Invisible Identity

Photo source: Michael Shaheen - My Name Was Michael & The Rest Is History

In my previous post, I promised to explain the following:

Organisations should care about identity so they can stop caring about it. Identity needs to disappear, but only from sight; it needs to be invisible.

If you've been to any of Disney's theme parks recently, you may have noticed they now have something called the MagicBand. It cost them a lot of money. Disney calls it "magic". The technology powering the MagicBand infrastructure was complicated to build, but they've done it and have the increased revenue to show for it. They've also managed to turn what is effectively a security device into a new revenue stream by making people pay for them, including charging a premium for versions that have Disney characters on them.

While it does many things, arguably the key benefit of the MagicBand is in delighting Disney's customers by providing seamless, friction-less, surprising experiences without being creepy. For example, when you walk up to a restaurant, you can be greeted by name. You will then be told to take a seat anywhere. Shortly after, your pre-ordered meal will be brought to you wherever you chose to sit, just like magic. If you understand technology, you can inherently figure out how this might work. But the key in all this is the trust that the consumer places in the company. Without the trust, Disney steps over the "creepy" line.

How does Disney ensure trust? Through security of course. Sure, the brand plays a part, but we've all lost trust in a supposedly trusted brand before because they screwed up their security.

The key pieces of that security? Identity proofing, authentication, access control and privacy, none of which is possible without a functional, secure identity layer.

Conveniently (for me), Ian Glazer recently delivered 2 presentations that go into a little more depth around the points I'd otherwise have to laboriously make:

1. Stop treating your customers like your employees
2. Identity is having its TCP/IP Moment

If you have some time, do yourself and favour and follow those links - you might just learn something :)

What Disney has managed to achieve within their closed walls is exactly what every organisation trying to do something with omni-channel and wearables would like to achieve. Disney is a poster child for what is possible through an identity-enabled platform, particularly in bringing value to the business through increased revenue and customer satisfaction. Identity truly is the enabler for Disney's MagicBand.

The reason it works is because no one notices the identity layer. Not every organisation will be able to achieve everything Disney has managed, but even going part of the way is worth the effort. Only by ensuring the identity layer is there, can you really make it invisible.

Until people stop noticing the identity layer, you need to keep working on it. Only then will the business see the full potential and value that identity brings to increasing revenue.

Identity needs to disappear

Photo source: Paul Chapman - The disappearing machine

In recent years, security vendors, including ones that don't sell Identity & Access Management (IAM) products, have been pontificating about how identity needs to be the focus for all things security. They (my current and previous employers included) continue to be on-message, each beating everyone to death with their own version; identity-centric-security, identity-powered-security, identity-defined-security, identity-is-the-perimeter, identity-is-the-foundation, identity-is-the-intelligence, and on and on.

Yeah, we get it. Identity is VERY important. Enough already.

The problem with rolling out the same message for years is that people stop listening. It's like the age old line in press releases: "the market leader in"; sure you and every other vendor out there. The market leader. Yeah, right.

Ok, so I'm being a little cynical. But the fact that as an industry, we've had to go all broken-record on this means:

1. We've not been very effective in explaining what we mean. AND/OR
2. No one gives a crap.

The truth is probably a combination of the two.

From the 10,000 foot marketing message, we have a habit of diving too deep too quickly, skipping the middle ground and heading straight into explaining, debating and architecting how everything needs to hang together. For example: "You need to federate between the identity provider and service providers using standards like SAML, OAuth or OpenID while maintaining a translatable credential that can be trusted between partner domains. Which OAuth do you mean? 1.0? 2.0? Can't we just go with OpenID Connect? Doesn't that cover the use cases? We're effectively supporting OAuth right?"

Errr, yeah. Sure. Hey, architect person, I'm not entirely sure what all that means, but we do that, right? And why do we do that again?

We often explain the "why should we care" answer by saying "you need security because you do, and identity is the key". And therein lies the problem. The "why should we care" question is difficult to answer in a meaningful, tangible way.

In addition, the reasons tied purely to security and risk no longer resonate. It's arguable that they ever did at all, but we could always pull out the audit, risk and compliance stick to metaphorically beat people with (oops, did I say that out loud).

Today, we often pull out the data-loss card. But we can do better:

Organisations should care about identity so they can stop caring about it. Identity needs to disappear, but only from sight; it needs to be invisible.

I'll explain in the next post.

Update: The next post is up.

Social identities are becoming our online driver’s licence

Note: This is a companion blog post to an article I wrote earlier this year for CSO Australia. The original essay was too long for an online publication, so I split it up into 2 related, but independent pieces.

For the generation that assumes a priori that the Internet is a tangible, more-essential-than-oxygen component of the air, social networks have become the digital manifestation of their identities as people. Most use each social network for a specific purpose. For example, Facebook content is typically personal and LinkedIn content is almost always professional. Where possible, we try to confine their use within our subconscious boundaries, but they invariably bleed into each other through porous walls. Nevertheless, each is a persona; a one dimensional representation of our real selves.

While online, much of our significant actions require some form of identification: a licence that says enough about us as unique individuals. While we don’t need a driver’s licence to walk along a road, we do need one to drive along it. Similarly, to do anything of significance online, we need to prove who we are to varying degrees; we need a licence that says enough about ourselves to be allowed to perform certain activities.

A majority of our individual activities both online and off can be divided into two categories: transactions and interactions. We transact with retailers, financial institutions and governments. We interact with friends, family, colleagues, employers and government institutions. There are exceptions to these, but a majority of what we do conforms to this model.

The word “transact” in this sense is not always tied to financial activities. Anything that has a negative real-life impact when fraud is committed can be deemed as transactional. In life, our identity matters when we transact and interact with retailers, financial institutions, governments and other people. There is however, a distinct difference in the acceptable forms of identity when comparing transactional activities and interactions which is tied to risk. It is why certain organisations will accept your Facebook account as proof of identity, but others will not.

Appropriate use of social identities

The key to understanding appropriate use for social identities is context. In real life, activities that require proper identification such as a passport or driver’s licence are transactional.

If you analyse the scenarios you are familiar with in dealing with retailers, financial institutions and governments, you will quickly realise that for anything we classify as an interaction, using social identifiers for access is sufficient. For transactions, they are not.

In the Information Security world, this is known as using the appropriate Level of Assurance (LOA) for the appropriate context. A higher LOA is required for transactions than interactions. The progression to a higher LOA is typically achieved using multi-factor authentication. If you’ve ever received a code on your mobile phone immediately after your username and password has been accepted and asked to enter it into a site before it allows you access, you have used multi-factor authentication. The SMS code sent to your mobile phone increases your LOA.

In situations where social identities play a part in the authentication process, they are best used as first level of authentication. As a “lightweight” identity, this provides the personalisation we psychologically crave and the added usability organisations would like to provide. The fact that personalisation provides additional insight to organisations is a bonus for them. When the interactions verge on being transactional, the LOA needs to be raised using either a second factor or a stronger form of identification. In real life, this is best demonstrated by the fact that a driver’s licence is sufficient for entry to a bar but a passport is required to cross international borders.

Excessive collection of personal information

A major concern regarding the use of social identities as a login mechanism relates to the amount of sensitive personal information stored within social networks. Using your Facebook account to login to another site does not necessarily give it access to your Facebook account (e.g. to make updates). More commonly, the login process involves sharing an amount of information about yourself that the site requires.

The word “requires” is used loosely here. Far too often sites ask for more information than they actually need because they can. We have become so accustomed that we accept it as the norm. Bad data collection practices have trained us into accepting additional risk as a condition for using the Internet. In reality, most sites really only need a way to contact you (e.g. email) and perhaps your name. Put simply, a site should only ask for the information it needs for you to complete your tasks.

The breach the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s website suffered earlier this year is a perfect recent example of data collection misuse. The information stolen included easily cracked hashed passwords and personal details about each person that the website did not need. When we give up our information to an organisation, we almost never have control over anything that happens to it after the fact.

This is something that the Kantara Initiative is attempting to address through its User Managed Access (UMA) work group and the associated UMA protocol. But until this or something like it is mandated across sites that store information about individuals, it is extremely difficult to address the lack of control we have over our personal details and their proliferation.

Note (not part of original blog post): I strongly suggest checking out Ian Glazer's "Big P Privacy in the Era of Small Things" video if you are interested in exploring and understanding this topic in more depth.

Potential benefit of social identities

Social networks have the potential to reduce the number of places that our information is stored. In addition, they can potentially become the gatekeepers to our information. Imagine if the interaction between a social network and another site included the obligation to delete our information upon request by the social network using a protocol like UMA? Better still, what if it required that the information used be transient and disappears when our session with the site in question ends? Nothing actually gets stored.

In fact, some social networks enforce this today, although this is used more as a defensive tactic to reduce the likelihood that a partner site becomes a competitor by replicating all their user data than a way to protect the information for the benefit of users. Sites that do not conform to the policy are unceremoniously prevented from being able to interact with the social network in any way.

There are benefits to be had for the sites accepting social identities as logins too. Studies have shown that user drop-off rates decrease because users no longer have to fill in forms to access the site. Data storage costs drop as a result and for organisations that do not want to be front page news for losing user data, this risk is no longer present.

A driver’s licence is not a passport

We began by referencing the generation of digital natives driving the assimilation of our digital and physical lives. They influence online innovation today through their demands and expectations. They are the demographic many businesses target. As a result, their behaviour shapes the evolution of the online world and by extension, the real world.

The rest of us have to begrudgingly adapt to a reality being built for them. Like it or not, social identities are becoming the Internet’s driver’s licence of choice. However, social identities are not our online passports. The world is not ready for that reality. And unless social networks start vetting people like banks do, that reality is unlikely to ever be achieved.

Gain RELIEF with future proof security

I wrote an article for SCMagazine that was published in late October. Unfortunately, since more than 7 days have passed, it now sits behind a registration wall (which I believe is free, but still requires effort on your part). It was originally titled: "Holistic security heals your cloud and mobility symptoms", but the editor decided the current one worked better.

For those that don't feel like registering to read the article, the RELIEF acronym in the title spells out:

• Resources – What are you trying to protect? This is almost always going to be information. Often, IT departments classify the applications housing information as resources, but without the information, applications do not need to be protected. The classification of data needs to be considered here as this has a bearing on access control policies.
• Entry – How is each resource accessed? Through an application? Database? As a text file on a file server? Do the access control policies and enforcement mechanisms cover all the combinations and can they be easily managed? Where are the blind spots? Where is access not enforced?
• Locations and time – Where are these resources located? On-premise? In the cloud? Where are resources accessed from? Can people access a resource when they are outside the office? When can they access these resources?
• Identity – Who is accessing corporate resources? Can access be tied back to a single individual or is the audit trail ambiguous? Can you enforce access based on who the person is? Are the monitoring mechanisms able to understand identities?
• Exit – How can information leave the organisation? What are the allowable circumstances and combinations where this can happen? Can this be enforced or at the very least monitored? Are there blind spots?
• Flow – How does information move between entry and exit points? What about all the points inbetween? Is the flow of information completely auditable and enforceable at all touch points?

Authentication debate fuelled by Apple Touch ID is in itself a game changer

There's a good debate on ZDNet between John Fontana and David Braue around the issue of whether Apple's Touch ID is a game changer. I've spoken to, discussed things with and read stuff written by both these guys, so I can vouch for the fact they know what they are on about, which is why I'm sort of fence sitting in the context of their actual debate. But if someone shook the fence I'm currently sitting on vigorously and I assume the question was framed around Touch ID in its current form (or rather, how it will be when the iPhone 5s is released in a few days), I'd probably fall onto the side that John's on.

John makes 2 really great points that I wholeheartedly agree with:

"Currently, Touch ID has no way for the enterprise to tap the technology into their identity and access management systems."

and

"...without an SDK, developers that made the App Store explode won't be able to lift a finger to raise Apple's security profile above a whimper."

He's right. But I believe Apple will eventually allow developers to hook into Touch ID, albeit indirectly. Apple does not build things into their devices without a long-term strategy for them.

Those of us in the IT security field are paid to be paranoid and sceptical, so I can understand how security professionals are not jumping on the Apple fanboy bandwagon. Interestingly enough, many are closet Apple fanboys when not doing their day jobs. One thing we all struggle with however, is getting people to actually care about security, let alone openly debate it.

While I don't believe that Touch ID in its current form is a game changer, the fact that Touch ID's lit the fire under the authentication debate is. That is something only companies like Apple can do.

While it may seem self-serving to quote myself, that's exactly what I'm going to do. I said in my previous blog post:

"...it will take at least one well-known brand with a significant amount of consumer influence to fork-lift-point us down the non-password oriented identification path."

Apple's done that. If you read some of David's arguments in the debate, he's actually projecting potential future applications of Touch ID, not features it will have upon initial release:

"MDM tools are all about adding a layer of control to distant mobile devices, and fingerprints are a readily available way for distant users to prove their identity."

and

"Better API access would allow developers to use fingerprints anywhere they now require user ID-and-password combinations."

Sitting firmly perched back on my fence, I agree with John that Touch ID in its current form is not a game changer. But I agree with David that Touch ID's potential, with the Apple juggernaut behind it, is.

At the very least, the fact that authentication has become a hotly debatable topic in the mainstream is the actual, indisputable game changer that Apple's managed to fuel with the introduction of Touch ID. As an added bonus, if your day job is to sell security internally to C-level decision makers, here's a potential way in to start those security conversations. Remember to leave the propeller hat behind in your desk drawer.

Usable identification - the key to a world without passwords

Consumer devices offer the best vehicle in bringing non-password based authentication mechanisms to the mainstream much the same way social networks have brought identity federation to the masses. It is the best shot we have of eventually killing passwords off for good. If that day comes, passwords will more than likely be replaced by a combination of biometric and token-based mechanisms.

The inevitable rise of wearable computing in addition to the ubiquity of smart phones will result in an abundance of options (compared to a world before smart phones) in available tokens to use as part of the identification dance known as authentication.

Signing on to a site using your social network is not commonly referred to as identity federation; that's what security people call it. But it works because it's usable, although this is at the expense of some security. Social identities help consumers clear the security hurdle to the point where the word "security" doesn't rate a mention during the authentication and/or registration process. Social networks however, still use passwords.

Passwords on their own are insecure. In the absence of other ways to identify ourselves (i.e. multi-factor authentication), a lot of damage can be done to our digital lives that are difficult to recover from. Also, let's not forget about the number of hacks suffered by multiple sites that included leaked passwords. But they remain because the username and password combination is a design pattern we have been trained to understand and accept. Because we have been conditioned this way, passwords are inherently usable. Therein lies the challenge in moving past them.

Good authentication practices have always included multiple factors. In other words, passwords on their own just won't do. In addition to usability, cost is almost always a prohibiting factor. It costs an organisation a lot of money to procure the hardware required to support authentication mechanisms beyond passwords. Wouldn't it be nice if consumers had tokens they could use that were as secure as these expensive ones organisations currently have to buy?

Some organisations have weighed the risks against costs and decided that SMS tokens are good enough to be considered as an acceptable second factor beyond passwords. If you've looked into this, you know SMS messages are not actually that secure. But for a lot of scenarios, they are "good enough" when combined with the primary password. If organisations want to move beyond this however, it gets very expensive.

It took well-known brands with a significant amount of consumer influence (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) to bring identity federation to the masses. Similarly, it will take at least one well-known brand with a significant amount of consumer influence to fork-lift-point us down the non-password oriented identification path.

In the case of authentication however, there is the cost consideration that was not present in the consumer identity federation equation. How can we put stronger authentication factors in the hands of consumers in a cost effective manner? Ideally, we would make consumers buy these tokens, but who would want to do that just for a bit of extra security and a more disjointed user experience? Enter large, well-known consumer brand with the requisite influence.

Apple, the king of making technology usable is that organisation. Their announcement yesterday of the Touch ID fingerprint sensor on the iPhone 5s is the latest (and loudest) in a recent spate of devices that have the potential in helping achieve the right balance of usability, cost and security at scale. Rich Mogull's article on TidBITS is the best one I've read if you want to understand some of the security aspects.

Beyond Cupertino, there are a few recent developments that will hopefully be caught up in the Apple authentication snowball that is rolling down security mountain:

• Nymi is a device which wraps around our wrist and uses our unique cardiac rhythm to authenticate and identify us to things around us. There are unknowns around how or if this will actually work, including some more knowledgable about cardiac rhythms than I, who remain sceptical. Dave Kearns however, is a little more enthusiastic, as are most other people on Twitter. I for one, hope it actually works because the potential scenarios are interesting, exciting even.
• Let's not forget about the impending barrage of smart watch releases over the next year, starting with Samsung's Galaxy Gear. Apple of course, has also been working on the rumoured iWatch. Even car manufacturers like Nissan are clamouring to wrap themselves around our wrists. While smart watches aren't inherently security devices, they are effectively another token that could be used in the authentication process. For example, the fact that a smart watch is mine and is paired with my smart phone (or car in the case of Nissan) at the point of identification (authentication) gives the system identifying me a level of assurance that I am who I claim to be.

As with any new technology, there are potential security implications that need to be analysed and I'm sure this will be done by many when the devices are made available to the general public. But Apple Touch ID, Nymi, smart watch manufacturers and other wearable devices we have yet to hear about have the potential to make security invisible.

Security is the enemy of usability. Studies have shown that when presented with a secure option or an easy option to perform a task, people almost always choose the easy option. The trick is to make the easy option also the secure option. The devices mentioned aim to make our lives better. The fact that they have the potential to make our lives easier while improving security is exciting.

Here's to a future where we don't need passwords, but can stay secure while remaining blissfully ignorant of that fact.

Login to the real world with your Facebook account

The following is an excerpt from an article I just wrote for CSO Australia.

Ultimately, context is the key to understanding the appropriate use of social identities. While we may be happy browsing a retailer’s website logged in with our Facebook account for a personalised experience, we are not going to be making the payment with it. Organisations that get the balance right while understanding appropriate use and context can begin their social-enablement journey with their eyes open.

Check out the rest of it here.

IT security implications of BYO* for enterprises

This is the post I promised I'd write when I talked about Cloud and BYOD as part of my "Do security like a start-up or get fired" series.

I created and delivered this presentation for events in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. The presentations received some press coverage, in particular this ZDNet article written by Michael Lee which garnered over 110 Tweets and 70+ LinkedIn shares including mentions from the likes of Cisco, IBM, SAP, Good Technology, Palo Alto Networks and of course NetIQ.

As this is a presentation masquerading as a blog post, it will be different to my usual posts. There are a bunch of images littered throughout, which are all slides from my presentation deck. As a result, you'll see some text as images because they were slides. I've kept it this way instead of typing everything out to give you a better feel for the actual presentation.

---

IT security implications of BYO* for enterprises

The BYO in the title stands for “bring your own”. The term dominating the headlines is Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) but it's about so much more than just the 'D' in BYOD. The use of the “*” is a reference to the fact it’s not just about employees bringing their own devices into the work place; it's about a trend towards employees bringing their own technology into the workplace.

I’m going to cover 3 things:

1. Why BYO is top of mind.
2. Understanding BYO.
3. How to secure BYO.

If BYOD was a viral video, it would be this one.

Your barista’s doing it.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt is doing it.

It’s the viral video of 2012, holds the Guinness world record for the most likes on YouTube and has spawned more spoof videos than any other this year.

My point, other than being able to work Gangnam Style into my presentation, is that all everyone wants to talk about this year in the enterprise is BYOD. Sure, people still talk about Cloud, but in the words of the Black Eyed Peas, that’s so two thousand and late. So, the real title of my presentation is...

How to secure the Gangnam Style of Enterprise IT

While we’re on Google, I thought I’d see what their algorithms thought about the BYO meme since we rely so much on search today. It’s a convenient, mildly scientific way to get at what’s top of mind in terms of things we want to know about or find solutions for.

As most of you know, Google gives you suggestions as you type. Here’s what “bring your own” reveals.

Three out of the four suggestions are related to the same thing.

Some come up with what’s known as the A to Z of Google search terms. Here’s one for “bring your own”.

There’s a few interesting ones on the list which I won’t comment on. The point of this is that you can classify the list into 2 distinct categories.

The driver for BYOD is essentially the combination of these categories crossing over into the enterprise.

But the key message I want to make is this.

That's right. You cannot deal with BYOD by dealing with BYOD. By the end of the presentation (blog post), it should be clear why this is true.

When I ask this question, almost everyone says "no". In reality, almost everyone has. We just know it better as the five stages of grief.

In speaking with organisations about BYOD, I’ve found they tend to go through the five stages.

This is where IT says no. It’s all too difficult and presents too much of a risk to the organisation so it’s much easier just to deny everyone the privilege. They also pretend it’s not happening and hope that they will never have to deal with it once they’ve said no.

The “no” answer, usually falls on deaf ears. IT gets asked again and they keep saying “no”, until they get the question from people at the executive level. In fact, this is commonly the compelling reason that forces IT to relax their stance and find a way to get it done. I’ve actually sat in a meeting before with one of the large Australian banks and had the head of security step out of the meeting to take a call about the CEO wanting to get access to corporate email via their iPad. Of course, it got done despite the fact that it broke policy.

Once you make single exception, there are always other exceptions. Eventually, it becomes too difficult to manage and IT has to relent, but only to a certain extent. Usually, IT lets you have limited access and this starts with email. The interesting thing is that there is a perception that email is one of the least sensitive applications and hence presents minimal risk to the organisation. This is why it’s usually one of the first systems that are moved to the Cloud. The reality is that corporate email is one of the most sensitive applications any organisation has. The fact is however, this is usually what happens.

This is where IT realises that even though they thought they addressed the issue by compromising, an increasing number of people continue to go around them. Users are a smart bunch at getting around IT departments and IT security policy, especially when we have full control of the device we’re using. At this point, IT has 2 options:

1. Stick their head in the sand, pretend it’s not happening and attempt to lock everything down thus getting in the way of business.
2. Deal with the situation at hand in a constructive, business-centric manner. We forget all too often that IT is a business enabler. IT security, should also be a business enabler.

Every organisation will get to this point whether they like it or not. It’s just a matter of time. To remain secure and evolve with the times, you have to. It’s better to go in with eyes wide open than to dig your heels in and pretend it’s not happening.

The reality today is that most organisations are somewhere between bargaining and acceptance, skewed towards the bargaining stage. The point to take away here is that when it comes to the freight train that is BYOD...

Photo credit: Steve Wilson

You can’t have a track that ends.

Photo credit: Cassandra Jowett

It has to look more like this.

Photo credit: Les Chatfield

Where you have well defined paths, but allow flexibility to choose the one that is appropriate for the situation and destination.

You can’t put a wall up or make it the end of the line otherwise people, usually the ones with the authority to make you change your stance, find ways around you. They will eventually replace you with someone who can be that creative "yes" person the modern enterprise needs.

You may have noticed that I've been using the BYOD term a lot. But as I said up front, when you actually have to deal with it, you will quickly realise it’s actually about more than dealing with devices. To deal with BYOD, you have to handle a raft of other issues. BYOD is essentially about handling employees using what they choose for business purposes, not just a device of choice. It is about the Consumerisation of IT and its intersection with Enterprise IT.

Since we’re talking about transport, let me talk about airports.

Photo credit: Oliver Mallich

Everyone generally knows how airports function, but we never take the time to think about it. We typically meander through because we want to get to our destination with as little fuss as possible. Airports are businesses and perform an essential function, but need to be self-sustainable from a financial standpoint. They provide infrastructure services to support the experiences we have in an airport; fuel for the planes, spaces for shops, airline lounges and so on. But when you strip everything back, there are two essential things about an airport that we cannot do without.

The first is ensuring that passengers are able to get to their destination safely. As travellers, we want safety. Without safety, we would not fly anywhere. That’s why we put up with the painful security checks at every airport.

Photo credit: Inha Leex Hale

The second is ensuring that the airport experience is as pleasant as possible, even though it may not seem that way. As consumers, we are demanding and expect more than just “pleasant”. Anything less than good and we complain that the airport is not up to standard. We want to be impressed, even if we won't admit to it. For example, Kuala Lumpur international airport has a jungle walk inside the terminal.

Back to safety; to minimise risk and ensure an acceptable level, airports and the relevant services within the terminal make us jump through all sorts of hoops to gain access to things. Airports control access to designated areas and services based on forms of identification combined with monitoring activity and observed behaviour. The only reason this works is because of identity.

But not just any identity. The key is that real-world identities are scalable.

Photo credit: Stefano Chiarelli

If you’ve seen (or read) my Identity in an agile world presentation, you’ll remember that the reason real world identities are scalable is because: for access to things, it doesn’t matter who I am; it matters what I am.

This is why the fact that my boarding pass...

Gets me onto a plane...

Photo credit: Jay-Oh

Has nothing to do with me being Ian Yip. It's because the boarding pass is an acceptable credential to gain access to the plane as a passenger. It just needs to be genuine and have the correct date and flight number on it. Even when it is cross-checked with a passport on international flights prior to boarding, the name on the boarding pass is irrelevant. The staff at the gate are simply checking that they match, which raises the level of assurance of the credential (boarding pass) I'm using.

When we fly, we have a choice. Imagine if the only choice we had when we fly was this plane.

Photo credit: Tim Bunce

And this is where you sit.

Photo credit: Bill Abbott

Would you want to use it? What would you think if that was your only option? Would you pay more to fly this in this other plane?

Photo credit: Vox Efx

And your seats looked like this?

Photo credit: Andy Mitchell

Right about now, you're probably thinking...

In the context of the topic at hand, various aspects our experiences in airports are relevant. If you think about the airport as being the organisation, the rest of the things on this list map logically.

The key point being that we have a choice of airlines, just like we have a choice of devices if corporate policies allow. Airports manage to remain secure despite the choices they present us. Sure there are inconveniences we have to deal with but we pay the price for the benefits.

Now, let’s consider this point. Would we lock the planes down but let everyone wander around freely? This only works at airshows, not in a real airport. We would never use an airport if this was the case. So why do so many organisations attempt to deal with BYOD using only Mobile Device Management (MDM) technologies? Doing so is effectively locking the plane down but leaving everything else open. MDM is a tactical feature, not an organisational strategy.

To deal with BYOD and subsequently the consumerisation of IT, you need all the other things that make an airport secure while balancing it with the flexibility of experiences a good airport provides. In other words...

Remember the jungle within Kuala Lumpur’s terminal?

Airports add services like this to make the experience better. It balances out all the inconveniences we have to endure in making our way through airports. Psychologically, this is similar to why employees are starting make their own choices when using applications to do their jobs.

How many of us have tried to use an enterprise application (e.g. ERP or CRM) and complained about how bad it was? They end up not getting used and we revert to something basic like spreadsheets, which aren't all that nice to use anyway. We’ve been behaving this way for quite some time and have been forced to get used to it due to the lack of available options. The difference today is that the innovation in the mobile space has extended to applications and we’re able to use great, consumer-grade applications for business needs (which aren't necessarily sanctioned by corporate IT). This is the driver behind users bringing their own applications, or if we follow the BYO meme, the Bring Your Own Application (BYOA) trend that is upon us.

Consumerisation is now extending to our social logins. The following options are arguably the dominant identities we use online: Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn.

Given the lines between personal and business are starting to blur, it is inevitable that our social identities start to extend into the enterprise. While we may not be at the stage where they can be used as being highly trusted identifiers for critical systems, they do provide a way for enterprises to use a lightweight identifier for their employees and customers.

In fact, a lot of organisations are looking at using social logins for their customers. Retailers are the most common type of organisation here, although the UK government announced recently that they were looking at allowing this for citizens. Washington State in the US allows voters to register through Facebook. We haven’t gotten to the stage where most organisations are actively trying to implement the same thing for their employees, but given that many will have the foundational components in place for their customers, it’s not a stretch to extend it to employees and provide a lightweight identifier internally for less critical systems without forcing employees to sign in. For example, my iPad is signed in to Twitter by default at the operating system layer. With the latest release of iOS, Apple added Facebook to sit side-by-side with our Twitter identity. In other words, it's relatively easy to Bring Your Own Identity (BYOI) to your day job, especially when you BYOD.

What about Cloud? Could employees conceivably bring their own Cloud?

Guess what? It’s already happening with business units procuring their own SaaS applications without the knowledge of IT. This has been caused by IT security saying no all the time and instead of trying to negotiate, they simple use a credit card and pay for a service with the approval of the business head. This is more common than most of us realise.

I said “pay”, but this typically starts off free. I’ll give you a simple example. Have you used Google Apps or Dropbox to store documents so you can easily collaborate with colleagues? It’s for business use and it’s free! Guess what? You’re bringing your own cloud in the form of SaaS. Again, instead of saying “no”, IT security departments are better off saying “yes” and working with the business users to mitigate the risks this poses.

Could we go further? What about the more technically minded that aren’t necessarily part of IT spinning up a new server instance within a Cloud service provider and building their own applications on top of this without the involvement of IT? This will be less common than bringing your own Cloud in the form of SaaS, but this vector actually poses more of a security risk than SaaS because someone who is technical enough to do so isn’t necessarily trained in IT security. In fact, the unfortunate situation we have today is that many technical people and developers aren’t sufficiently trained in IT security. This is something that urgently needs to be fixed. Also, the further down the infrastructure stack you go, the harder it is to secure and that's exactly what happens when someone spins up new IT infrastructure in the Cloud.

Apart from BYOD, I’ve mentioned a few other BYO acronyms.

This is by no means the final list. It’s still early days and the list will evolve. Organisations need to be agile enough to deal with trends and issues as they arise. As many of us found with Cloud and BYOD, these things creep up a lot more quickly than we expect and if you aren’t prepared, it makes things difficult, especially when it comes to security.

You can generalise the various approaches to dealing with BYO* into the following list, three of which are tactical and one of which is strategic.

By tactical, I mean that you can address one aspect of security, but you will find holes in other areas. It’s better to adopt the strategic approach so that you can react more quickly and focus on what it is you’re trying to do. Strategic approaches allow you to address a larger "risk and threat surface area" with less long-term spend.

In focusing, you should be thinking about what you are actually trying to protect. In reality, it’s the information.

Notice how I’ve said information and not just data. There’s a subtle distinction best illustrated by a joke about all the PINs in the world being exposed. It was simply a list of all the numbers from 0000 to 9999. That list is simply data. Add things like account numbers to the PIN and you have information. The difference between information and data is context.

What this means is that the strategic approach to cover your bases in the long term and become agile, is to focus on protecting the information. You do that by controlling access to the information, knowing about the identities accessing the information, what is being done to the information, when things are being done and subsequently being able to react quickly when appropriate.

I’ve already mentioned a few challenges. Here’s a list of some important ones that need to be addressed if you want to deal with the consumerisation of IT within the enterprise effectively.

Many of them have to do with human behaviour, which cannot be fixed by technology alone. It’s about altering culture. It’s about rethinking security.

There are two on this list that I want to focus on for a few moments:

• The first is skills. As your IT environment evolves, so do the skills required. One of the biggest challenges enterprises face is that many of people with the skills required are shying away from working in the enterprise due to the perceived lack of innovation. They prefer to work for small companies. The challenge for enterprises is to change that perception and you do that by changing the culture and the way you do IT.
• The second is the tricky issue of privacy. Given that devices hold a lot of personal data, it becomes paramount that organisations do not store employee personal data in the enterprise. In fact, one of the reasons many MDM deployments fail is due to the privacy concerns of employees and the concern that their employers are monitoring them during non-business hours. On the other hand, many organisations don’t want anything to do with employee personal information due to potential legal ramifications they may be subject to. Inevitably, for things to work, there needs to be compromise, but not at the expense of the requirement to NOT use more personal information in a business context than required or allowed (by the employee and regulatory requirements).

That said, there are benefits to be had. I’ve already mentioned a few, but here is a list of the top 5 benefits many organisations cite.

Notice I don’t have something commonly cited in the list of benefits and that is in the reduction of hardware costs. It seems logical that in not having to buy employees new equipment, you save money. But these costs will manifest themselves in other ways, the most obvious being the expenditure required in dealing with BYO.

Here’s a list of things that will help secure the Gangnam Style of the enterprise.

It’s not an exhaustive list, nor are they all appropriate for every organisation, but it’s a good starting point. To expand on each in the list:

• Evolve from no people to creative yes people - I’ve alluded to this a few times. Stop saying no. Say yes and be creative about mitigating the risks or people will go around you. Also, your boss will fire you and hire someone who can say yes while managing risk.
• Have an acceptable use policy for devices that is easy to understand - The first step down the BYO journey tends to be the drafting of a policy. But it is essential that it’s easy to understand. How many times have we blindly agreed to a policy because it’s too difficult to understand?
• Enforce access control policies - These should rely on identity, context and policy to protect resources. Do not allow a device to access resources if systems cannot determine the user’s identity, if it does not meet compliance standards or if it does not have prerequisite software installed. Apply context by restricting access based on factors such as location and whether the connection is encrypted.
• Automate the remediation process - Make it as simple as possible for the user to ensure device compliance by automating a majority of the remediation process. Do not rely on the user to know that they need to download and install a list of software components.
• Monitor events and activities - Monitor all devices accessing resources on the corporate network using a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution that can provide auditable, actionable intelligence and can be tied to identities. In an environment filled with partially trusted, potentially compromised devices, visibility is paramount and incident response time critical.
• Use scalable identities - Reduce operational overhead in environments with many identity sources in a secure, standards-based manner by federating user identities across segmented zones and rely on trust-levels to enforce access controls. As an example, consider the overlap between internal employee identities and their online identities that I alluded to earlier when talking about BYOI. Users with their own devices are usually already logged in to their online accounts. For ease of use and transparent single sign-on, security policies can be implemented to support levels of assurance (LOA). If an employee is already signed into Twitter, internal applications can utilise that identity, but at a lower level of trust. So, an employee can potentially use their Twitter credentials to access non-sensitive parts of the intranet. But if they want to access corporate email, they are required to provide their employee credentials thus enforcing a higher LOA (thus "stepping-up" their authentication level) and asserting with greater confidence (and reduced risk) that the employee is who they claim to be.
• Provide secure devices - An alternative to allowing employees to buy and bring their own devices is to let them pick what they want and pay for it with the trade-off being that they have to allow the organisation to load required software and implement relevant controls based on IT security policies. This presents a win-win situation for both organisation and employee. They use a device of their choice without having to pay for it and can access the corporate environment in a secure and compliant manner.
• Encrypt sensitive information - Encrypt any information placed on a non-standard device that is deemed to be company property. This may include the employee’s corporate email.

In summary, if you don’t remember anything else, please at least keep the following 5 things front of mind.