Top 5 emerging information security technologies
The war between data defenders and data thieves has been described as a cat-and-mouse game. As soon as the white hats counter one form of black-hat malicious behavior, another malevolent form rears its ugly head. How can the playing field be tilted in favor of the infosec warriors? Here are five emerging security technologies that may be able to do that.
The inadequacies of usernames and passwords are well known. Clearly, a more secure form of authentication is needed. One method is to bake authentication into a user’s hardware. Intel is moving in that direction with the Authenticate solution in its new, sixth-generation Core vPro processor. It can combine a variety of hardware-enhanced factors at the same time to validate a user’s identity.
Intel has built on previous efforts to dedicate a portion of the chipset for security functions to make a device part of the authentication process. Good authentication requires three things from users: what they know, such as a password; who they are, such as a username; and what they have, such as a token. In the case of Authenticate, the device becomes the what-you-have.
“This isn’t new,” said Scott Crawford, research director for information security at 451 Research. “We’ve seen this in other manifestations, such as licensing technologies and tokens.”
Hardware authentication can be particularly important for the Internet of Things (IoT) where a network wants to ensure that the thing trying to gain access to it is something that should have access to it.
However, Crawford noted, “The most immediate application for the technology is for authenticating an endpoint in a traditional IT environment — laptops, desktops, and mobile devices using Intel chipsets.”
Once someone’s username and password are compromised, whoever has them can waltz onto a network and engage in all kinds of malicious behavior. That behavior can trigger a red flag to system defenders if they’re employing user behavior analytics (UBA). The technology uses big data analytics to identify anomalous behavior by a user.
“There’s a lot of interest in this in the enterprise,” 451’s Crawford said.
He explained that the technology addresses a blind spot in enterprise security. “Once an attacker gains entry into an enterprise, what happens then?” he asked. “One of the first things they do is compromise credentials. So then the question becomes, Can you differentiate between a legitimate user’s activity and an attacker who has gained entry, compromised a legitimate user’s credentials and is now looking for other targets?”
Visibility into activity that does not fit the norm of the legitimate user can close a blind spot in the middle of the attack chain. “If you think of the attack chain as initial penetration, lateral movement, and then compromise, theft, and exfiltration of sensitive data, the middle links in that attack chain have not been very visible to enterprise security pros, and that’s why the interest in user behavior analytics today,” Crawford said.
Comparing a user’s present behavior to past behavior isn’t the only way UBA can identify a malicious actor. “There’s something called ‘peer analysis’,” explained Steven Grossman, vice president for program management at Bay Dynamics, a threat analytics company. “It compares how someone is behaving compared to people with the same manager or same department. That can be an indicator that the person is doing something they shouldn’t be doing or someone else has taken over their account.”
In addition, UBA can be a valuable tool for training employees in better security practices. “One of the biggest problems in a company is employees not following company policy,” Grossman said.
