the pace of commercial market, so that governments won’t have to do that kind of regulation which may not keep up.

Gardner: Andras, any thoughts from your perspective on this ability to keep up in terms of market forces? How do you see the dynamic nature of this being able to be proactive instead of reactive?

One of our goals is to ensure that the viability of the specification itself, the best practices, are updated periodically.

Szakal: One of our goals is to ensure that the viability of the specification itself, the best practices, are updated periodically. We're talking about potentially yearly. And to include new techniques and the application of potentially new technologies to ensure that providers are implementing the best practices for development engineering, secure engineering, and supply chain integrity.

It's going to be very important for us to continue to evolve these best practices over a period of time and not allow them to fall into a state of static disrepair.

I'm very enthusiastic, because many of the members are very much in agreement that this is something that needs to be happening in order to actually raise the bar on the industry, as we move forward, and help the entire industry adopt the practices and then move forward in our journey to secure our critical infrastructure.

Gardner: Given that this has the potential of being a fairly rapidly evolving standard that may start really appearing in RFPs and be impactful for real world business success, how should enterprises get involved from the buy side? How should suppliers get involved from the sell side, given that this is seemingly a market driven, private enterprise driven activity?

I'll throw this out to the crowd. What's the responsibility from the buyers and the sellers to keep this active and to keep themselves up-to-date?

Lounsbury: Let me take the first stab at this. The reason we've been able to make the progress we have is that we've got the expertise in security from all of these major corporations and government agencies participating in the TTF. The best way to maintain that currency and maintain that drive is for people who have a problem, if you're on the buy side or expertise from either side, to come in and participate.

Hands-on awareness

You have got the hands-on awareness of the market, and bringing that in and adding that knowledge of what is needed to the specification and helping move its evolution along is absolutely the best thing to do.

That’s our steady state, and of course the way to get started on that is to go and look at the materials. The white paper is out there. I expect we will be doing snapshots of early versions of this that would be available, so people can take a look at those. Or, come to an Open Group Conference and learn about what we are doing.

Gardner: Anyone else have a reaction to that? I'm curious. Given that we are looking to the private sector and market forces to be the drivers of this, will they also be the drivers in terms of enforcement? Is this voluntary? One would hope that market forces reward those who seek accreditation and demonstrate adhesion to the standard, and that those who don't would suffer. Or is there a potential for more teeth and more enforcement? Again, I'll throw this out to the panel at large.

Szakal: As vendors, we'd would like to see minimal regulation and that's simply the nature of the beast. In order for us to conduct our business and lower the cost of market entry, I think that's important.

I think it's important that we provide leadership within the industry to ensure that we're following the best practices to ensure the integrity of the products that we provide. It's through that industry leadership that we will avoid potential damaging regulations across different regional environments.

It's important that we provide leadership within the industry to ensure that we're following the best practices to ensure the integrity of the products that we provide.

We certainly wouldn't want to see different regulations pop-up in different places globally. It makes for very messy technology insertion opportunity for us. We're hoping that by actually getting engaged and providing some self-regulation, we won't see additional government or international regulation.

Lipner: One of the things that my experience has taught me is that customers are very aware these days of security, product integrity, and the importance of suppliers paying attention to those issues. Having a robust program like the TTF and the certifications that it envisions will give customers confidence, and they will pay attention to that. That will change their behavior in the market even without formal regulations.

Gardner: Joshua Brickman, any thoughts on the self-regulation benefits? If that doesn’t work, is it self-correcting? Is there a natural approach that if this doesn’t work at first, that a couple of highly publicized incidents and corporations that suffer for not regulating themselves properly, would ride that ship, so to speak?

Brickman: First of all, industry setting the standard is an idea that has been thrown around a while, and I think that it's great to see us finally doing it in this area, because we know our stuff the best.

But as far as an incident indicating that it's not working, I don’t think so. We're going to try to set up a standard, whereby we're providing public information about what our products do and what we do as far as best practices. At the end of the day the acquiring agency, or whatever, is going to have to make decisions, and they're going to make intelligent decisions, based upon looking at folks that choose to go through this and folks that choose not to go through it.
It will continue

The bad news that continues to come out is going to continue to happen. The only thing that they'll be able to do is to look to the companies that are the experts in this to try to help them with that, and they are going to get some of that with the companies that go through these evaluations. There's no question about it.

At the end of the day, this accreditation program is going to shake out the products and companies that really do follow best practices for secure engineering and supply chain best practices.

Gardner: What should we expect next? As we heard, there has been a lot of activity here in Austin at the conference. We've got that white paper. We're working towards more mature definitions and approaching certification and accreditation types of activities. What's next? What milestone should we look to? Andras, this is for you.

Szakal: Around November, we're going to be going through company review of the specification and we'll be publishing that in the fourth quarter.

We'll also be liaising with our government and international partners during that time and we'll also be looking forward to several upcoming conferences within The Open Group where we conduct those activities. We're going to solicit some of our partners to be speaking during those events on our behalf.

The only thing that they'll be able to do is to look to the companies that are the experts in this to try to help them.

As we move into 2012, we'll be working on the accreditation program, specifically the conformance criteria and the accreditation policy, and liaising again with some of our international partners on this particular issue. Hopefully we will, if all things go well and according to plan, come out of 2012 with a viable program.

Gardner: Dave Lounsbury, any further thoughts about next steps, what people should be looking for, or even where they should go for more information?

Lounsbury: Andras has covered it well. Of course, you can always learn more by going to www.opengroup.org and looking on our website for information about the OTTF. You can find drafts of all the documents that have been made public so far, and there will be our white paper and, of course, more information about how to become involved.

Gardner: Very good. We've been getting an update about The Open Group Trusted Technology Forum, OTTF, and seeing how this can have a major impact from a private sector perspective and perhaps head off issues about lack of trust and lack of clarity in a complex evolving technology ecosystem environment.

I'd like to thank our guests. We've been joined by Dave Lounsbury, Chief Technical Officer at The Open Group. Thank you, sir.

Lounsbury: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: Steve Lipner, the Senior Director of Security Engineering Strategy in the Trustworthy Computing Security Group at Microsoft. Thank you, Steve.

Lipner: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: Joshua Brickman, who is the Director of the Federal Certification Program Office in CA Technologies, has also joined us. Thank you.

Brickman: I enjoyed it very much.

Gardner: And Andras Szakal, Vice President and CTO of IBM’s Federal Software Group. Thank you, sir.

Szakal: It's my pleasure. Thank you very much, Dana.

Gardner: This discussion has come to you as a sponsored podcast in conjunction with The Open Group Conference in Austin, Texas. We are here the week of July 18, 2011. I want to thank our listeners as well.

This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Don’t forget to come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from The Open Group Conference on The Open Group Trusted Technology Forum and setting standards for security and reliability. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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• Exploring the Role and Impact of the Open Trusted Technology Forum to Ensure Secure IT Products in Global Supply Chains

Exploring the Role and Impact of the Open Trusted Technology Forum to Ensure Secure IT Products in Global Supply Chains

Transcript of a sponsored podcast panel discussion from The Open Group 2011 U.S. Conference on the new Open Trusted Technology Forum and its impact on business and government.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Get the free white paper. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion in conjunction with The Open Group Conference held in San Diego, the week of February 7, 2011. We've assembled a panel to examine The Open Group’s new Open Trusted Technology Forum (OTTF), which was established in December.

The forum is tasked with finding ways to better conduct global procurement and supply-chain commerce among and between technology acquirers and buyers, across the ecosystem of technology providers. By providing transparency, collaboration, innovation, and more trust on the partners and market participants in the IT supplier environment, the OTTF will lead to improved business risk for global supply activities in the IT field. [Get the new free OTTF white paper.]

We'll examine how the OTTF will function, what its new framework will be charged with providing, and we will examine ways that participants in the global IT commerce ecosystem can become involved with and perhaps use the OTTF’s work to its advantage.

Here with us to delve into the mandate and impact of the Open Trusted Technology Forum, we're here with Dave Lounsbury, Chief Technology Officer for The Open Group. Welcome, Dave.

Dave Lounsbury: Hi, Dana. How are you?

Gardner: I'm great. We're also here with Steve Lipner, Senior Director of Security Engineering Strategy in Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group. Welcome, Steve.

Steve Lipner: Hi, Dana. Glad to be here.

Gardner: And, we're also here with Andras Szakal, Chief Architect in IBM’s Federal Software Group and an IBM distinguished engineer. Welcome.

Andras Szakal: Welcome. Thanks for having me.

Gardner: We're also here with Carrie Gates, Vice President and Research Staff Member at CA Labs. Welcome.

Carrie Gates: Thank you.

Gardner: Let’s start with you, Dave. Tell us in a nutshell what the OTTF is and why it came about?

Lounsbury: The OTTF is a group that came together under the umbrella of The Open Group to identify and develop standards and best practices for trusting supply chain. It's about how one consumer in a supply chain could trust their partners and how they will be able to indicate their use of best practices in the market, so that people who are buying from the supply chain or buying from a specific vendor will be able to know that they can procure this with a high level of confidence.

Gardner: Clearly, people have been buying these sorts of products for some time. What’s new? What’s changed that makes this necessary?

Concerns by DoD

Lounsbury: There are a couple of dimensions on it, and I will start this off because the other folks in the room are far more expert in this than I am.

This actually started a while ago at The Open Group by a question from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), which faced the challenge of buying commercial off-the-shelf product. Obviously, they wanted to take advantage of the economies of scale and the pace of technology in the commercial supply chain, but realized that means they're not going to get purpose-built equipment, that they are going to buy things from a global supply chain.

They asked, "What would we look for in these things that we are buying to know that people have used good engineering practices and good supply chain management practices? Do they have a good software development methodology? What would be those indicators?"

Now, that was a question from the DoD, but everybody is on somebody’s supply chain. People buy components. The big vendors buy components from smaller vendors. Integrators bring multiple systems together.

So, this is a really broad question in the industry. Because of that, we felt the best way to address this was bring together a broad spectrum of industry to come in, identify the practices that they have been using -- your real, practical experience -- and bring that together within a framework to create a standard for how we would do that.

Gardner: And this is designed with that word "open" being important to being inclusive. This is about a level playing field, but not necessarily any sort of exclusionary affair.

Lounsbury: Absolutely. Not only is the objective of all The Open Group activities to produce open standards and conformance programs that are available to everyone, but in this case, because we are dealing with a global supply chain, we know that we are going to have not only vendors at all scales, but also vendors from all around the world.

If you pick up any piece of technology, it will be designed in the US, assembled in Mexico, and built in China. So we need that international and global dimension in production of this set of standards as well.

Gardner: Andras, you've been involved with this quite a bit. For the edification of our listeners, is this mostly software we're talking about? Is it certain components? Can we really put a bead on what will be the majority of technologies that would probably be affected?

Szakal: That’s a great question, Dana. I'd like to provide a little background. In today’s environment, we're seeing a bit of a paradigm shift. We're seeing technology move out of the traditional enterprise infrastructure. We're seeing these very complex value chains be created. We're seeing cloud computing.

Smarter infrastructures

We're actually working to create smarter infrastructures that are becoming more intelligent, automated, and instrumented, and they are very much becoming open-loop systems. Traditionally, they were closed loop systems, in other words, closed environments, for example, the energy and utility (E&U) industry, the transportation industry, and the health-care industry.

As technology becomes more pervasive and gets integrated into these environments, into the critical infrastructure, we have to consider whether they are vulnerable and how the components that have gone into these solutions are trustworthy.

Governments worldwide are asking that question. They're worried about critical infrastructure and the risk of using commercial, off-the-shelf technology -- software and hardware -- in a myriad of ways, as it gets integrated into these more complex solutions.

That’s part of the worry internationally from a government and policy perspective, and part of our focus here is to help our constituents, government customers and critical infrastructure customers, understand how the commercial technology manufacturers, the software development manufactures, go about engineering and managing their supply chain integrity.

Gardner: I got the impression somehow, listening to some of the presentations here at the Conference, that this was mostly about software. Maybe at the start, would that be the case?

Szakal: No, it’s about all types of technology. Software obviously is a particularly important focus, because it’s at the center of most technology anyway. Even if you're developing a chip, a chip has some sort of firmware, which is ultimately software. So that perception is valid to a certain extent, but no, not just software, hardware as well.

Gardner: Steve, I heard also the concept of "build with integrity," as applied to the OTTF. What does that mean, build with integrity?

Lipner: Build with integrity really means that the developer who is building a technology product, whether it be hardware or software, applies best practices and understood techniques to prevent the inclusion of security problems, holes, bugs, in the product -- whether those problems arise from some malicious act in the supply chain or whether they arise from inadvertent errors. With the complexity of modern software, it’s likely that security vulnerabilities can creep in.

So, what build with integrity really means is that the developer applies best practices to reduce the likelihood of security problems arising, as much as commercially feasible.

And not only that, but any given supplier has processes for convincing himself that upstream suppliers, component suppliers, and people or organizations that he relies on, do the same, so that ultimately he delivers as secure a product as possible.

Gardner: Carrie, one of the precepts of good commerce is a lack of friction between borders, where more markets can become involved, where the highest quality at the lowest cost types of effects can take place. This notion of trust, when applied to IT resources and assets, seems to be important to try to keep this a global market and to allow for the efficiencies that are inherent in an open market to take place. How do you see this as a borderless technology ecosystem? How does this help?

International trust

Gates: This helps tremendously in improving trust internationally. We're looking at developing a framework that can be applied regardless of which country you're coming from. So, it is not a US-centric framework that we'll be using and adhering to.

We're looking for a framework so that each country, regardless of its government, regardless of the consumers within that country, all of them have confidence in what it is that we're building, that we're building with integrity, that we are concerned about both, as Steve mentioned, malicious acts or inadvertent errors.

And each country has its own bad guy, and so by adhering to international standard we can say we're looking for bad guys for every country and ensuring that what we provide is the best possible software.

Gardner: Let's look a little bit at how this is going to shape up as a process. Dave, let's explain the idea of The Open Group being involved as a steward. What is The Open Group's role in this?

Lounsbury: The Open Group provides the framework under which both buyers and suppliers at any scale could come together to solve a common problem -- in this case, the question of providing trusted technology best practices and standards. We operate a set of proven processes that ensure that everyone has a voice and that all these standards go forward in an orderly manner.

The white paper actually lays out the framework. The work of forum is to turn that framework into an Open Group standard and populate it.

We provide infrastructure for doing that in the meetings and things like that. The third leg is that The Open Group operates industry-based conformance programs, the certification programs, that allow someone who is not a member to come in and indicate their conformance standard and give evidence that they're using the best practices there.

Gardner: That's important. I think there is a milestone set that you were involved with. You've created the forum. You've done some gathering of information. Now, you've come out right here at this conference with the framework, with the first step toward a framework, that could be accepted across the community.

There is also a white paper that explains how that's all going to work. But, eventually, you're going to get to an accreditation capability. What does that mean? Is that a stamp of approval?

Lounsbury: Let me back up just a little bit. The white paper actually lays out the framework. The work of forum is to turn that framework into an Open Group standard and populate it. That will provide the standards and best practice foundation for this conformance program. [Get the new free OTTF white paper.]

We're just getting started on the vision for a conformance program. One of the challenges here is that first, not only do we have to come up with the standard and then come up with the criteria by which people would submit evidence, but you also have to deal with the problem of scale.

If we really want to address this problem of global supply chains, we're talking about a very large number of companies around the world. It’s a part of the challenge that the forum faces.

Accrediting vendors

Part of the work that they’ve embarked on is, in fact, to figure out how we wouldn't necessarily do that kind of conformance one on one, but how we would accredit either vendors themselves who have their own duty of quality processes as a big vendor would or third parties who can do assessments and then help provide the evidence for that conformance.

We're getting ahead of ourselves here, but there would be a certification authority that would verify that all the evidence is correct and grant some certificate that says that they have met some or all of the standards.

Szakal: Our vision is that we want to leverage some of the capability that's already out there. Most of us go through common criteria evaluations and that is actually listed as a best practice for a validating security function and products.

Where we are focused, from an accreditation point of view, affects more than just security products. That's important to know. However, we definitely believe that the community of assessment labs that exists out there that already conducts security evaluations, whether they be country-specific or that they be common criteria, needs to be leveraged. We'll endeavor to do that and integrate them into both the membership and the thinking of the accreditation process.

Gardner: Thank you, Andras. Now, for a company that is facing some hurdles -- and we heard some questions in our sessions earlier about: "What do I have to do? Is this going to be hard for an SMB? -- the upside could be pretty significant. If you're a company and you do get that accreditation, you're going to have some business value.

Steve Lipner, what from your perspective is the business rationale for these players to go about this accreditation to get this sort of certification?

Obviously, there will be effort involved in achieving the certification, but that will be related to real value, more trust, more security, and the ability of customers to buy with confidence.

Lipner: To the extent that the process is successful, why then customers will really value the certification? And will that open markets or create preferences in markets for organizations that have sought and achieved the certification?

Obviously, there will be effort involved in achieving the certification, but that will be related to real value, more trust, more security, and the ability of customers to buy with confidence.

The challenge that we'll face as a forum going forward is to make the processes deterministic and cost-effective. I can understand what I have to do. I can understand what it will cost me. I won't get surprised in the certification process and I can understand that value equation. Here's what I'm going to have to do and then here are the markets and the customer sets, and the supply chains it's going to open up to me.

Gardner: So, we understand that there is this effort afoot that the idea is to create more trust and a set of practices in place, so that everyone understands that certain criteria have been met and vulnerabilities have been reduced. And, we understand that this is going to be community effort and you're going to try to be inclusive.

What I'm now curious about is what is it this actually consists of -- a list of best practices, technology suggestions? Are there certain tests and requirements that are already in place that one would have to tick off? Let me take that to you, Carrie, and we'll go around the panel. How do you actually assure that this is safe stuff?

Different metrics

Gates: If you refer to our white paper, we start to address that there. We were looking at a number of different metrics across the board. For example, what do you have for documentation practices? Do you do code reviews? There are a number of different best practices that are already in the field that people are using. Anyone who wants to be a certified, can go and look at this document and say, "Yes, we are following these best practices" or "No, we are missing this. Is it something that we really need to add? What kind of benefit it will provide to us beyond the certification?"

Gardner: Dave, anything to add as to how a company would go about this? What are some of the main building blocks to a low-vulnerability technology creation and distribution process?

Lounsbury: Again, I refer everybody to the white paper, which is available on The Open Group website. You'll see there in the categories that we've divided these kinds of best practice into four broad categories: product engineering and development methods, secure engineering development methods, supply chain integrity methods and the product evaluation methods.

Under there those are the categories, we'll be looking at the attributes that are necessary to each of those categories and then identifying the underlying standards or bits of evidence, so people can submit to indicate their conformance.

I want to underscore this point about the question of the cost to a vendor. Steve said it very well. The objective here is to raise best practices across the industry and make the best practice commonplace. One of the great things about an industry-based conformance program is that it gives you the opportunity to take the standards and those categories that we've talked about as they are developed by OTTF and incorporate those in your engineering and development processes.

Within secure engineering, for example, one of the attributes is threat assessment and threat modeling.

So you're baking in the quality as you go along, and not trying to have an expensive thing going on at the end.

Gardner: Andras, IBM is perhaps one of the largest providers to governments and defense agencies when it comes to IT and certainly, at the center of a large ecosystem around the world, you probably have some insights into best practices that satisfy governments and military and defense organizations.

Can you offer a few major building blocks that perhaps folks that have been in a completely commercial environment would need to start thinking more about as they try to think about reaching accreditation?

Szakal: We have three broad categories here and we've broken each of the categories into a set of principles, what we call best practice attributes. One of those is secure engineering. Within secure engineering, for example, one of the attributes is threat assessment and threat modeling. Another would be to focus on lineage of open-source. So, these are some of the attributes that go into these large-grained categories.

Unpublished best practices

You’re absolutely right, we have thought about this before. Steve and I have talked a lot about this. We've worked on his secure engineering initiative, his SDLC initiative within Microsoft. I worked on and was co-author of the IBM Secure Engineering Framework. So, these are living examples that have been published, but are proprietary, for some of the best practices out there. There are others, and in many cases, most companies have addressed this internally, as part of their practices without having to publish them.

Part of the challenge that we are seeing, and part of the reason that Microsoft and IBM went to the length of publishing there is that government customers and critical infrastructure were asking what is the industry practice and what were the best practices.

What we've done here is taken the best practices in the industry and bringing them together in a way that's a non-vendor specific. So you're not looking to IBM, you're not having to look at the other vendors' methods of implementing these practices, and it gives you a non-specific way of addressing them based on outcome.

These have all been realized in the field. We've observed these practices in the wild, and we believe that this is going to actually help vendors mature in these specific areas. Governments recognize that, to a certain degree, the industry is not a little drunk and disorderly and we do actually have a view on what it means to develop product in a secure engineering manner and that we have supply chain integrity initiatives out there. So, those are very important.

Gardner: Somebody mentioned earlier that technology is ubiquitous across so many products and services. Software in particular growing more important in how it affects all sorts of different aspects of different businesses around the world. It seems to me this is an inevitable step that you're taking here and that it might even be overdue.

Our approach is not all that unique, but it's certainly the first time the technology industry has come together to make sure that we have an answer to some of these most important questions.

If we can take the step of certification and agreement about technology best practices, does this move beyond just technology companies in the ecosystem to a wider set of products and services? Any thoughts about whether this is a framework for technology that could become more of a framework for general commerce, Dave?

Lounsbury: Well, Dana, you asked me a question I'm not sure I have an answer for. We've got a quite a task in front of us doing some of these technology standards. I guess there might be cases where vertical industries that are heavy technology employers or have similar kinds of security problems might look to this or there might be some overlap. The one that comes to my mind immediately is health care, but we will be quite happy if we get the technology industry, standards and best practices in place in the near future.

Gardner: I didn't mean to give you more work to do necessarily. I just wanted to emphasize how this is an important and inevitable step and that the standardization around best practices trust and credibility for lack of malware and other risks that comes in technology is probably going to become more prevalent across the economy and the globe. Would you agree with that, Andras?

Szakal: This approach is, by the way, our best practices approach to solving this problem. It's an approach that's been taken before by the industry or industries from a supply chain perspective. There are several frameworks out there that abstract the community practice into best practices and use it as a way to help global manufacturing and development practices, in general, ensure integrity.

Our approach is not all that unique, but it's certainly the first time the technology industry has come together to make sure that we have an answer to some of these most important questions.

Gardner: Any thoughts, Steve?

Lipner: I think Andras was right in terms of the industry coming together to articulate best practices. You asked a few minutes ago about existing certifications and beyond in the trust and assurance space. Beyond common criteria for security features, security products, there's really not much in terms of formal evaluation processes today.

Creating a discipline

One of the things we think that the forum can contribute is a discipline that governments and potentially other customers can use to say, "What is my supplier actually doing? What assurance do I have? What confidence do I have?"

Gardner: Dave?

Lounsbury: I want to expand on that point a little bit. The white paper’s name, "The Open Trusted Technology Provider Framework" was quite deliberately chosen. There are a lot of practices out there that talk about how you would establish specific security criteria or specific security practices for products. The Open Trusted Technology Provider Forum wants to take a step up and not look at the products, but actually look at the practices that the providers employ to do that. So it's bringing together those best practices.

Now, good technology providers will use good practices, when they're looking at their products, but we want to make sure that they're doing all of the necessary standards and best practices across the spectrum, not just, "Oh, I did this in this product."

Szakal: I have to agree 100 percent. We're not simply focused on a bunch of security controls here. This is industry continuity and practices for supply chain integrity, as well as our internal manufacturing practices around the actual practice and process of engineering or software development, as well as supply chain integrity practices.

That's a very important point to be made. This is not a traditional security standard, insomuch as that we've got a hundred security controls that you should always go out and implement. You're going to have certain practices that make sense in certain situations, depending on the context of the product you're manufacturing.

The security mindset is a little bit different, in that you tend to be thinking about who is it that would be interested in doing harm and how do you prevent that?

Gardner: Carrie, any suggestions for how people could get started at least from an educational perspective? What resources they might look to or what maybe in terms of a mindset they should start to develop as they move towards wanting to be a trusted part of a larger supply chain?

Gates: I would say an open mindset. In terms of getting started, the white paper is an excellent resource to get started and understand how the OTTF is thinking about the problem. How we are sort of structuring things? What are the high-level attributes that we are looking at? Then, digging down further and saying, "How are we actually addressing the problem?"

We had mentioned threat modeling, which for some -- if you're not security-focused -- might be a new thing to think about, as an example, in terms of your supply chain. What are the threats to your supply chain? Who might be interested, if you're looking at malicious attack, in inserting something into your code? Who are your customers and who might be interested in potentially compromising them? How might you go about protecting them?

I am going to contradict Andras a little bit, because there is a security aspect to this, and there is a security mindset that is required. The security mindset is a little bit different, in that you tend to be thinking about who is it that would be interested in doing harm and how do you prevent that?

It's not a normal way of thinking about problems. Usually, people have a problem, they want to solve it, and security is an add-on afterward. We're asking that they start that thinking as part of their process now and then start including that as part of their process.

Szakal: But, you have to agree with me that this isn't your hopelessly lost techie 150-paragraph list of security controls you have to do in all cases, right?

Gates: Absolutely, there is no checklist of, "Yes, I have a Firewall. Yes, I have an IDS."

Gardner: Okay. It strikes me that this is really a unique form of insurance -- insurance for the buyer, insurance for the seller -- that they can demonstrate that they’ve taken proper steps -- and insurance for the participants in a vast and complex supply chain of contractors and suppliers around the world. Do you think the word "insurance" makes sense or "assurance?" How would you describe it, Steve?

Lipner: We talk about security assurance, and assurance is really what the OTTF is about, providing developers and suppliers with ways to achieve that assurance in providing their customers ways to know that they have done that. Andras referred to install the Firewall, and so on. This is really not about adding some security band-aid onto a technology or a product. It's really about the fundamental attributes or assurance of the product or technology that’s being produced.

Gardner: Very good. I think we'll need to leave it there. We have been discussing The Open Group's new Open Trusted Technology Forum, The Associated Open Trusted Technology Provider Framework, and the movement towards more of an accreditation process for the global supply chains around technology products.

I want to thank our panel. We've been joined by Dave Lounsbury, the Chief Technology Officer of The Open Group. Thank you.

Lounsbury: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: Also, Steve Lipner, the Senior Director of Security Engineering Strategy in Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group. Thank you, Steve.

Lipner: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And also, Andras Szakal, he is the Chief Architect in the IBM Federal Software Group and an IBM's Distinguished Engineer. Thank you.

Szakal: Thank you so much.

Gardner: And, also Carrie Gates, Vice President and Research Staff Member at CA Labs. Thank you.

Gates: Thank you.

Gardner: You've been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion in conjunction with The Open Group Conference here in San Diego, the week of February 7, 2011. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks for joining and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Get the free white paper. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Transcript of a sponsored podcast panel discussion from The Open Group 2011 U.S. Conference on the new Open Trusted Technology Forum and its impact on business and government. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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