Evaluating, Promoting and Managing Expectations of Emerging Security Technologies in the Enterprise

Enno Rey
February 19, 2008

Abstract

In the last few years, enterprise and government organizations concerned with choosing long-term IT security strategies have had to deal with a wide variety of choices, from the recently developed technologies such as Trusted Computing, massive OS virtualization, and new non-IP network architectures, to the resurgent paradigms such as the Mandatory Access Control policies and Multi-level security systems. Not surprisingly, a perfect fit between a given security technology and the security goals of a particular organization is an extremely rare occasion; most often an external assessment is necessary to assess whether a chosen combination of technologies actually fits the company's or government agency's security needs. Moreover, the security researchers' job is not done when the technical part of an assessment is over, because it is crucial for them to communicate its results to the enterprise leaders in such a way that they can understand them and make informed decisions.

In this talk, I will discuss our experiences of conducting practical vulnerability research into the latest enterprise IT technologies, and bringing it to our enterprise and government customers, both helping technologies conducive to achieving the customer's actual goals to get traction, and dissuading customers from popular choices that did not appear to be a good match for their needs.

Bio

Enno Rey is a German security researcher who runs a company specialized in performing security assessments for large corporations and governmental agencies. Amongst his main interests are network technologies (e.g. MPLS, VoIP) and operating system security architectures. He's a regular speaker at hacker conferences (Black Hat, ShmooCon and the like) and network events (including FutureNet, Carrier Ethernet World Congress) and author of several books and articles.