Understanding Risk Management and Compliance, What Is Different After Monday, July 13, 2015

I was between flights when I read an interesting speech by Commissioner Luis A. Aguilar (Securities and Exchange Commission).

The title was really strange: “A Threefold Cord — Working Together to Meet the Pervasive Challenge of Cyber-Crime”.

Ecclesiastes and cyber-crime… We live in the 21st century!

We read in Ecclesiastes 4:12: “Though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him — and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.”

We read in the Commissioner’s speech: “It’s an old joke that only the paranoid survive. In the cybersecurity context, it might just be true.”

The threefold cord (we called this approach overlapping controls in Sarbanes-Oxley) is a symbol for strength.

Read more at Number 3 below.

We have interesting developments in the Domain Name System-Based Security for Electronic Mail project.

You may know that the Domain Name System (DNS) serves as the phone book for the Internet, by translating human-friendly computer hostnames into IP addresses. For example, the domain name www.example.com translates to the addresses 93.184.216.119 (IPv4) and 2606:2800:220:6d:26bf:1447:1097:aa7 (IPv6).

The original design of the Domain Name System (DNS) did not include security. Instead it was designed to be a scalable distributed system. The Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) attempts to add security, while maintaining backwards compatibility.

Today we have an interesting paper about the Domain Name System-Based Security for Electronic Mail project that provides trustworthy email exchanges across organizational boundaries. The project includes authentication of mail servers, signing and encryption of email, and binding crypto key certificates to the servers.

Domain Name System Security (DNSSEC) protocols will be used to authenticate server addresses and certificates by binding the X.509 certificates used for Transport Layer Security (TLS) to DNS names verified by DNSSEC.

Read more at Number 8 below. Welcome to the Top 10 list.