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Managing Information Security Risks
Authors Alberts and Dorofee are the principal developers of OCTAVE and are staff members at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where CERT has offices. As such, they're the right people to describe OCTAVE. The CERT OCTAVE website area explains the process in more detail. Needless to say, OCTAVE is a very large, complex, heavy process for an organization to go through, with some arguable benefits. Very few organizations have done so to the best of my knowledge -- most of them are scared off by the complexity of the whole undertaking.
This brings up a very important point. It's important to state the difference between a critique of the OCTAVE method and the book itself. OCTAVE is interesting in that it's an attempt to formalize the complex process of information security evaluations. Despite its shortcomings and turnoffs, it has a purpose, and I wont dispute it for the most part. The book, instead, covers an abbreviated format of OCTAVE. It's important to focus on the strengths and weaknesses of the book and not the topic.
The books is organized into three main parts. Part 1 (covering chapters 1 and 2) is an introduction to the principles being discussed in the book. The method itself, and therefore these chapters, focus on a formal evaluation of information security risks and how to manage them. The principles focus on enumeration of assets, their threats and vulnerabilities, and then remediation of the threats to minimize the risk. The section introduces the core concepts to this philosophy.
Part 2 of the book, covering chapters 3 through 11, server two main purposes, preparation and then execution of the method. Chapter 3 introduces the fundamentals of the OCTAVE method, specifically how the three phases (asset-based threat profiles, vulnerability identification, and security strategy planning) fit together. The inputs of the method and its outputs are then described; you'll be using them in later chapters. Chapter 4 helps you prepare for the approach in your organization, including how important it is to get management buy-in, who will participate, and how to organize the evaluation. Project managers will adore this chapter.
The next few chapters cover the meat of the OCTAVE method. Chapter 5 covers processes 1 to 3, where assets are enumerated and the current state of the security profile is captured, as well. This step is crucial for building a baseline and knowing what you'll have to cover. Chapter 6 leads you through the threat profile, where you examine assets that you've identified as critical and the security requirements for them. And finally, in Chapter 7, the basic identification steps are done as you identify critical infrastructure components to examine later on. This is done so that you can work efficiently, as opposed to studying every asset in depth. By studying classes of assets you can (hopefully) achieve the same coverage without spending valuable time repeating the process.
Chapters 8 and 9 deal with the commonly understood parts, the actual vulnerability and risk analysis. Chapter 8 discusses vulnerability assessment tools and some basic questions to ask about them, but leaves the actual evaluation of those tools up to another text. Chapter 9 then helps you undertake the actual risk analysis, such as the impact of any threat being realized or the probability that one would be encountered. This is what most people think of when they think of an information security audit.
This gets to what is perhaps my biggest complaint about the book. It doesn't teach you how to think creatively about threats to information security. Instead, you're told to enumerate assets and threats against them via brainstorming, as though you'll somehow "get it" the first time (or every time). For someone new to the field, this can be hard, because not all assets are obvious -- and not all threats are understood. It's a hard skillset to teach, but it should have been attempted with more gusto.
Chapters 10 and 11 close the big circle of an information security audit, by developing an information security protection strategy. It's basically a series of outlines of meetings and their agendas as you present the findings of the evaluation but are (obviously) vague in the absence of any concrete findings.
This is probably a good time to raise another objection to this book. My second biggest complaint is that the authors never cut to the heart of what the OCTAVE method is trying to do. Sure, the book covers a stripped-down version of OCTAVE, but it doesn't ever get at how you can really adapt this to your organization. Instead, it's a series of rigid steps in the OCTAVE method. If you attempt to do something different for whatever reason, you're on your own. Again, an attempt to work in some flexibility beyond what is present in Chapter 12 (An Introduction to Tailoring OCTAVE, the start of part 3) would have been welcome. This chapter just keeps you inside the narrow confines of the OCTAVE approach.
Chapter 13 attempts to bring this home by discussing the practical applications for an organization. They attempt to discuss how a small company would utilize OCTAVE, but to be honest it's so heavy and time-consuming it's hard to see how they would employ anything but the barest of concepts to their workflow. Three other examples are given: a very large distributed organization, an integrated Web portal service provider (which faces unique threats), and large and small organizations. Again, while this chapter attempts to show how to tailor OCTAVE to anything but the largest and most diligently staffed of organizations, it falls to get to the salient points of the method. Instead, it tries to foist the process on them.
Finally, chapter 14 tries to bring it all home and discuss the information security life cycle of analysis, monitoring, control, and implementation (not in that order). They hope that OCTAVE has become a part of this process and show how it complements and matures this process. Instead, I wonder if an organization will think about the effort they just expended and be reluctant to do this again. The appendices are piles of worksheets, charts and workflows to go through with OCTAVE. You can make photocopies and use them if you implement the OCTAVE approach. It's very hard to take consider these methods strong enough when you read about the report card government agencies received for information security. While they may have not been following OCTAVE, it's hard to see how a book that so superficially treats the subject matter can help anyone do better. Almost everything is just a high-level line-item risk-and-mitigation strategy. Things like "Our organization cannot deliver effective or efficient health care without PIDS" and an impact of "High" are, to put it mildly, interesting in their superficiality. So many things are simply glossed over, yet so many worksheets remain. On the other hand, if a fair treatment of threats, assets, and the like were fully discussed the book would be many more volumes, a significantly more tedious tome, and too sensitive to the shifting sands of time.
Overall the book does a decent job of covering OCTAVE's core premises, but doesn't really provide much beyond that. It's a complex process that doesn't work well for a number of organizations. Instead of helping organizations see how to use it, the authors simply keep presenting OCTAVE for what it is, which makes me question the value of this book beyond someone who has already decided to implement OCTAVE. It doesn't seem like it has a lot to offer anyone who doesn't have a large body of knowledge in information security management and a staff to deploy with worksheets in hand. The book simply fails to contribute greatly beyond the very narrow specifics of OCTAVE.
You can purchase Managing Information Security Risks: The OCTAVE Approach from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
However, if I was paying for security (like all stakeholders are), that is not what is important. The assets are what is important. I was involved in this process for a major hospital chain. Of course, we wanted to scan networks and probe for vulns (we did), but it was interesting hearing the "lusers" talk about the voice system. Having the other non-technical types helps you really understand which assets do the day-to-day work, and which assets were developed to put on someone's resume.
In conlcusion, you are correct that a lot of the OCTAVE methodology is aimed at generating paperwork. However, I suggest you strip it down to Threat-Asset-Vulnerability (the TAV in OC-TAV-E) and run with that for a while.
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One thing this book doesn't do a good job of is explaining the deficiencies in current risk assessment methodologies, be it OCTAVE, NIST, whatever....
the numerical data presented is crap.
Too many times some CISSP (either inhouse or outsourced) who sees possibility and confuses it with probability sticks his finger in the air and delcares that there's "high" risk today. There's no common taxonomy amoung Infosec professionals, there's no common rating system, and there's not enough data to drive probability analysis.
Subsequently, run off with your Risk Assessment data to line of business management outside of IT, and they're laughing at infosec - and the credit card processing system remains a Tandem machine, the assembly line remains on the same segment as the rest of the network and the contingency plans remain "pen and paper".
Don't get me wrong, the methodology in OCTAVE (and this book) are fine. Great places to start. But Infosec itself will remain in its infancy until there's a probabilistic means to express risk outside of IT.
So in the meantime, you can run and do OCTAVE or NSA/NIST all you want, your CFO is still going to rely on the morons in the PWC/E&Y/DT&T infosec practice because they have some percieved authority to express risk (and they're getting their quantification the same place you are, from their behinds).
"oohhh... I didn't know Schopenhauer was a philosopher!"
Microsoft's desktop security issues stem from its continued reliance on the Antivirus industries "Infect-Scan-Remove" approach. Even Garner analyst Neil MacDonald has finally realized "Microsoft's overriding goal should be to eliminate the need for (antivirus) and (anti-spyware) products, not simply to enter the market with look-alike products at lower prices,". In comparison, right from the outset, open source desktop platforms and applications have relied almost wholly on closing the infectable vectors, the exploited vulnerabilities used by malware, as quickly as possible. The result is that both the KDE and GNOME desktop environments are a lot more secure and even more secureABLE.