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May 15, 2021 11:14 pm

How America Will Improve Its Cybersecurity

Politico writes:President Joe Biden on Wednesday ordered a sweeping overhaul of the federal government's approach to cybersecurity, from the software that agencies buy to the security measures that they use to block hackers, as his administration continues grappling with vulnerabilities exposed by a massive digital espionage campaign carried out by the Russian government... Biden's order requires agencies to encrypt their data, update plans for securely using cloud hosting services and enabling multi-factor authentication... It also creates a cyber incident review group, modeled on the National Transportation Safety Board that investigates aviation, railroad and vehicle crashes, to improve the government's response to cyberattacks. And it sets the stage for requiring federal contractors to report data breaches and meet new software security standards. The directive, which sets deadlines for more than 50 different actions and reports, represents a wide-ranging attempt by the new Biden administration to close glaring cybersecurity gaps that it discovered upon taking office and prevent a repeat of Moscow's SolarWinds espionage operation, which breached nine federal agencies and roughly 100 companies... In addition to requiring agencies to deploy multi-factor authentication, the order requires them to install endpoint detection and response software, which generates warnings when it detects possible hacks. It also calls for agencies to redesign their networks using a philosophy known as zero-trust architecture, which assumes that hackers are inside a network and focuses on preventing them from jumping from one computer to another... Officials say current federal monitoring programs are outdated — they can only spot previously identified malware, and they can't protect increasingly pervasive cloud platforms... Biden's executive order attempts to prevent another SolarWinds by requiring information technology service providers to meet new security requirements in order to do business with the federal government. These contractors will need to alert the government if they are hacked and share information about the intrusion. The order "reflects a fundamental shift in our mindset from incident response to prevention, from talking about security to doing security," one senior administration official told reporters. The order notes "persistent and increasingly sophisticated malicious cyber campaigns" that "threaten the public sector, the private sector, and ultimately the American people's security and privacy," calling for "bold changes and significant investments." But the order also argues that "In the end, the trust we place in our digital infrastructure should be proportional to how trustworthy and transparent that infrastructure is..." warning that "The development of commercial software often lacks transparency, sufficient focus on the ability of the software to resist attack, and adequate controls to prevent tampering by malicious actors." To that end, the order also requires guidelines for a "Software Bill of Materials" or "SBOM," a "formal record containing the details and supply chain relationships of various components used in building software... analogous to a list of ingredients on food packaging."[A]n SBOM allows the builder to make sure those components are up to date and to respond quickly to new vulnerabilities. Buyers can use an SBOM to perform vulnerability or license analysis, both of which can be used to evaluate risk in a product. Those who operate software can use SBOMs to quickly and easily determine whether they are at potential risk of a newly discovered vulnerability. A widely used, machine-readable SBOM format allows for greater benefits through automation and tool integration. The SBOMs gain greater value when collectively stored in a repository that can be easily queried by other applications and systems. Understanding the supply chain of software, obtaining an SBOM, and using it to analyze known vulnerabilities are crucial in managing risk. ZDNet reports that "the Linux and open-source community are already well on their way to meeting the demands of this new security order," citing security projects in both its Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) and from the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF).

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