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by walrus01 3368 days ago
> scholars working with culture and technology love to make a huge deal about data leakage

one of the fundamental considerations is that if things are very sensitive, they need to be on their own air gapped network. Or at least not on the same layer 2 fabric as a ton of other things that it can arp. Network engineers who understand all of the myriad possible ways that topology can be set up (both at OSI layer 1 and logically) are key.

Properly set up with a secure gateway/VLAN delivery for a critical workstation that has a special route outbound to the internet through a firewall, there will be only two MACs showing up on the fabric: The workstation itself and the device that is serving as its default route/gateway.
1 comments
dom0 3368 days ago
> one of the fundamental considerations is that if things are very sensitive, they need to be on their own air gapped network.

Or maybe consider not using an information-dispersal machine for "very sensitive things".

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walrus01 3368 days ago
tell that to the people who run siprnet/jwics... they're not going to go back to pencil and paper.
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nickpsecurity 3368 days ago
The rules back to the Conputer Security Initiative & Orange Book said that high-assurance, security systems should be used there or at least at interface points. Currently called a Controlled Interface IIRC. Numerous products hit market under Orange Book and later Common Criteria that passed 2-5 years of pentesting each. Most of that was killed off by NSA and DOD acquisition policies about getting more shiny COTS in full of dangerous features and lockin. All kinds of problems resulted. Certain orgsnizations still use the high-assurance stuff, though, at least for cross-domain.

So, it's provably not going from what we have to paper. They could reduce a lot of risk using high-assurance products (esp compartmentalizing ones) that are on market right now. Plus port them to those secure CPU architectures NSF and DARPA funded. Hell, given CHERIBSD, NSA would get really far just paying for it to be put on an ASIC as is with ATI doing custom, MLS firmware. Boom. Immune to most attacks plus POLA for security-critical components. They just dont care enough to do it across DOD.

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