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Part 7: State of the Art and Future

Are we in a sorry state? How to keep us Safe? Software trust management Hardware trust management Evasive virus scanning Return of Obscurity Techniques (e.g. Steganography)

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Case 1: Doom and Gloom

Viruses are running around Even though they are not the smart kind

Financial losses are a problem Anyone trying to do PKI for credit cards?

Integrity checking missing As users get smarter, attackers get even smarter

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Case 2: Getting better

Spam effectiveness is getting lower Filtering making major inroads

Fraud is being contained via awareness

Countermeasures getting smarter Hardware (TPM) and virtual machines are coming RSA Secureid and such cards are being pushed

Phone verification is catching on

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Trust Management

Hardware trust management Stores keys in hardware (e.g. PKI cards)

Software Trust management Hashes, signatures, trusted software Verification, attestation, cleaner installations

Email trust Advent of email authentication may be soon

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Better Systems Security

Smarter viral scanners White lists Evasive scanners In kernel support

Rootkit detectors Practical detectors can run in kernel Boot time detectors work

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Obscurity

Security though obscurity may be a good idea in some cases

Hide secret using polymorphic schemes Virus/rootkit checkers use techniques that are “secret” Make systems “highly personalized” in some automatic way

Makes viruses not know how things are arranged in a particular computer

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Conclusions

Security has come a long way Networking is almost conquered Viral attacks is sill a pain Software is the final frontier

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Conclusions