Is Whitelisting the Answer To the Rise In Data Breaches?

MojoKid writes "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that cyber criminals are quickly getting more sophisticated than current security, intrusion detection and prevention technology can defend against. And you have to wonder if the computer security industry as a whole is willing to take the disruptive measures required to address the issue head-on. One way to tackle the surging data breach epidemic is with a technology called "whitelisting." It's not going to sound too sexy to the average end user and frankly, even CIOs may find it unfashionable but in short, whitelisting is a method of locking-down a machine such that only trusted executables, DLLs and other necessary system and application components are allowed to run – everything else is denied. A few start-up security companies are beginning to appear in this space. The idea is to start with a known, clean system installation and then lock it down in that state so absolutely nothing can be changed. If you follow system security, regardless of your opinion on the concept of whitelisting, it's pretty clear the traditional conventions of AV, anti-malware, intrusion detection and prevention are no longer working."

Comments

Already Possible

[EmperorArthur]

Newer versions of Linux can already do this. Using the integrity measurement architecture, module signing, and Secure Boot it's possible to have a system where almost any change is detected. I'm currently trying to get it all working on my machine right now, but it's slow going. Here's hoping that distros start shipping with this set up by default. http://lwn.net/Articles/488906...

A shorter term security measure that more users/Distributions should take is making the root partition read only. I know Android already does this, but it really does help. Something that I would really like to see is an easy to use per application firewall. Cgroups mean that I don't even have to worry about it just spawning a child process. Yes, I want to play this game in wine. No, I don't want it to access the internet. No, wine refuses to run it as a different user, much less one with lower privileges.

Re:Do it in ROM

[donaldm]

You should always set-up your file-systems in such a way that the OS part is completely separate from user data such that it should be a simple matter to recover or even install and update just the system file-systems. Unix and now Linux has always recommenced this type of layout although you can even do something like this for Microsoft Windows.

I have Fedora 20 running on my PC's and I make sure I document my system layout, application requirements, customisations and of course my security files which I save. If on the off my system gets compromised I can easily 1) Do a system recovery or 2) Do a fresh install and update without compromising my /home or archive data.

The fresh install takes me approximately 1 hour then 15 minutes for customisations then about 1 hour for the update although during this time I can fully use the machine. It must be noted that a recovery from backup would most likely take me about 20 minutes for 10 GB to be recovered (over 2000 packages), however if you have been compromised it is usually safer to do a fresh install.

It is possible to have a read-only system file-system for a Unix/Linux but this would be a stupid idea since you have /var which contain logs and update information that is required to be read/write. Even / (/ and /usr) needs read/write on occasion. The same is true for a Microsoft OS. The best you can do is have a tested disaster recovery plan and surprisingly it need not be that elaborate but you do need to cover most what if's.