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NSA Chief Wants Internet Partitioned For Government, 'Critical' Industries
GovTechGuy writes "NSA chief Keith Alexander, also the head of the US Cyber Command, told reporters that he would like to see the creation of a secure zone on the Internet for government and critical private sector industries such as utility companies and the financial sector. Alexander has repeatedly emphasized the dramatic nature of the cyber threat facing American networks and his comments were a further sign that the Pentagon does not think the war against foreign hackers can be won. Alexander denied the military has any role in safeguarding civilian networks currently, but didn't rule out the option in the future."
Somebody's confused about the difference between "an internet" and "The Internet".
Help stamp out iliturcy.
This is what a bunch of us have been saying for a while: there's no reason for those really critical things to be on the Internet. Now they're proposing that they won't be, but are calling it a "partition". (??)
One little gateway to the great, unwashed Internet, and the whole walled garden is compromised.
In fact, thinking they are safe in a walled garden is likely to lower their level of caution.
And it doesn't require an active network link spanning the networks. Virus and other nasties can be entered via CD's, USB sticks (I'm looking at you, U.S. Navy), or malicious persons on the inside.
If this guy is serious, what he probably wants is the ability to partition the Internet such that walled gardens can be set up, torn down, and have their membership adjusted very quickly.
On, and to hope that the ability to mess with that never gets into the wrong hands.
I suppose it would be possible to build a whole second infrastructure across the country for Government agencies and 'critical industries', one that would never necessarily cross lines with any part of the 'insecure' internet. However, I would think the fact that you would need a nationwide infrastructure is what would make it just as insecure as the real thing, as there would be innumerable points for a malicious person to connect in. Also, unless you plan on creating a whole new 'secure' operating system to connect to every computer on this new network, you're still going to be vulnerable if anyone brings in a flash drive or a DVD with a virus.
Oh, and you could NEVER allow wireless connections to this network... that would just be too damn easy.
Just tell all the companies worried about cyber attack to set their gateway as 127.0.0.1 and they'll be perfectly safe.
Is this guy legitimate? How the hell did someone so ignorant of networking become head of US cyber command? NOTHING stops someone from grabbing off the shelf hardware and creating a WAN that has no hardware connections with the global internet. Or, there's various virtual ways to do this that are almost as good. Companies and institutions have been doing this for decades. Hackers can only get in if the institution is dumb enough to put the mission critical hardware on a network that IS connected to the internet, or even dumber, run the mission critical control system on a windows machine. Of course, corporations do this all the time...
So, what they want is a private IP-based network. No sweat, we've been building those for a couple of decades now. When I did point-of-sale for a truck-stock company, we had our own private network for connecting to our stores, credit-card processors and the like. You need routers, appropriate leased-line or other dedicated bandwidth, and some time spent on a white-board laying out the topology. The only real hard part is making sure you don't connect any machines to this network that also have connections to the public Internet. Yes, this means the machines on that network aren't going to be able to access the public Internet. You wanted a private, isolated network, you get a private, isolated network. If you want to live dangerously you can create appropriate DMZs and firewalls and proxies to give internal machines external access, but remember that that means worms, viruses and other malware can ride in on stuff coming back in through that external access and infect machines inside the perimeter. At that point your "protected" network isn't protected at all (in fact it's probably more vulnerable, since you likely skimped on internal protection since it's supposed to be a protected network).
That's just it, though, the only way to truly securely establish a separate network would be to run separate lines -- build in separate hardware, build in an air gap. Attempting to "partition" the Internet at the software level is pure silliness -- unless you command both ends of the pipe, and all points in between, there's a chance that someone may be able to intercept your traffic. And with deep packet inspection and similar tools these days, they could thus also alter your traffic, meaning any communications over the Internet cannot be secure, at least not in the way this Keith Alexander is talking about.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I mean, wasn't the internet designed/made for the military in the first place (ARPA/DARPA)? Then first the institutions (.edu) and later the commercial market (.com) came along and took it over. I guess creating a new network from scratch (and doing it RIGHT this time) is easier than kicking the rest of us pikers off of what was theirs in the first place.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
The DoD owns those... NIPR is mostly bureaucratic military stuff, while SIPR is the secure one. Good luck with the Pentagon letting folks like HHS, DOI, DOE, congress-critters, or (heh) your local utility co-op getting latched onto to those.
Speaking of "realistic security policies", just to even think of hooking into NIPR, you have to harden your boxes to the these specs (ever had to put all of /usr onto its own partition and lock the whole thing read-only? I guess it all depends on your definition of "realistic"). SIPR's requirements are only 'slightly' more anal.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
They are for the Military - Google for NIPR and SIPR as a good start...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
That's just it, though, the only way to truly securely establish a separate network would be to run separate lines -- build in separate hardware, build in an air gap. Attempting to "partition" the Internet at the software level is pure silliness -- unless you command both ends of the pipe, and all points in between, there's a chance that someone may be able to intercept your traffic. And with deep packet inspection and similar tools these days, they could thus also alter your traffic, meaning any communications over the Internet cannot be secure, at least not in the way this Keith Alexander is talking about.
Cheers,
I think a much better approach is to assume that the intermediate network is insecure and beyond your control. Then, use very strong end-to-end encryption to make a secure tunnel, much like the SSH approach. I mean, this is the NSA here. It's not like they wouldn't know how to use good encryption.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
As many have no doubt pointed out, there is not now and has never been anything that stops anyone from building their own TCP/IP-based network and only allowing trusted users/machines/sites to connect to that network. There is no inherent need to connect *anything* to the public Internet, much less an asset that contains confidential information.
The thing that bothers me most about this announcement is the clear implication that secret data *isn't* currently partitioned onto private networks at top-secret government agencies.
you get yourself a bunch of private pipes, and you use them as a backbone using IP, and you use a private set of addresses like the 10-net, and you make no connections whatsoever between this and The Connected Internet.
and you have an internet.
and it's not connected to The Connected Internet.
and then you can control your own security.
and as long as you do not put any software on any machines on the private internet that comes from untrusted sources and has not been vetted, you're nice and secure.
nothing with any criticality should EVER be connected to The Connected Internet.
glad you've made a start in this process. now build one. a bunch of pre-teens could hash up one in an hour if you don't need a bunch of wacky routing rules.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Completely. They have the .mil network, and can't secure that. So the answer is to segregate the 'real' Internet and a 'secure' Internet?
And this will prevent infestations via USB drive how exactly?
I thought so. Next, please.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Sure, the NSA is undoubtedly up on the best crytpo around. While encryption will secure a message payload, it doesn't ensure that the message gets where it's going -- routing traffic over the Internet leaves the end- and midpoints open to DDOS and other attacks, tying up servers and preventing message transmission. A physically separate network, however, would avoid much of the harmful noise that happens in teh intarwebs.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
The whole point of the Internet 2 project was to provide secure, robust, high-speed communication to those who needed it. Not that I really know what makes "Internet 2" anything more than a section of the regular Internet 1 with restrictions on traffic routing off the high-speed backbone they've got. That and a functional IPv6 infrastructure which they've had in place for about 15 years without the need of tunnel brokers. Oh, and IPv6-aware applications - something else Internet 1 users have too few of and they've plenty of.
So the military have only NOW realized that putting sensitive or mission-critical information over a public network is a Bad Idea? Pffft. Pull the other one. They're one of the key players IN the Internet 2 endeavor. I can understand them wanting to get power stations and other critical infrastructure onto it, I can even understand them thinking Joe Public is too stupid to remember all of the news coverage Internet 2 has had over they years, or to google to see if such a network exists. But I'm frankly amazed that they've not been called on it by anyone, and shocked (shocked I tell you!) that nobody on Slashdot has mentioned it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I used to work at a bank, and I really wished for something like this. Imagine a network with no home connections, nothing moving across it but VPNs. VPNs from bank to bank, power company to government, etc. Every node would be authenticated. No worms.
In this type of network, I can turn the logging on my firewall to the max, and anything that even looks at my bank's firewall with a ping can be reported to the agency that runs the show. Once it is confirmed that they're going where they should not, they're kicked off the network.
The issue I had is that because there are so many cases where bank A needs to talk to bank B, and neither want to have the T1 line under their name. If the Internet goes down, no money can be moved and there are big problems. Making a walled place for this would be great.
People need to understand that you can EITHER have security OR the ability to be anonymous. If you want one, you're losing the other.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
> and while they are at it, make it all IPV6.
Why would the second, USA or NATO only, internet need IPV6? Remember, this is the one that YOU will never be allowed on (at least in your role as a private person), let alone Mexico, Central America, South America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia. Likewise, this is the one that toasters, your gas and water meter, the coke machine on the 7th floor of Science Hall, or any other such appliances would not need to be on. In short, this is the Internet before Al Gore ruined it by opening it up for blatant commerce, and will have that few hosts (i.e., few enough so that every admin on it would know all the top level domains, if not most of the other admins).
> and while we're at it, maybe we can get the U.S. on the metric system.
Obviously, you are too young to buy liquor. Try and buy a new *fifth* of bourbon (or get your parents to). The USA has been on the metric system for decades (since the yard was defined in terms of the meter) but doesn't send men with guns after people or companies who use the customary measurements instead.
The government and military already have a "partitioned" inaccessible "internet". The real name of the "internet" you are using to view this site is called NIPRNET, and the "secure partitioned" one is called SIPRNET. The secured internet has been around for decades and is still used by governments around the world.
So this proposition simply is a play on words, particularly a "partition" word, possibly for a total ground up restructuring scheme for sure. This is such a bold statement from a government official, it's baffling really.
> ever had to put all of /usr onto its own partition and lock the whole thing read-only?
No, because SunOS5 had this on installation, back about 1990. With symbolic links and such, it was really quite simple. You remounted /usr as RW only when you had to remake the kernel, and then rebooted after (once a month or less often). In fact, our /usr was on a separate disk that had a hardware RO/RW switch on it.
This stuff was worked out long ago. Then, it was ignored because someone decided to build from scratch with no more (prior) thoughts of security than a HAL-9000 had.
The ruling class doesn't want to be exposed to those peons who are subject to laws.
Oh well, at least they're not calling us Morlocks yet.
Like what?
The only one that immediately springs to mind is email and that's simple enough to handle.
What else would a person working on a secured network need to access?
The US military and defense establishment already has its own private internet (DarpaNet), along with backbone and such. This is just, in the words of Bruce Schneier, so much security theater. The physics research community also has its own network, PhysNet, that provides high bandwidth and secure connections between major research sites and universities world-wide. Yes, they interconnect to the broader Internet, but they don't carry general Internet traffic and are quite secure against outside hackers.
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
I've always said: "Why should [X] be connected to the public internet in the first place? Isn't connecting [X] to the public internet a really bad idea?"
Where [X] is any number of things: (list not exhaustive)
a power plant control system
a waste water treatment plant control system
an electrical plant control system
an electrical substation control system
a train station control system
a traffic control system
There are many things besides control systems, but for this post I am thinking of basic infrastructure. If these things need to be networked, they should be on their own private network with limited access. These problems also occurred before the internet existed. For example by connecting them to the public telephone system. (sometimes with no password, relying on the obscurity of the phone number to limit access)
It is not just the public sector that needs to learn this, but also private industry. If it is vitally important, limit physical access to it. Private networks exist for a reason. There is no need to do anything to the public internet.
-Mysteryvortex
Until someone gets tired of having to use another machine for the "real" net and hooks up a router between them. Half an hour tops before some idiot breaks the separation model. Yes, people ARE that dumb.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
There's nobody else there anyway....
It's not an error or misconfiguration, you don't have the .mil CA in your trusted CAs. The DOD runs it's own CA because they're pushing PKI for everything and don't want to have to pay another CA for each and every cert issues.