Time to Revisit the Debate Between x86 Wintel and IBM z/OS Mainframe Platforms

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it is time to revisit the security debate between the x86 wintel and the ibm zeos mainframe platform the reason is that the z14 ibm zos will entail pervasive encryption by poor friend and nick benigno okay and um if you're just interested in that picture there that was from an article in 1995 from the new york times of um the 2600 used to have that well they still have meetings in the um um citicorp center in the once every first friday of every month and the person sitting down giving the talk is me so i've been around a very long time and i used to be photographing so look in silhouette but you can see my jaw and

my glasses today data breaches are inevitable however if the data is encrypted there's no value to hackers

in information technology in the early 1960s the ibm 360 computer changed information technology and that it was up properly and doubly compatible with software written the personal computer by ibm was another paradigm shift apple computer and other power line shifts gates and jobs visit xerox palo alto and his birth for the graphical user interface they realized that having a gui made computers and personal feels very useful that there's no longer you have to use online commands and again the xerox management did not realize that they did not discover it on the standard gates and jobs they had the prepared mind so they could evaluate and understand the importance of it next paradigm shift is the ibm z14

the system enabling pervasive encryption and again it enables phrase impression but you do have to build rules to enable it it does not come uh the encryption is not uh automatic when you turn on the box the next major paradigm shift and this is important is quantum computing and unfortunately it looks like the chinese are ahead of us with that the history of the mainframe 360 computer the ibm mainframe conveys during 1960s this was time in corporations with migrating from pencil and paper spreadsheets and accounting legislative computers uh this was a major revolution because at that time people have very little experience with computers uh the problem with the confused is there was nothing tangible to feel

or see corporate financial records were consigned to bits and bytes on a computer again this was a time when people have very little understanding computers and what happens if somebody massages or when it puts the data on the computers and that also spawned the the creation of edp orders uh really a um group that sort of fell into um i think hard times history of the x86 computer until 8086 was a start it was extremely successful it was sort of having a microprocessor for everybody evolution 80 186 286 386 486 uh again the x36 was a general purpose microprocessor and it was probably the most popular and the most successful more successful than um motorola's microprocessor ultimately

they migrated to the i3 i5 i7 and i9 keeping most of the x86 legacy and again it's um basically the cheap microprocessor to use in um blade servers if you want to just uh increase um massive computer power you just keep adding on and earning on

third-party preachers third-party breaches remain a dominant security challenge organizations with over 63 percent of the bridges linked to a third party and again this is people dying in or going through the internet onto your server your main frame their major problem because you do need to have excess parties to have access it could be an insurance company a bank a pension fund but again you're talking to everybody else and um their major problem and probably the biggest problem that i see and since i'm uh administrative a large mainstream side i see this as a significant issue no matter how good you have your security on your site um when you allow people in you can have

problems okay this is something i've talked about a bit the zos operating system and def con black hat um a number of years ago they had somebody remember his uh community like he was fortran and he needed to talk to def con and black hat and he had access to a mainstream computer that was not really it's not kept up in other words um it's not updated with the new security fixtures uh it's a delaware the people who the bracket was the security package it's an ibm security package it was not again kept up the standards um and again if you have any type of uh security either x86 machine whatever unix or linux machine

or whether ibm if you don't maintain the security levels if you don't maintain any type of fixes to the operating system it's going to have all sorts of problems and this machine that he did demonstrate had tremendous number of problems and a number of the problems which one problem in particular it said that um if you use the su command on this machine to get become a super user in other words on the unix linux side you could become a uid of zero which is a super user well if you have a linux or unix box out on the internet and you don't have to say you command or the command becomes super user protected it's not going to last long

and um the def con of black hat people either they were not that technically sophisticated really there's something wrong here or they're just enthralled about uh an ibm mainframe having problems i don't know what it was but uh it was very deceptive by the way i did know about this talk ahead of time and since i spoke at def con a number of times i asked can i be on stage with them commenting on the security exposures and def con said no again if you go to any security conference including death kind of black hat you do have to take everything with a little grain of salt you have to do some checking up on it

let's just talk about the trademarks ibm iraq f is a security product name called racket access access security function rack f resource access uh security function it's an old uh thing that's been updated many times i think it was first created in the late 1970s ca7 and top secret also security products computer associates owns them unix i believe is owned as a trademark from the open group in the united states microsoft windows windows nt trademarks of microsoft corporation in the united states okay the rainbow series in the late 70s the defense bomb created the rainbow series and it was really a series of books to create security on computers systems the orange book has hd ratings the green

book password management like ping cover channel analysis glossary of security terms chromebook trusted facility management um the only book that i see reference today and people will say it's it's obsolete is the orange book and um uh i will go into some interesting aspects of the artwork the orange book has security classifications from d to a e is minimal production reserved for systems that fail evaluation c1 discretion and access controls um but you don't need to distinguish between individual uses and types of access c2 controlled access protection the system distinguishes between individual users types of access gives object reviews and the features required okay the b1 is where you see a demarcation line in production

it is uh mandatory access control basically you have security labels required for all subjects and storage objects b2 is a structured protection again mandatory access controls sensitivity labels required for all subjects and objects trusted path requirements b3 again security domains again mandatory access controls access control lists specifically required in other words you do not have an object out there it's a data set out there that has no access control list everything needs to be required and the system must protect against covert channels a1 is verified design again mandatory access formal top level specifications required configuration management procedures must be enforced throughout entire system life cycle in other words you have a security group that enforces

it and you may also have a qa security group that validates either qa security group or an order group that validates it um maybe not at the um real time level but definitely within a week's time or less a1 self protection and run sufferings monitoring are implemented across the computing base tcp verified the source code level now we have an interesting matrix we have the discretionary access control again the d1 level is not the level is not in this matrix because everything at the fail so doesn't have matrix discretionary access control again that goes from c1 to a1 controlled access where you have uh access this which uh identifies user against c2 day one mandatory access control again it's b1

through to a1 and um there are a number of other labels the other requirements that as you go down the list the b1 b2 b3 or the a1 have to fulfill let's talk about discussion access controls versus mandatory access controls i have a little um text here but somebody can work in the payroll department they can copy over the file with discretionary access controls and since many of their friends working in accounts payable or other systems so basically it's at the discretion person who has access to that object under mandatory access controls you have a type of token or security level or something on the file that identifies that it's under mandatory access controls and the people who can see it are the

only ones who have that same type of token or security level on their id to see it so if you copy over a payroll file that's under mandatory access controls and try to send it to somebody who is outside of payroll they would not see because they would have this type of token or security level warnings so they'd be impossible to see how no stay here how do you break these uh access controls mandatory access controls simple you hook up a instead of having a dumb terminal you have a um a small terminal sometimes x86 box or any type of box running that is smart um and uh you can display the payroll file which

has um even though it has a token on that on the mainframe you do a text file you cut and paste paste it in your email and send to everybody else every woman and child in the free world so that's how you get around mandatory access controls uh again when i talk about mandate i'm talking about only at to be one level okay the next one the next security control is against some people say obsolete well evaluation assurance level uh again i have the um link that down there um it's quite impressive uh let's go again next time okay these are the evaluation assurance levels um and a little dry mouth do you want to

just read them off oh sure yeah um valuation insurance bubble so eel1 that's going to be fully tested l2 is structurally tested l3 tested and checked yeah l4 is going to be methodically designed and and reviewed yay five similarly formula designed and tested eal6 semi-formally verified designed and tested and eal7 is formally verified designed and tested well don't change general yet let me go back in um a lot of the security um like sans and other uh groups that give security tests most of the time you will not hear anything about the orange book or the er levels and you would not know what systems are at those levels what systems are not at those levels

so again this is going to fill in some information for people who maybe they have a cissp or other level and um give them a feeling for um evaluations at um the different levels okay next slide this is basically in my opinion it's incorrect try to give the equivalency between the um orange book european multiset levels and the common criteria levels again the b1 is where you have mandatory access controls and an el4 is not mandatory access control uh i'm not sure who set this up but you should be aware that uh you cannot directly correlate one to the other although as you go down the line from ear one to seven the uh security controls

increase as you go from d to a one the security controls increase the european thing eeo zero to ea six i haven't seen many people use that i'm not that familiar with them but it does exist and again let me talk about some more about the yellow levels uh next slide these show the assurance class of what you need to have for each of the ell levels from one to seven and as you start to get to um it has all of these development guidance documents life cycle support and which really should be developed lifecycle support security target evaluation tests and then vulnerability assessment um you know obviously it's beyond the scope of what we're going to do here but

these show levels assurance family and these show the necessary conditions for these different levels to have and this is pretty much inclusive for the next slide um these shows certified product by charlotte's level and certification date if you go down the slides from eal one to seven you're gonna find that they're very few and fewer at the el six and seven levels they're more costly to do because need more evaluation um again it gives you a breadth of understanding of how difficult it is and how much you have to do in testing to evaluate these levels so this should give you an appreciation that these levels do mean something again some people say they're obsolete i see people

using ea levels in the orange levels all the time i don't really see too much else el my device the internet of things i have an eel one two three i put the three in there i should not have put the three in there um i've seen internet of things devices have either one or two or no yeah or level at all in other words people the internet of things you're putting these gadgets on your network to provide some type of function and to give you an example that could be arduino which is a microprocessor it could be raspberry pi again these are not things that you need licenses to you just buy the product for very little

money and you can go up and running but again um adino has as far as i know no eel level at all raspberry pi um there was this um computer science student for his master's thesis who did evaluate raspberry pi and he did evaluate for some criteria valid criteria but he did not put it at indiana level of anything um again it was a massive student it was a smart thing to do for a massive thesis but i think that he should have looked at some type of an el level or orange level and again it was good um again raspberry pi has many holes in it if you're going to put it on your your

internet of things or your network eal4 is windows sun linux red hat it's eo4 is really the first level where you do have security that you've identified users you have an access control list and where you're really putting some type of security interface in there that uh you could allow people or your your employees to use eal5 ibm l paws are el5 and basically it almost means you're a-gapped that is between the logical partitions in an ibm system they're air-gapped if i want to get to one l-part to another um i have to write specific security rules to do that and also using tc pip it's almost as if you have two separate um computers logical partitions an ibm

machine you could create logical partitions in other words if you're not really familiar like you think of vmware where you can run logical machines under um the same cpu again um under an x86 machine running um vmware i'm not sure what the ai love between the machines is if you have a multi-core um advanced micro devices or intel uh uh device i'm again i'm not sure what the levels are whether or not you can get to those levels i think i read somewhere that you can get to the other levels um i don't think it's by design again um it's somebody who write a message thesis or maybe a phd thesis on it um yeah six

that's when we get really serious about things and um you want something that can operate uh cannot be spoofed or interfered with aviation operating systems tend to have that again fly-by-wire for the f2 f-16 f-35 the air bus again if you're flying in the flyby one machine running with this operating you want it highly secure el 7 is very hard um level to get out again if you look back at the swipe before very few systems are available level a smart card was evaluated i think it was a samsung smart card that was evaluated at the l7 level again the smart card is like a challenge card and you can um you'll do a google search on this and uh

look at it okay next one okay this is the reference for windows at an el4 level so you can look that up and this is the um reference for rdml part and a5 level again you can look that one up too okay now we gotta go addressing a little something different once a second just been talking to you guys there are two um internal configurations of the most popular computers um of the mainframe and everything else um album of many frames called ebcdic that's the internal configuration of what the data looks like absolutely ibm mainframe it's not change sensitive um paul in caps does not equal poor and small letters ascii 2 is windows linux

unix uh everything else on the sun i think has ascii too it's case sensitive call is not equal to a pull on small letters and ibm main from z os unix side uses that next line the ibm zeros mainframe has two sides of the traditional absolute side and an open unix side which uses ascii 2. in other words on the sloping unix side you can easily just transmit files from x86 server to the unit side and then ascii you know he converted everything else next slide now here again we wouldn't progress a little bit with um symmetrical versus asymmetrical in symmetrical the key to encrypt is the same key to decrypt uh it's not really very useful commerce

it's like a one time pad in a sense you have to transmit the uh key pgp uh pretty good encryption uh that was created about 1991 by um by the name of zimmerman and um i think the defense department took exception to that because they considered encryption basically a type of um of uh weaponization in other words they couldn't read it an interesting thing is that um i've been mainframes going back to i think 1976 did have encryption of the passwords and i think they used 56 bits not 64 bits and everybody thought the reason why they used 56 bits was because of the nsa want to be able to decrypt them sony way brigade from a time uh

in the late 70s of six 56 bits say when i create an encryption key i only use 4k keys um which is uh the highest that i can use at this level so you know we've been going up some old um websites may only use 128 bit encryption that have not really been maintained asymmetrical encryption the key to encrypt is different from the key to decrypt called public key private key rsa is most famous um version of that and it's most widely used it's the x 509 um um uh so evaluate not evaluation though it's the standard really the problem potentially is quantum computing and again our big problem was china china is a problem because

it's potentially available that if you mess a quantum computer you can break these 4k keys or to these 2k rsa keys readily china's another problem because they did create a desktop operating system that is sort of linux based and they set the gray net at the b2 level in other words they're using the orange book with friends apart from book and the grain at the b2 level which means that mandatory access controls and both on whatever they're using as a server and on the um the desktop so that's uh that's a big issue and in the west we haven't really looked at china or thick saying that it's a b2 level rsa again the most popular encryption

level i use it um that's really the only one that i really use on the mainframe or even on the x86 machine it's an asymmetrical encryption method the private key and it has pokey again it's most easily used encryption methodology business transactions um if we didn't have this publicly private key we would not have this uh just massive amounts of in commerce on the internet

okay so federal information processing standard 140-2 uh it specifies the security requirements for cryptographic modules and it was created by nist and the department of commerce it's used by cmvp along with other standards according to fips graphic modules are required to meet documentation requirements to meet general physical security requirements to meet cryptographic key requirements be able to perform self-tests like power-up tests or cryptographic tests to use and to use the finite state model fips divides security requirements into four levels here the four levels in a nutshell level one meets the basic security requirements mentioned earlier and it's the most cost effective level level two adds physical security requirements these include blocks tamper evidence coding and seals

it adds role based authentication level three is when you probably see the biggest changes it adds tamper detection and resp uh tamper response and it responds with zeroization it adds identity based authentication the io of manual methods must be encrypted must be an encrypted form or it has to use split knowledge procedures level four adds enhanceability to detect to physical access there's more like um an encapsulation around the module and also with level four you uh it's able to detect uh changes in voltages and temperature don't change the channel yet let me just get over it um at level three which says i o manual methods must be encrypted form or use split knowledge procedures

split knowledge procedure i interpret as a separation of function which again separation function is very important on the mainframe level we still have separation function the computer operators may not be the ones doing the backups at night and again the people who running the machines may not write the security rules you have separate separation function you don't find that level separation function on the x86 machines you sort of have the same person at least doing the um updates and the backups and again it's level separation function it's something old-fashioned but a lot of people would not be aware of that now we're talking about um cryptographic co-processor and also if you look at it you realize

it's a half with pcie cryptographic card which means that it could fit into an x86 box because it is using a specie id card i doubt that rbm would sell to people and then you would need the um you would need the drivers and um probably the i'm not sure what the internal configuration is whether it uses absolute or ascii but the cryptographic card performs symmetric hashing aes des td es xiao one sha2 recently in the past uh two years we had the great up upgrading from sha-1 to sha-2 because the shot one had um security issues there's asymmetric algorithm rsa up to four 96 against 4k which is what i use exclusively 4k i don't use 1k rarely do i use 2k

mostly i use 4k the important point it's fips 104 institute at level four it's at the highest level and the eclipse was created by um i think about commerce department or the national artist the national institute of standards so it's a government level for cryptographic it's at the highest level it's an earl level four which i think is really good enough because there's physical controls and separation of function and the other of there are a number of other um um techniques not to get access to it and it's tamper-proof again suitable for high-speed cryptographic data encryption digital circuit processing without everything you connect with everything and people includes producing all my comments on the cell phones and everything else

you need a fast machine that encrypt in real time and again this is what ibm has um created with this and this is also something that was demanded by a coalition of um i think banks and other companies a closer of almost 150 end users who asked rpm for this and they did create it for the z14 um right now and we know one bank that's actually using advertising and using it it's the melon bank um and i would think having an evasive encryption is a type of marketing ploy too that a bank insurance company or financial services company can said you know we try to protect your data your data is encrypted um in our machines and again

um security is an ongoing process it's not a stagnant process so encrypting data just gives you another level of security it's not the end-all but it is something okay it's a secure device that can deal with number of physical and logical attacks protection includes being able to withstand side channel attacks and now we're going to talk about i'm going to talk about side channels first of all um hackers have a saying that if you have physical access to a computer server you own it why well you could flash the bios uh the basic input operating system of the computer you could insert the keyboard with a down or keyboard in a probe that you attach

to it do cable intercept intercept the cable or the cable leading to your um your um ethernet or um um was it the hacker ring not to ring the um token ring uh you can also get the hard drive again um once you have access and everybody has access to their mainframe that's on top desk you lose a little bit of security but that's unavoidable side channeling um let me differentiate power now so you could use power analysis to uh see what's going on in the computer system simple power analysis uh all the most performed during the crypto event encrypting and de-encrypting acoustics vulnerability side channel is not something you're going to learn from any type of a um

security conference or school that advertises you know take these security courses um it's really for a hacker hacker and it's it's actually very old um you have my first limited side channel early on i think in the late 40s and 50s with um teletypes teletypes were very noisy electronically that uh they had side channel vulnerabilities and um again that this had to be quashed the ibm 360 euro one had side channel really more tempest and it had multiple slideshow tempest is just one of the side channel one about tempest is incepting the electrical functions from the computer and interpreted them but uh the ibm 360 had multiple side channel vulnerabilities again this is the early 360. uh

one programmer was able to write a program that played a tune on the ibm 360. and also some could put a radio on top of it and tune it and pick up the side channel noise from it another slight channel vulnerability is that the 360 had a lot of lights and you could see from we're going to see from what lights were active what the machine was doing so again these are what we saw channel vulnerabilities that have been solved actually another vulnerability that i should have mentioned about at the def con or uh black hat was a vulnerability that the ibm mainframe has right now is or used to have is that if a programmer

and usually of the system program had access to an authorized program facility library this is a library that runs in the kernel or the nucleus of the operating system he could actually change the security profile in other words he could become a um unix version a um super user a uid of zero or he could become a um under rack f uh system white or systemwide operations so we could achieve these tremendous powers and ibm has dealt with this vulnerability again it's up to your wreck of people or people using a top secret ca7 to um correct this it's not something that's corrected by um default you don't plug the machine in and it has that um

protection okay let's go again famous side channel and there have been many of them the soviet union had an underground cable that went under the ocean floor and especially after the u.s submarine they put a device on top of the cable and decided to read messages in real time again it did not need to break into the cable or anything else just by laying on top of the cable was able to pick up these electronic vibrations and interpret what was happening and again the solution had no idea what was happening um and i think the only reason they found out is they needed to do some type of upgrading the table and they found this

gadget attached to their cable underneath uh again it's side channel is a hacker's hack you have to be a hacker's hacker no outside channel and the vulnerabilities this shows um it's from members security division introduction to the differential power analysis again it's used for solid channel and again there's reference there rambus security division uh you can click on the internet and learn more about excellent no i guess let me just take your quarter successful search attack against rsi and it's cool attack against by one of his creators from rsa and it shows the integrity the competence of this guy to actually try to find a security flaw against and it's only on desktop x86 machines laptop x86 machines

and he was able to extract a 4k key from the machines he was able to use a mobile phone placed by a laptop he's also used was able to use a more sophisticated excuse me sensitive cable sensitive microphone uh there's a whole um paper written by him and two other co-authors um shamir does i looked into his background he just has a math cryptography background uh to develop this type of attack the person would have to know something about um electrical engineering and um noise analysis or um to extract uh signals from a noise and again that's more like a um a um person with a bachelor's degree additional digital signal processing or master's degree digital signal processing

electrical engineering again it's um a hacker's hacker so it's very interesting um again how about optical cable is that a possible um side channel i don't know um change the shadow so these are the conclusions ibm z14 is a major paradigm shift in computer technology due to its ability to have pervasive encryption companies that do have a mainframe can use the unix ascii to the side of the mainframe to backup important documents in the encrypted format also they could use the site as a backup engine um one thing that came to my attention when new york city downtown the financial area had um hurricane sandy um the companies and these are financial services companies one company in particular and i was

never able to find out the exact name of the company their x-ray system their service system they had trouble backing up because uh the backup uh procedures and the backup information was not at the level that they could easily um come back online whereas the mainframes had a much better historical backup capabilities and they also had a lot of side capabilities so it's easy to back up the main trim systems then the xh of their server system this if you have server form of 100 servers or 200 um you got to keep an eye on let's say 200 services you have now being mainframe which has maybe 10 l pause it's easy to keep an eye on 10 l

bars and 100 200 servers again the ibm logical partition has an el certification of five the ibm encryption card meets fips 104 dish to level four secure hardware encryption and it's tested for side channel vulnerabilities so that's the end of the discussion and um if you have any questions uh my email id is p render p r e n d a at pipeline that's p i p e l i n e dot com if you have any questions or if you know of ibm vulnerabilities that you think the public doesn't know about you'll send it in the subject area you have to put ibm mainframe vulnerabilities ibm mainframe questions because of a spam filter that's going to catch

it so i'd have to see it when it hits my spam filter but again uh my name is paul frender i've spoken a number of conferences also that earlier picture you saw it was from 1995 when i was doing teaching at um the 2600 um uh monthly meeting now you have monthly meetings for defcon 2600 around the world um so you can go to any of those meetings and again i was teaching there that was 1995. so i've been around a long time and i've seen a lot of things and again it's p render p r e n d a dot pipeline p i p e l i n e dot com and i'm interested in

here if you have any um uh comments so you know get back to me nick you want to give them you your um if you don't mind giving it out well sure uh yeah my email is uh and uh benigno b and igno12 gmail.com and tell them that you're a student and you're graduating this year right i'm student at ualbany and i'm a senior right now and i plan to graduate this year and you're my dream oh i'm majoring in informatics and with a concentration in cyber security and a minor in emergency paradise homeland security and cyber security and i hired nick as a research decision to research certain things okay so thank you very much this is the

end of the talk and um

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