Clean Pipes – Less Sewerage or More Potable Water?

Pipesprev
Jeff Bardin over on the CSO blog pitched an interesting stake in the ground when he posited "Connectivity As A Utility: Where are My Clean Pipes?"

Specifically, Jeff expects that his (corporate?) Internet service functions in the same manner as his telephone service via something similar to a "do not call list."  Basically, he opts out by placing himself on the no-call list and telemarketers cease to call. Others might liken it to turning on a tap and getting clean, potable water; you pay for a utility and expect it to be usable.  All of it.

Many telecommunications providers want to charge you for having
clean pipes, deploying a suite of DDoS services that you have to buy to
enhance your security posture.   Protection of last mile bandwidth is
very key to network availability as well as confidentiality and
integrity. If I am subscribing for a full T1, shouldn’t I get the full
T1 as part of the price and not just a segment of the T1? Why do I have
to pay for the spam, probes, scans, and malicious activity that my
telecommunications service provider should prevent at 3 miles out
versus my having to subscribe to another service to attain clean pipes
at my doorstep?

I think that most people would agree with the concept of clean pipes in principle.  I can’t think of any other utility where the service levels delivered are taken with such a lackadaisical best effort approach and where the consumer can almost always expect that some amount (if not the majority) of the utility is unusable. 

Over the last year, I’ve met with many of the largest ISP’s, MSSP’s, TelCo’s and Mobile Operators on the planet and all are in some phase of deploying some sort of clean pipes variant.  Gartner even predicts a large amount of security to move "into the cloud."

In terms of adoption, EMEA is leaps and bounds ahead of the US and APAC in these sorts of services and will continue to be.  The relative oligopolies associated with smaller nation states allows for much more agile and flexible service definition and roll-outs — no less complex, mind you.  It’s incredible to see just how disparate and divergent the gap is between what consumers (SME/SMB/Mobile as well as large enterprise) are offered in EMEA as opposed to the good-ol’ U S of A.

However, the stark reality is that the implementation of clean pipes by your service provider(s) comes down to a balance of two issues: efficacy and economics, with each varying dramatically with the market being served; the large enterprise’s expectations and requirements look very, very different from the SME/SMB.

Let’s take a look at both of these elements.

ECONOMICS

If you ask most service providers about so-called clean pipes up to a year ago, you could expect to get an answer that was based upon a "selfish" initiative aimed at stopping wasteful bandwidth usage upstream in the service provider’s network, not really protecting the consumer. 

The main focus here is really on DDoS and viri/worm propagation.  Today, the closest you’ll come to "clean pipes" is usually some combination of the following services deployed both (still) at the customer premises as well as somewhere upstream:

  • DoS/DDoS
  • Anti-Virus
  • Anti-Spam
  • URL Filtering/Parental Controls
  • Managed Firewall/IDS/IPS

What is interesting about these services is that they basically define the same functions you can now get in those small little UTM boxes that consolidate security functionality at the "perimeter."  The capital cost of these devices and the operational levies associated with their upkeep are pretty close in the SME/SMB and when you balance what you get in "good enough" services for this market as well as the overall availability of these "in the cloud" offerings, UTM makes more sense for many in the near term.

For the large enterprise, the story is different.  Outsourcing some level of security to an MSSP (or perhaps even the entire operation) or moving some amount upstream is a matter of core competence and leveraging the focus of having internal teams focus on the things that matter most while the low hanging fruit can be filtered out and monitored by someone else.  I describe that as filtering out the lumps.  Some enormous companies have outsourced not only their security functions but their entire IT operations and data center assets in this manner.  It’s not pretty, but it works.

I’m not sure they are any more secure than they were before, however.  The risk simply was transferred whilst the tolerance/appetite for it didn’t change at all.  Puzzling.

Is it really wrong to think that companies (you’ll notice I said companies, not "people" in the general sense) should pay for clean pipes?  I don’t think it is.  The reality is that for non-commercial subscribers such as home users, broadband or mobile users, some amount of bandwidth hygiene should be free — the potable water approach.

I think, however, that should a company which expects elevated service levels and commensurate guarantees of such, want more secure connectivity, they can expect to ante up.  Why?  Because the investment required to deliver this sort of service costs a LOT of money — both to spin up and to instantiate over time.  You’re going to have to pay for that somewhere.

I very much like Jeff’s statistics:

We stop on average for our organization nearly 600
million malicious emails per year at our doorstep averaging 2.8
gigabytes of garbage per day. You add it up and we are looking at
nearly a terabyte of malicious email we have to stop. Now add in probes
and scans against HTTP and HTTPS sites and the number continues to
skyrocket.

Again, even though Jeff’s organization isn’t small by any means, the stuff he’s complaining about here is really the low-hanging fruit.  It doesn’t bear a dent against the targeted, malicious and financially-impacting security threats that really demands a level of service no service provider will be able to deliver without a huge cost premium.

I won’t bore you with the details, but the level of high-availability,
resilience, performance, manageability, and provisioning required to
deliver even this sort of service is enormous.  Most vendors simply can’t do
it and most service providers are slow to invest in proprietary
solutions that won’t scale economically with the operational models in
place.

Interestingly, vendors such as McAfee even as recently as 2005 announced with much fanfare that they were going to deliver technology, services and a united consortium of participating service providers with the following lofty clean pipe goals (besides selling more product, that is):

The initiative is one
part of a major product and services push from McAfee, which is
developing its next generation of carrier-grade security appliances and
ramping up its enterprise security offerings with NAC and secure
content management product releases planned for the first half of next
year, said Vatsal Sonecha, vice president of market development and
strategic alliances at McAfee, in Santa Clara, Calif.

Clean Pipes will be a major expansion of McAfee’s managed
services offerings. The company will sell managed intrusion prevention;
secure content management; vulnerability management; malware
protection, including anti-virus, anti-spam and anti-spyware services;
and mobile device security, Sonecha said.

McAfee is working with Cable
and Wireless PLC, British Telecommunications PLC (British Telecom),
Telefónica SA and China Network Communications (China Netcom) to tailor
its offerings through an invitation-only group it calls the Clean Pipes
Consortium.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1855188,00.asp

Look at all those services!  What have they delivered as a service in the cloud or clean pipes?  Nada. 

The chassis-based products which were to deliver these services never materialized and neither did the services.  Why?  Because it’s really damned hard to do correctly.  Just ask Inkra, Nexi, CoSine, etc.  Or you can ask me.  The difference is, we’re still in business and they’re not.  It’s interesting to note that every one of those "consortium members" with the exception of Cable and Wireless are Crossbeam customers.  Go figure.

EFFICACY

Once the provider starts filtering at the ingress/egress, one must trust that the things being filtered won’t have an impact on performance — or confidentiality, integrity and availability.  Truth be told, as simple as it seems, it’s not just about raw bandwidth.  Service levels must be maintained and the moment something that is expected doesn’t make its way down the pipe, someone will be screaming bloody murder for "slightly clean" pipes.

Ask me how I know.  I’ve lived through inconsistent application of policies, non-logged protocol filtering, dropped traffic and asymmetric issues introduced by on-prem and in-the-cloud MSSP offerings.  Once the filtering moves past your prem. as a customer, your visibility does too.  Those fancy dashboards don’t do a damned bit of good, either.  Ever consider the forensic impact?

Today, if you asked a service provider what constitutes their approach to clean pipes, most will refer you back to the same list I referenced above:

  • DoS/DDoS
  • Anti-Virus
  • Anti-Spam
  • URL Filtering/Parental Controls
  • Managed Firewall/IDS/IPS

The problem is that most of these solutions are disparate point products run by different business units at different parts of the network.  Most are still aimed at the perimeter service — it’s just that the perimeter has moved outward a notch in the belt.

Look, for the SME/SMB (or mobile user,) "good enough" is, for the most part, good
enough.  Having an upstream provider filter out a bunch of spam and
viri is a good thing and most firewall rules in place in the SME/SMB
block everything but a few inbound ports to DMZ hosts (if there are
any) and allow everything from the inside to go out.  Not very
complicated and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how, from the
perspective of what is at risk, that this service doesn’t pay off
handsomely.

From the large enterprise I’d say that if you are going to expect that operational service levels will be met, think again.  What happens when you introduce web services, SOA and heavy XML onto externally-exposed network stubs.  What happens when Web2/3/4.x technologies demand more and more security layers deployed alongside the mechanics and messaging of the service?

You can expect issues and the lack of transparency will be an issue on all but the most simple of issues.

Think your third party due diligence requirements are heady now?  Wait until this little transference of risk gets analyzed when something bad happens — and it will.  Oh how quickly the pendulum will swing back to managing this stuff in-house again.

This model doesn’t scale and it doesn’t address the underlying deficiencies in the most critical elements of the chain: applications, databases and end-point threats such as co-opted clients as unwilling botnet participants.

But to Jeff’s point, if he didn’t have to spend money on the small stuff above, he could probably spend it elsewhere where he needs it most.

I think services in the cloud/clean pipes makes a lot of sense.  I’d sure as hell like to invest less in commoditizing functions at the perimeter and on my desktop.  I’m just not sure we’re going to get there anytime soon.

/Hoff

*Image Credit: CleanPipes

  1. stijn
    July 17th, 2007 at 03:09 | #1

    AT&T leads the way here by reselling ScanSafe to large enterprise. Interestingly, Postini also resells scansafe for their web security offering

  2. January 13th, 2008 at 17:06 | #2

    You have an interesting site here, in fact it's good!

  1. September 30th, 2009 at 07:15 | #1