This document describes the evolution of Security Monitoring Solutions and the next stage in the SIEM evolution

1. The Art of Digital War
The objective of this section is to identify the issues around a digital intrusion. The
following diagram shows the picture of a digital intrusion time line (by an internal or
external Intruder or an automated Intruder – virus / worm / bots etc) along with the
Vulnerability time line and security monitoring tools with current features and future
building blocks. The focus is on the fundamental problems, and it will not go into
analyzing different digital attack patterns or any vulnerability analysis.
Latest CERT reports a total of 59901 vulnerabilities for the year 2005 an increase of
58.5% from the year 2004 and a 3402% increase from the year 1995. Usually
vulnerability in an application is due to un-identified bug in the code. However there are
times when backdoors written explicitly in some application to get into a users machine.
An intentional backdoor into any system is more dangerous than an accidental bug due
to an oversight or bad coding practices. Huge debate gone over the recent WMF2
1
2005 Vulnerability List
http://www.cert.org/stats/cert_stats.html
2
WMF Vulnerability – MS Advisory 912840 -
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/912840.mspx
Security Focus - Zero-day WMF flaw underscores patch problems by Robert Lemos – January 12, 2006
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11368

2. (Windows Meta File) Vulnerability – Microsoft Security Advisory (912840) whether it’s an
intentional backdoor or not.
“Speeding up the patch process is never going to solve the problem; it is never going to
be fast enough. We need to be investing very heavily in zero-day defenses, because another
zero-day will happen. There is a lot of talk about whether (the software vendor has) gotten the
patch out in time, but the real conversation should be about risk removal, not risk mitigation.”
Richard Ford, associate professor of computer science, Florida Institute of Technology
“Application vulnerabilities propagate so rapidly today that the old methods of dealing with them
no longer suffice. New standards like AVDL offer one of the best hopes of breaking this cycle by
dramatically reducing the time between the discovery of a new vulnerability and the effective
response at enterprise sites”
John Pescatore - Vice President of Security Research, Gartner
Security Threat Modeling
Security Threat Modeling is an essential process to protect the Assets (or applications).
It helps the organizations to determine the correct controls and produce effective counter
measures within the budget. Effective management and understanding of the
vulnerabilities is required to efficiently defend attacks against those (vulnerabilities). As
the number vulnerabilities increases year by year the customer needs a mechanism to
identify the most critical vulnerabilities in his enterprise.
The Core of Digital Security
The three key things in digital security for the enterprise are identifying and classifying
the Intruder and their attacks on the Assets and the Damage it can cause on the
enterprise or the potential damage on the similar attacks in the future. Regulatory
compliance and other government regulations revolve around the core or rather
monitoring the health of the core.
The above image shows the Intruder attack sophistication and the incident time line
which starts when the intruder finds the vulnerability in the enterprise and the actual
break-in and the damage he causes by information leakage, denial of service on critical
systems, and attack on other systems etc.
The Defense sections shows the 3 phases which is as follows; the Monitoring phase,
Attack discovery on the assets and the Containment and the Remediation process. The
key will be how efficiently we can correlate and provide relevant information back to the
end user at the right time so that he/she (the analyst) can stop the attack (while in
progress) before it wrecks havoc in the enterprise.
The three core areas (Intruder, Assets and Damage) will remain same today (2006) or
even after 15 or 20 or 2000 years. What matters is how good we are at identifying these
three key elements and build a robust Security Threat Model around it.
Intruders and their Attacks

3. Classification of an Intruder is critical in understanding the Threat the intruder posses. A
good Security Threat Model needs to understand the strengths, weakness and the
attack methodologies of any Intruder. The Intruders are classified into 3 – Internal,
External and Automated (Robotic) Intruder. Classification of Intruders helps us to
prioritize the incidents and focus on the relevant incident.
Assets
Security revolves around protecting the Assets (Behind every Asset there will be some
applications). Asset oriented Security Monitoring will be the key in this evolution.
Application infrastructure of the future will be heavily distributed in nature with SOA
(Service Oriented Architecture). Protecting the business services will be the most
important aspect in the service oriented world.
Asset Oriented Security Monitoring will eventually move towards applications and in the
future will lead to protecting the collection of web services3 which the applications
published. Security will go down to the fabric of the distributed applications. According to
Forrester the ERP4 Market will be $24 Billion by the end of 2008. SAP5 the leading ERP
Application provider will be moving to Service Oriented architecture by the end of 2008.
Classification of assets is important to protect the assets efficiently. Asset value will not
yield this classification. For example an asset which contains blog and user forum data
will be classified differently compared to assets with financial transaction databases.
There will be assets which require protection while data at rest6 as well as protection of
data on the wire.
Damage caused by Incidents and its impact
The above chart and depicts the damage impact if a break in happens. Today the users
do the impact manually and lot of different software applications will be used in the
complete process. Streamlining this business process and using this data to further
improve process will help in quick remediation and containment.
Tracking the cost of Incidents, resources required for containment and remediation, and
the time spent will help in predicting the actual cost involved if the similar attacks
happens in the future. This information can be used in the Security Threat Model to
narrow down the attacks and vulnerabilities where the potential damage will very high.
Digital Security - Building Blocks
3
Forrester – Large Enterprises Pursue Strategic SOA by Randy Heffner - April 5, 2005
http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/0,7211,36580,00.html
4
ERP Apps – Technology and Industry Battle heats up by Paul Hamerman, R Wang – June 9, 2005
Site: http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/0,7211,37058,00.html
5
SAPs Big Bet To Revolutionize App by Erin Kinikin – August 3, 2004
http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/0,7211,34739,00.html
6
Forrester Wave – Data Encryption Solutions Q3, 2005
http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/0,7211,36486,00.html
Application Security – http://www.appsecinc.com
Encryption of Data at Rest - http://www.appsecinc.com/presentations/Encryption_of_Data_at_Rest.pdf
DMReview – Information Management: Encryption at Rest
http://www.dmreview.com/article_sub.cfm?articleId=1033567

4. The first generation of security management tools processed data from security devices
like firewalls, intrusion detection systems, vulnerability scanners apart from network
devices like routers and switches. Correlation technologies correlated the events across
the systems. However, these systems focused more on handling the events. This model
is an extension of log management systems which started of the Digital Security
Management space.
The second generation Security Management tools focuses more on entities like Assets
and its relevance, Network and its importance, Attacker (with classification) and threat
levels, Vulnerability Severity relevant to the network. This model deviates from the first
generation event based management as the focus is on the entity rather than the events.
Entity model in the second generation simplifies the process of building a Security
Threat Model compared to first generation event model based Risk or Threat Scores.
The CSO7 / CISO are focused more on protecting their assets instead of worrying about
how many events passed through the network.
The third generation of Security Management will move closer to where the real action in
the enterprise digital world – ‘The Applications’. As per the Forrester and Gartner8 most
of the enterprise applications will move towards SOA9 (Service Oriented Architecture) by
the end of 2008-2009. Cisco already announced the Cisco AON (Application Oriented
Network) Architecture where the focus is on routing the application specific traffic.
End of the day security is all about protecting the data (information or knowledge)
created by the applications (Assets in the enterprise) and the applications runs 24/7.
The Fourth generation of Security Management will see the convergence of physical
security with information security. As per Forrester forecast10 Security Convergence
spending for Europe and North America combined will be $11 Billion dollars in 2008
compare to $506 million in 2004.
Conclusion
The objective of this document is to highlight the core of digital security and the
expectations around the core. Around 30-40 years ago we knew that the fundamentals
7
CSO Online - http://www.csoonline.com/research/leadership/cso_role.html
8
Gartner – http://www.gartner.com
Future of Enterprise Security – September 15, 2004
http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=454567
Cool Vendors in Security and Privacy – March 28, 2005
http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=475999
9
Forrester – Your Strategic SOA Platform Vision By Randy Heffner – March 29, 2005
Site: http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/0,7211,35951,00.html
Development Roles In The World Of Service-Oriented Architecture – January, 13, 2005
http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/0,7211,35822,00.html
SOAP Vs REST – A Comparison – By Randy Heffner, September 13, 2004
http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/0,7211,35361,00.html
Forrester Wave – Enterprise Service Bus Q4 2005
http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/0,7211,36162,00.html
10
Forrester - Trends 2005: Security Convergence Gets Real By Steve Hunt – January 11, 2005
http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/0,7211,36137,00.html
Converged IT And Physical Security: Small But Real – By Laura Koetzle April 15, 2005
http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/0,7211,36680,00.html

5. of Atom11 are electron, proton and neutron. As the science progressed we realized that
protons and neutrons were made up of quarks12 and discovered hundreds of sub atomic
particles13 and then finally to ‘Strings’ and the String theory14, However, electrons,
protons and neutrons still remains as fundamental particles (at atomic level).
So, let me re-instate the core again.
Do we think the above three elements will change in the year 213115. The answer is a
big ‘NO’.
There will never be a silver bullet which will solve all the problems. What you can do is to
improve the probability of successfully defending any attack. After so much of advances
in medical sciences the common cold still exists!
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a
hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained
you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will
succumb in every battle.
The Art of War - Sun Tzu. Lived: 500-320 BC
11
CERN – The worlds largest particle physics lab - http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/Welcome.html
12
Stanford University – Quarks Theory http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/vvc/theory/quarks.html
13
Getting closer to the God Particle - http://arafkarsh.blogspot.com/2005_02_01_arafkarsh_archive.html
14
String Theory - http://www.superstringtheory.com/index.html
15
What is so peculiar about this year?