A few weeks ago, I traveled to the OWASP Summit located just outside of London. The OWASP Summit is not a conference. It is a remote offsite event for OWASP leaders and the community to brain storm on how to improve OWASP. There were a series of one hour sessions on how to tackle different topics and what OWASP could offer to make the world better. This is a summary of some of the more interesting sessions that I was involved in from my personal perspective. These views are not in any way official OWASP views nor are they intended to represent the views of everyone who participated in the respective working groups.
One session that I attended dealt with incident response (IR). Often times, incident response guidelines are written for the response team. They cover how to do forensics, analyze logs, and other response tasks covered by the core IR team. However, there is an opportunity for creating incident response guidelines which target the security champions and developers that IR team interacts with during an incident. In addition, OWASP can relate how this information ties back into their existing security development best practices. As an example, one of the first questions from an IR team is how does customer data flow through the application. This allows the IR team to quickly determine what might have been exposed. In theory, a threat model should contain this type of diagram and could be an immediate starting point for this discussion. In addition, after the IR event, it is good for the security champion to have a post mortem review of the threat model to determine how the process could have better identified the exploited risk. Many of the secure development best practices recommended in the security development lifecycle support both proactive and reactive security efforts. Also, a security champion should know how to contact the IR team and regularly sync with them on the current response policies. These types of recommendations from OWASP could help companies ensure that a security champion on the development team are prepared to assist the IR team during a potential incident. Many of the ideas from our discussion were captured in this outcomes page from the session: https://owaspsummit.org/Outcomes/Playbooks/Incident-Response-Playbook.html.
Another interesting discussion from the summit dealt with internal bug bounties. This is an area where Devesh Bhatt and myself were able to provide input based on our experiences at Adobe. Devesh has participated in our internal bounty programs as well as several external bounty programs. Internal bug bounties have been a hot topic in the security community. On the one hand, many companies have employees who participate in public bounties and it would be great to focus those skills on internal projects. Employees who participate in public bug bounties often include general developers who are outside of the security team and therefore aren’t directly tied into internal security testing efforts. On the other hand, you want to avoid creating conflicting incentives within the company. If this is a topic of interest to you, Adobe’s Pieter Ockers will be discussing the internal bug bounty program he created in detail at the O’Reilly Security conference in New York this October: https://conferences.oreilly.com/security/sec-ny/public/schedule/detail/62443.
Lastly, there was a session on machine learning. This has been a recent research area of mine since it is the next natural step of evolution for applying the data that is collected from our security automation work. Adobe also applies machine learning to projects like Sensei. Even though the session was on Friday, there was a large turnout by the OWASP leaders. We discussed if there were ways to share machine learning training data sets and methodologies for generating them using common tools. One of the observations was that many people are still very new to the topic of machine learning. Therefore, I decided to start by drafting out a machine learning resources page for OWASP. The goal of the page isn’t to copy pages of existing introductory content onto an OWASP page where it could quickly become dated. The page also isn’t designed to drown the reader with a link to every machine learning reference that has ever been created. Instead, it focuses on a small selection of references that are useful to get someone started with the basic concepts. The reader can then go find their own content that goes deeper into the areas that interest them. For instance, Coursera provides an 11 week Stanford course on machine learning but that would overwhelm the person just seeking a high-level overview. The first draft of my straw man proposal for the OWASP page can be found here: https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_Machine_Learning_Resources. As OWASP creates more machine learning content, this page could eventually be a useful appendix. This page is only a proposal and it is not an official OWASP project at this stage. Additional ideas from the workshop discussion can be found on the outcomes page: https://owaspsummit.org/Outcomes/machine-learning-and-security/machine-learning-and-security.html.
OWASP is a community driven group where all are invited to participate. If these topics interest you, then feel free to join an OWASP mailing list and start to provide more ideas. There were several other great sessions from the summit and you can find a list of outcomes from each session here: https://owaspsummit.org/Outcomes/.
Peleus Uhley
Principal Scientist