Re:How Hackers Broke into John Podesta and Colin Powell’s Gm...
by nickpsecurity on Friday October 21, 2016 @12:44AM
(#12758186)
It's long been known not to use insecure endpoints, email, etc in government. NSA used to certify the high-assurance alternatives. Here was one of the early ones with incredibly-strong TCB for the time:
Almost all older or modern ones build email processing capabilities onto guards optionally with a proxy on client's side to integrate with common, mail client. Here's an article describing what a guard is along with some examples government uses today:
Firewalls are knockoffs of guards that were created after businesses and much of government rejected high-assurance systems since they didn't have development pace and [insecure] features of low-security competition. Firewalls were cheap, fast, constantly added features, and totally left off the whole "design it to be nearly unhackable" aspect of guards. Even the guards themselves have lowered their assurance at the TCB and guard software over the years as neither military nor commercial market really care outside a small niche of customers. Remaining ones like Boeing SNS Server and BAE's XTS-400 go for $100,000+ a unit due to limited market + high development & certification costs.
So, that's that. Medium-assurance solutions like Nexor's and General Dynamics continue being developed and adopted. They'll get smashed, though, since they're all adopting Linux-based cores & other COTS tech. Such are the market incentives.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.454...
Almost all older or modern ones build email processing capabilities onto guards optionally with a proxy on client's side to integrate with common, mail client. Here's an article describing what a guard is along with some examples government uses today:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guard_(information_security)
Firewalls are knockoffs of guards that were created after businesses and much of government rejected high-assurance systems since they didn't have development pace and [insecure] features of low-security competition. Firewalls were cheap, fast, constantly added features, and totally left off the whole "design it to be nearly unhackable" aspect of guards. Even the guards themselves have lowered their assurance at the TCB and guard software over the years as neither military nor commercial market really care outside a small niche of customers. Remaining ones like Boeing SNS Server and BAE's XTS-400 go for $100,000+ a unit due to limited market + high development & certification costs.
So, that's that. Medium-assurance solutions like Nexor's and General Dynamics continue being developed and adopted. They'll get smashed, though, since they're all adopting Linux-based cores & other COTS tech. Such are the market incentives.