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Feds Move to Secure Net
An anonymous reader writes "eWeek reports:The Cyber Warning Information Network, a key part of the Bush administration's National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, will use a secure, private IP network separate from the public Internet, according to officials. The government currently has seven nodes running, said Marcus Sachs, director of communications infrastructure protection at the Office of Cyberspace Security, in Washington."
I'd be interested to see how they propose to use this - ie is it completed closed, or are there specific hosts that have access to public and private. Inevitably there's always some host somewhere that comprimises this type of idea.
Since their interest is in securing the net as a whole, it's a pity they're not practising what they preach, and try and implement a secure solution over the public 'net. Would be a inspiration for other folks.
tom-george.comBecause geeks rate higher t
You mean they didn't already have a separate network? Well, I didn't think high of them anyway, but here's yet another reason why.
not being overly experienced myself in design of infrastructure for critical and data sensitive systems, surely this thought of thing is not the newest idea in the book. I would have thought most agencies would already have "critical" and "secure" networks in place to deal with emergency situations like mass DDOS or vulnerability attacks especially with all the paranoia for the last 5 years odd about cyberterrorism..
Physical separation of networks _is_ widely used among government and military networks. The reason being very simple: It's the only cost-effective way to guarantee security.
However, even if you lease a private line it would still be in control of a third party, the telephone company for instance. In these cases cryptographic hardware is used to secure the channel.
I find it surprising that this doesn't exist already - surely this is something like a slightly shinier version of UK Government Secure Intranet which has been operational for some time.
Surely the US government has something equivalent...?
this is why there's a global ipv4 shortage, cos the bastards at the DoD and other places own most of them
:)
I think that possibly a more relevant explanation of the ipv4 shortage would be that because there are so many new nodes being added, a shortage of addresses was obviously going to happen at some point. What with all the mobile phones and other, smaller devices (i.e. embedded systems in Internet-enabled fridges etc). that are connecting, ipv4 was going to run out at some point.
Besides, ipv6 should sort out that problem... Come 2010 even us poor souls in the UK may have completely switched to the new protocol version. Just in time to see BT finally provide full, half-decent UK broadband coverage (maybe give it a few more years though eh)
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"An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind" - Gandhi
If this "fednet" thing is to be totally separate, they're not staying with IP version 4, are they? The article doesn't say as far as I can make out.
That's about the only realistic route a worldwide migration to IPv6 could take, I think - building an entirely separate infrastructure.
Then we can have that one and they can have the old one back!
These people employ some of the best mathematicians and engineers in the world, they ought to be able to come up with a good implementation.
Not to mention the fact that even a separate link is going to require some informataion-level security as you don't want every tech with a current probe to be able see your network traffic ...
Pathman, Free (as in GPL) 3D Pac Man
Heck, it's not the DoD that has all those IPs tied up! It's the universities! I don't know how many times I've come across colleges with a whole Class B, and every single PC has a routable address. And since only the very largest ones have anywhere close to 64K nodes, the vast majority of their space is just plain empty.
You want to make IPv4 last another decade? Take back all the colleges' IP blocks, make them use a single Class C with NAT-ing.
I have always been frustrated by the biggest technology issue facing the military or any large organization: deployment. The SIPRNET has been around for ages. However, in all the places I have been assigned, nobody at my level ever has access. This is ridiculous because I have always worked where the proverbial rubber meets the road. VPN, Fortezza cards, and all this is not new, nor revolutionary. The issue is plainly logistics, sustainment, and training. Logistics is an issue because you have to field the equipment. The government already runs scads of custom applications many requiring dedicated computers. If you are able to field the equipment, it will be very difficult to maintain and upgrade because the channels for doing so are often convoluted or repair facilities are hundreds of miles away. Sustainment is a pain because the military is not designed (for the most part) to be stationary. When a large deployment happens, you are lucky to have a telephone let alone Internet capability. Finally, training is always a big problem. Right now most users cannot even perform the most basic computer tasks. As it all revolves around dollars when it comes to manning and training, I find it hard to believe that enough is going to be vested in empowering the end user to have access or know-how. In the end, it will end up where all good ideas end up, only being used at levels above reality by people who already have access to all matter of secure everything. I don't see it getting to the end user any time in the near future. To me this is an operating system issue, if you don't ingrain this crap at the OS level, there is always going to be problems. From sensitive data left in the swap space, to unsecured file systems, and ineffective data destruction utilities, there are dozens of pitfalls for truly running a secure network. Throwing tons of third party applications on top of it is a huge mess. Secondly, the government has become over-reliant on using the Internet. At least for the military, occupations in fixed facilities should mirror operations in deployment situations. The only solution for the military is satellite or high frequency radio. Access to these solutions at the speeds necessary for Internet transactions is years away and very expensive. I won't believe a word of any of this until the Department of Defense stops using Telnet and other insecure software for their day to day business. Way too many personal transactions are conducted via Telnet un-tunneled and unsecured. I have seen this first hand many times and as recently as yesterday. I am tired of the good idea factory coming up with solutions from behind their $3000 dollar oak desks when at my level the IT and security is crap and my personal information is strewn all over who knows where.
I talked to some computer people working in Swiss banks last year. It turned out they have a private network in parallel with the internet.
...
Every worker has two computers. One for the bank stuff and the other for internet/ordinary stuff.
The internal network has very limited connections to the internet (necessary web-banking connections, but not more). Don't count on Sendmail bugs to get you in here
I heard a story few years ago while taking a networks training course. We were talking about packet order and the fact that it's not guaranteed. The instructor mentioned that you could probably expect the order to be maintained if you specified the route and were the only thing transmitting, but still, it is not guaranteed.
Someone in the class had worked on a secure network project where all the routes were static, but when they did load testing the packets would arrive out of order. This worried them (as it should) and they looked into it. It turned out that the routers (switches?) they were using would "cheat" when they detected backup and would send packets to ports off the static routes.
The exptected behavior was that the receiver would bounce the packet back as destination unknown. But this could buy the equipment precious milliseconds and the conjestion might clear.
A cute solution, but not very secure.
It will be less vulnerable because they will have mandated that communications use physically separate switching nodes paths. And you can be sure that they have thought about this.
They already are. People have been arrested (though, in the cases I heard of, not held) merely for wearing anti-war tee-shirts.
Practically speaking, the Star Chamber has been recreated. That was the imposition of the English monarchy that habeus corpus was specifically created to stamp out. People being arrested without their name being released, without being allowed any outside contacts, and held indefinitely without being charged. Flagrant constitutional violations, but all actions taken by our government.
In *most* of the cases I've heard of there has been decent reason for the person to be arrested. But not for the violation of their rights. And in more than one of the cases I have not been able to determine any reason. (This doesn't mean there wasn't one. The information available it *intentionally* fragmentary.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
On the other hand, VPN over Internet can be very secure and far cheaper. Not VPN using OpenSSL on Linux boxes, because both OS and the relatively big library could have buffer overflows or some other low-level bugs. But it's easy to build a layered system that will be extremly secure. Say, hardware routers that decrypt and check signature on every incoming packet in hardware before looking at it otherwise. And then AFTER that, a Linux box that does a santity check on what comes through the router, just in case.