Everybody blogged about RSA, I guess I am the only one who has not gotten around to do so until now. I did some pretty interesting survey of companies and how they use visualization in their products. I will try to publish some of my findings at a later point. The other thing which is always incredible about RSA is the people and the networking. I don’t know how many parties there were in total, but there were a lot. Just the parties I knew about were in the high teens. I even went to the Gala for a little bit but unfortunately I left too early. Otherwise I would have seen this life:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=geeks+dance+rsa

I wish I could dance like this guy. Dude, he got moves!

I can’t believe it. I was fighting with R (the statistical package) for a while now. All the restrictions about data types and such are driving me crazy. It constantly complains that something is not a numerical type if I try to generate a histogram, etc. Well, I just found THE solution: R Commander:

apt-get install r-cran-rcmdr
R --gui=tk
library(Rcmdr)
You are in business! I love it! It just does things for you! I am back in business and can continue writing my book!

I came accross this very well done Web Log Analysis. The author uses a 3D scatter plot to plot certain aspects of his Web server log. He uses gnuplot to do so. What I like in particular is his discussion of the output and the way he positions scatter plots to find correlated event fields.

I am finally biting the bullet. I will start to really anonymize my graphs. In order to do so, I was trying to find a tool on the Web which does that. Well, as you can probably imagine, there is non which does exactly what I wanted. So i wrote my own anonymization script. To safe you some hassle, also download the Anonymous.pm file.

This is how you use the script on a CSV file:

cat /tmp/log | ./anonymize.pl -c 1 -p user

Credits to  John Kristoff who wrote the Anonymous.pm module for Perl.

I am still waiting for that one company which is going to develop the univeral agent!

What am I talking about? Well, there is all this agent-based technology out there. You have to deploy some sort of code on all of your machines to monitor/enforce/… something. The problem is that nobody likes to run these pieces of code on their machines. There are complicated approval processes, risk analysis issues, security concerns, etc. which have to be overcome. Then there is the problem of incompatible code, various agents running on the same machine, performance problems, and so on.

Why does nobody build a well-desgined agent framework with all the bells and whistles of remotely managed software. Deployment, upgrades, monitoring, logging, etc. Then make it a plug-in architecture. You offer the most important functionality already in the agent and let other vendors build plug-ins which do some actual work. You would have to deploy and manage exactly one agent, instead of dozens of them.

Well, maybe this will remain wishful thinking.

I thought I would start sharing my del.icio.us links. Especially people that are into visualization might enjoy some of the links. I will keep posting good links and discussion entries here and on secviz.org

But I thought this was kind of fun thing to do 😉

I read a lot of research papers and security articles. I am getting so tired seeing all these tools, research papers, and new algorithms that propose new approaches in computer security and then as a proof, they are solving one of the “old” problems: Detecting worms, portscans and finding peer-to peer traffic. Guys, it’s been done. We don’t need any more tools to do it. It’s easy and nothing to show off with!
Show me that other use-cases can be solved with your new approch. That will not only tell me that you actually thought about the problem space, but it will help the security community at large to tackle new problems (maybe some that they were not even aware of)!

Anton Chuvakin just blog-tagged me. What that means is that I have to write five things about myself that not many people know and then list five other people that should do the same thing. Well, here ya go:

1. I used to be heavily involed in crossbow shooting. I was Swiss champion, was shooting in the national team for about 6 years and was the coach of the youth team for about 2 years. A great time which is responsible for a lot of what I am today.

2. I have a passion for bridges. I love taking pictures of them. I should probably start posting them 😉
3. I guess this is well known: I am Swiss. I grew up in Switzerland. In 1999 I came to the Silicon Valley for an internship, left the US again and then moved back to San Francisco in 2003.
4. My interest in security came about during my cryptography lessons in college. I was phascinated by the concepts and how they can be put into practical solutions. That initial phascination led to an internship and then later my master thesis at IBM Research in Zurich.

5. VIM: I am a huge fan of VIM. Some people hate me for using VIM for all my writing; Anton? I write my emails in VIM, I write my books in VIM, and much to the annoyance of my co-workers, I set my shells to VIM mode (set -o vi). And who is responsible for that? I am pretty sure it was Dhawal during my internship at Cylink.

So, who am I tagging?

1. Jian Zhen

2. Jan P. Monsch

3. Michael Rash

4. Deigo Zamboni

5. Axel Eble

Are you one of those people who read the ISSA articles by first checking out the title and then the little bio about the author, posted at the end of the article? I am! What is funny to me is that the acronyms after the name are getting more and more. Is there a list of accepted certification acronyms? What do you put there? Does everyone really know what they mean? And is more better?
The best one I have seen is RSA. What’s that? Is this guy certified in public key crypto? Can he do it in his head? Is he certified in RSA secure IDs? What is it? No idea. Is it really cool to put a CCNA and MCSE certification after your name? I would almost be ashamed 😉 I keep wondering whether more certifications is really better. To be honest, when I get resumes, I am a bit alarmed if someone has too many certifications. Doesn’t that mean that the person spends more time on certifications than doing real work? I’d rather have someone who knows his stuff hands-on than through certifications. But that’s just me.