ICS Startup SafeMashups Forms MashSSL Alliance

The latest Institute for Cyber Security startup to go live, SafeMashups, Inc., has just announced the launch of the MashSSL alliance. Read the press release below:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwire - November 12, 2009) - A consortium of leading technology companies today announced the creation of the MashSSL Alliance, an organization dedicated to evangelizing the use of the MashSSL technology and specification. MashSSL is an innovative way to use the proven and trusted SSL protocol and trust infrastructure to solve the tricky and serious problem of trust establishment between web applications communicating through an end user at a browser. This is a hard problem as the web applications have to assume that the user in the middle could be a malicious hacker or a legitimate user with a malware infected browser.

The founding members of the Alliance include leading SSL certificate vendors Comodo, DigiCert, Entrust and VeriSign; leading providers of security technology and services Arcot, Cenzic, ChosenSecurity, Denim Group, OneHealthPort, QuoVadis, SafeMashups and Venafi; leading security research institutions Institute for Cyber Security, UTSA, MIT Kerberos Consortium and Secure Business Austria, and noted industry security experts.

"Having been both a vendor and security practitioner, what makes MashSSL such an innovative and elegant solution is the fact that it sits on top of SSL at the application layer and does not disrupt the existing ecosystem -- no new crypto protocols to analyze, no changes to the browser and no new types of credentials," said Lynn Terwoerds, Former Head of Security Architecture & Standards, Barclays GRCB, former Senior Security Strategist, Microsoft, and member of the Cloud Security Alliance. "The ability to significantly reduce the risk involved with online collaboration and transactions opens up a whole new realm of opportunities to both product developers and to security practitioners who need to live in a highly virtualized and cloud based world, where applications and data no longer reside in a single location."

"End users' Web experiences, be it in healthcare or any other vertical, are increasingly an aggregation of data and processing from cooperating Web applications that communicate wholly or partially through the user's browser," said Sue Merk, vice president of business development and product management at OneHealthPort, a coalition of health plans, physicians and hospitals that joined together to build a trusted community where business and clinical information could be shared securely. "Unfortunately, a malicious man-in-the-middle attack or a user infected with man-in-the-browser malware can easily subvert such communications. An open standard to solve this universal problem once, and not in a piece meal ad hoc fashion, has been a long time coming. That it is based on the trusted and familiar SSL certificate infrastructure is a bonus."

MashSSL, which was first developed by application authentication pioneer SafeMashups, has now become an open specification with an open source reference implementation, and is in the process of being standardized.

"Using different proprietary security methods and a multitude of quasi-trusted credentials to solve this fundamental problem is clearly inefficient and will lead to administrative errors which underlie many vulnerabilities," said Siddharth Bajaj, Principal in the Innovation Group at VeriSign and steering committee chair of both the MashSSL Alliance and W3C MashSSL XG. "MashSSL repurposes SSL to create a secure application layer pipe through which open protocols like OAuth, OpenID, OpenAJAX, etc., and proprietary applications like payment provider interfaces can flow in a more secure fashion while leveraging the already existing trust and credential infrastructure."

While MashSSL was originally developed for use with newer mashup technologies, it became rapidly apparent that the protocol can be used in any situation where two Web applications need to communicate through a user's browser, where the user may be malicious or the browser infected with malware. Consequently, the potential field of use for MashSSL is very broad, including potentially underlying identity federation protocols, payment button interfaces, etc.

The initial MashSSL specification and open source reference implementation have been made generally available at www.mashssl.org.

Erhan J. Kartaltepe, PMP
erhan.kartaltepe-at-utsa.edu

UK Web Host Announces Winner to its Innovative Mashup Contest

At the Institute for Cyber Security our love for mashups and contests is legendary, and a few months ago, we found a mashup contest by 34SP, a web host located in the United Kingdom. This Pub Mashup Competition, amusingly, had only one requirement: the mashup had to do with pubs in some way.

Last week, 34SP named PubStop as the winning entry. The mashup finds the closest pubs to a highway route, helping a driver determine the location of the nearest pint, or even re-route their driving directions to include a stop at the pub. This application won the creator a cash prize and the use of a virtual private server for a year. Perhaps ICS should host its own web application competition?

Image is of Kyrie's, a famous pub in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Erhan J. Kartaltepe,
erhan.kartaltepe-at-utsa.edu

(IN)SECURE Magazine #22 Out

   

Issue 22 of (IN)SECURE Magazine is hot off the press. The quarterly magazine covers digital and information security topics. This issue in particular covers such diverse interests as network scanning, geolocation, cloud security, mashup security, book reviews, and so on. The digital version is free and can be downloaded as a PDF from their site.

One of the featured articles, "In Mashups We Trust?", was written by yours truly. The article discusses mashup security at a high level, addressing business-to-business security, classical server-side and client-side mashups, and the need for mashup authentication.

Erhan J. Kartaltepe,
erhan.kartaltepe-at-utsa.edu

Comodo and SafeMashups Partner on MashSSL Technology

SafeMashups, Inc., the latest startup from the Institute for Cyber Security to go live, has teamed up with Comodo to further secure web 2.0 protocols. Comodo is a large SSL certificate authority and only the latest in growing number of SSL CAs to interoperate with SafeMashup's free Web Toolkit and SafeMashups Community Service.

As Ravi Ganesan, founder and CEO of SafeMashups states, "MashSSL has the potential to fill a significant hole in the fabric of the Internet with a secure and standard protocol. MashSSL will also drive the adoption of SSL certificates, including EV-SSL certificates in a significant fashion." Both companies reiterated their commitment to work with other partners to rapidly make the standard completely open.

Look for more good news from SafeMashups soon!

Erhan J. Kartaltepe,
erhan.kartaltepe-at-utsa.edu

ICS Startup SafeMashups Named Top 11 Security Company to Watch

SafeMashups, Inc., the latest startup from the Institute for Cyber Security Incubator to go live, has been named one of the eleven security companies to watch by NetworkWorld.

According to the article, SafeMashups is worth watching because its free Web Toolkit and SafeMashups Community Service can change today's mashups' lack of security controls. MashSSL is a protocol to allow one web app to talk to another through a browser in "mashups. There is a neat accompanying slideshow as well.

Look for more from SafeMashups in the coming months!

Erhan J. Kartaltepe,
erhan.kartaltepe-at-utsa.edu

Firefox 3.5 Released

The good folks behind Mozilla's Firefox made its highly anticipated Firefox 3.5 available today.

As we've discussed before, One of the most interesting advancements to come out of Firefox 3.5 (and IE8) is mainstream cross-domain XHR. Due to the same origin policy concept that all major browsers adhere to, web applications are only allowed to make AJAX-style requests from the browser to their own server Cross-domain XHR provides mainstream support for mashups, but without security underlying it, most enterprises will not adopt them.

The latest startup from the Institute for Cyber Security to go live, SafeMashups, Inc., provides such a authentication and authorization framework in its free web toolkit and SafeMashups Community Service.

Along with enhanced JavaScript enhancements in both mainstream browsers (and Safari 4's recent release), the language's prominence and status has grown. It'll be worthwhile to see what improvements come down the pipes in the next few years.

Erhan J. Kartaltepe,
erhan.kartaltepe-at-utsa.edu

Follow ICS on Twitter

Sure you read the Institute for Cyber Security blog to read up on the interesting world of its startups and cyber security news, and you visit the ICS site to learn more about its startup incubator program and next-generation security labs, but you feel there's something missing. You want to read the views of ICS's staff on programming, web security, startups, cloud computing, mashups, and more almost as soon as its staff thinks them.

Well, now you can.

Follow ICS on Twitter and drink from the ICS stream of consciousness.

Erhan J. Kartaltepe,
erhan.kartaltepe-at-utsa.edu

Entrust and SafeMashups Team Up to Protect Mashups

SafeMashups, Inc., the latest startup from the Institute for Cyber Security to go live, has teamed up with Entrust to further secure web 2.0 protocols. Entrust is a large SSL certificate authority and only the latest in growing number of SSL CAs to interoperate with SafeMashup's free Web Toolkit and SafeMashups Community Service.

As Ravi Ganesan, founder and CEO of SafeMashups states, "Emerging mashup innovations such as cross domain XHR and OAuth offer many benefits to online users, but also introduce new threats. Customers of Entrust SSL certificates can use MashSSL to strongly authenticate the business partners participating in these productive mashups for their employees or customers, helping to reduce unnecessary risks."

For more about the recent OAuth security hole that exposed a man-in-the-middle vulnerability in Twitter and how MashSSL can be used as a workaround to it, visit our post on the subject here.

Look for more good news from SafeMashups soon!

Erhan J. Kartaltepe,
erhan.kartaltepe-at-utsa.edu

UK Web Host Unveils an Innovative Mashup Contest

As is well-documented, we at the Institute for Cyber Security enjoy both mashups and contests. So imagine our delight when 34SP, a web host located in the United Kingdom, announced its mashup contest yesterday.

In fine British fashion, their only requirement is that the mashup have to do with pubs in some way. More information on the contest, as well as a link to their rules, can be found at their contest site. We might humbly suggest securing that wonderful new mashup with MashSSL, invented by SafeMashups, the latest company to emerge from the ICS Incubator!

Image is of Kyrie's, a famous pub in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Erhan J. Kartaltepe,
erhan.kartaltepe-at-utsa.edu

Cloud Computing and Semi-Private Clouds

If anyone had the opportunity to attend the RSA conference in April (of which SafeMashups, an Institute for Cyber Security incubator company, was named an RSA "Most Innovative Company" finalist), nearly half the talks covered cloud computing in some respect, even if it was only tangeltially related to their business. If it wasn't obvious to the conference's audience that cloud computing was the "next big thing", it certainly became so, especially as it relates to securing the cloud.

RedHat has a new study out that finds many companies are building "private clouds" within large enterprises, but that a few are building "semi-private clouds", in which they plan to share IT resources with trusted partners. This opens a huge door for access control and trust computing experts to leep the network secure, but it also opens an interesting door in enterprise mashups.

Nemertes Research also highlighted the need for enterprise mashups security in a brief on SafeMashups. In their study, they found 42% of participants are already using mashups, but that for the enterprise, they must implement strong security controls to protect internal mashup applications from insider threats. It's worth mentioning that SafeMashups's MashSSL protocol is identified by Nemertes as having the opportunity to boost enterprise mashup platforms.

(Image is an aerial shot of flat-base cumulus clouds, often colloquially referred to as "mashed potato" or just "mashed" clouds)

Erhan J. Kartaltepe,
erhan.kartaltepe-at-utsa.edu