Here are slides for my presentation, “DevOps Is Automation, DevSecOps Is People.” It’s about exercising communication skills, establishing empathy, and considering threat models that consider people. Communication skills are a part of inserting security into the DevOps process. Empathy is about understanding not only the engineering constraints that DevOps teams face, but also the population […]
Tag Archives: privacy
OURSA Recap
Last week I attended the OURSA conference. I tweeted during the conference and wrote up some reasons why I enjoyed the content so much. Briefly, the format (~15 minute presentations followed by panel discussion) kept the themes well-focused. It was also impressive that the conference stayed so well on schedule. But these are more superficial […]
Now One Week All Year
The annual summer conference constellation of the week of Black Hat, BSides, and DEF CON usually brings out a certain vocal concern about personal device security. Some of the concern is grounded in wry humor, using mirth to illustrate a point. Some of it floats on ignorance tainted with misapplied knowledge. That’s fine. Perform the […]
Why You Should Always Use HTTPS
This first appeared on Mashable in May 2011. Five years later, the SSL Pulse notes only 76% of the top 200K web sites fully support TLS 1.2, with a quarter of them still supporting the egregiously insecure SSLv3. While Let’s Encrypt makes TLS certs more attainable, administrators must also maintain their sites’ TLS configuration to use the best protocols and ciphers […]
RSA APJ 2014, CDS-W07 Slides
Here are the slides for my presentation, Building and Breaking Privacy Barriers, at this year’s RSA Asia Pacific and Japan conference in Singapore. The slides convey more theory than practical examples, but the ideas should come across without too much confusion. I expect to revisit the idea of a Rot network (a play on Tor) […]
RSA USA 2014, DSP-R04A Slides
Here are the slides for my presentation, DSP-R04A Is Your Browser a User Agent or a Double Agent?, at this year’s RSA USA conference in San Francisco. This departed from a security focus into the realm of privacy, noting how browsers struggle (or not) against tracking mechanisms and how various organizations build views of web site visitors.
The Rank Decay Contingency
The idea: Penalize a site’s ranking in search engine results if the site suffers a security breach. Now, for some background and details… In December 2013 Target revealed that it had suffered a significant breach that exposed over 40 million credit card numbers. A month later it upped the count to 70 million and noted […]
Audit Accounts, Partition Passwords, Stay Secure
It’s a new year, so it’s time to start counting days until we hear about the first database breach of 2014 to reveal a few million passwords. Before that inevitable compromise happens, take the time to clean up your web accounts and passwords. Don’t be a prisoner of bad habits. It’s good Operations Security (OpSec) […]
Soylent Grün ist Menschenfleisch
Silicon Valley green is made of people. This is succinctly captured in the phrase: When you don’t pay for the product, the product is you. It explains how companies attain multi-billion dollar valuations despite offering their services for free. They promise revenue through the glorification of advertising. Investors argue that high valuations reflect a company’s […]
Plugins Stand Out
A minor theme in my recent B-Sides SF presentation was the stagnancy of innovation since HTML4 was finalized in December 1999. New programming patterns emerged over that time, only to be hobbled by the outmoded spec. To help recall that era I scoured archive.org for ancient curiosities of the last millennium. (Like Geocities’ announcement of […]
