I started wondering how people can prepare themselves for such times, given the recent events. Military clashes are happening in the real world and the cyber one in modern times. The are many parallels between defending assets in both of these worlds. In this article, I shall try listing the different approaches one could use to harden their defenses. At the same time, I shall try giving a clear picture of the target goals of the defenders.
So what is the ultimate goal of every defender? By default, it is to make the cost of the attack too high, and this way to diminish the gains of that attack. This kind of narrative is often seen in many books focused on the defensive side of cybersecurity. It is important to note that sometimes, people attack other people for personal reasons or even because of emotion. In these cases, attackers usually do not care how much it will cost them to perform the attack. As a defender, we should consider these reasons during the design phase of our defense.
You can see a sample architecture of an off-grid data center on the diagram. Such data centers have much better resilience during any events
There is one exciting proverb regarding the importance of preparation – more sweat in training, less blood in the fight. If we transfer this to the realm of cyber security – the more efforts we put into preparing the infrastructure, the less likely it is to be penetrated. So how we can prepare ourselves for an attack:
Buy quality equipment: Your equipment shouldn’t be the most expensive or cheapest. You need gear that can do the job and have a lifespan of at least five years. It is a good idea to buy multiple pieces, so you have hot swaps in case of failure. Items in the middle price range usually are good candidates.
Plan and train: There is little sense in having great gear without using it. Regular training sharpens the skills and decreases the reaction time during the use of the equipment. At the same time, testing the items help check their limits and allows the designer to prepare a better defense. In the realm of cybersecurity, we could do regular red/blue team games where the red team will try to penetrate the infrastructure, and the blue team will defend it.
Be realistic: If your attacker has much more resources (money and time) than you, they will penetrate you. There is no great sense in making sure your electronic infrastructure survives an EMP wave coming after a detonation of a nuclear warhead. At the same time, it makes excellent sense to make sure your data is backed up into a protected vault and that you have replacement units if such an event happens.
Hack and Slash: Don’t be afraid to modify your equipment if it does not suit your needs. Many security units prefer buying cheaper equipment and rigging it for double or triple purposes. Play around with your gear, and don’t be afraid of breaking it. Sometimes you can find real gems by doing that.
In conclusion, preparation for any defense activity comes with a lot of research. The primary goal of every defender is to increase the cost of attack. The higher the price is, the less motivated the attacker will be. Often the resources of both sides are asymmetric, and thus, some defenders must think such as guerilla fighters or even as Start-Up owners. They have to squeeze the last piece of efficiency provided by their infrastructure.
Unfortunately, during the last two years, we saw quite a rise in the number of cybercrimes worldwide. Many attacks allegedly came from nation-state actors, and we observed much blame in the public media space supporting this statement. Life is indeed a challenge, and the strongest ones almost always win. Still, there is a subdue difference between being aggressive and attacking foreign countries and defending your interests and infrastructure.
As a matter of fact, we could categorize the last couple of years as a series of standalone cyber battles, which could finally end in a fully-fledged cyberwar. And in such situations, some people start fantasizing about hiring hackers-privateers and starting a Cyber World War, where teams of the best hackers will fight each other. It sounds like an incredible plot for a sci-fi novel, but there are reasons why such actions could lead to disaster in reality:
On the diagram, you can see the standard military uses of electrical and communication equipment. Cyberwarfare privateers can use their skills to attack many targets without even going near the real battlefield
Global World: We live in a global village. The world is no more disconnected, and one crisis can quickly affect it. Check the COVID-19 situation, for instance. Despite its allegedly natural origin, it blocked the global economy and opened many old wounds. Now, believe me, if a worldwide cyberwar happens, we shall have much more complex problems, which could easily lead to conventional or even a nuclear, large-scale war.
Ethical Reasons: An old proverb states that one is to be able, another is to have the will, and the entirely different thing is to do it. Ethical hackers could start a fully-fledged cyberwar suitable for their businesses. However, I believe that cybersecurity must be more oriented to stopping criminals rather than achieving political agenda or starting conventional or nuclear wars.
Willingness: Most white hat cybersecurity specialists will not act of aggression for any sum of money. As patriots, they care for the well-being of their country; however, one thing is being a patriot, another is doing destructive actions versus another country or organization. At the same time, most hackers are criminals. Working for state actors will reveal their personalities and end them in jail. These statements reduce the number of individuals willing to work, such as hacker-privateers, to a tiny number.
In conclusion, cybersecurity and hacking are not similar to conventional armies. Sure, we can use the same terminology and ever do “war” games. But essentially, the whole sector is more identical to the standard private security companies, which defend infrastructure perimeters and fight crime. The role of pentesting companies is to test these defenses acting like criminals. Everything other than that should be categorized as cyber warfare and be forbidden.
I want to start this post with the statement that I am a fierce supporter of Open Source, and all of my computers, servers, and smartphones are using different flavors of Linux. For the last ten years, I have used Windows ten times at most, all of this because some software vendors have been neglecting the Linux ecosystem for years. Other than that, I have no wish or necessity to touch Mac or Windows for anything rather than testing web or mobile apps.
At the same time, I want to strongly emphasize that Open Source as a model has its problems and that I believe no software development practice, Open Source or proprietary, is ideal. This post aims to list some of the advantages and disadvantages the Open Source model has. Despite its widely successful spell during the last 30 or more years, the model is somehow economically broken. But, let’s start with the lists:
The good
Open Source is almost free: Most open source projects provide free plans for casual users or tech-savvy customers by having an ecosystem. This way, a whole set of companies can build their business model based on these freemium plans and add value.
More openness: People working on open source projects must make an ecosystem. And people stay in any ecosystem only if the system is open to proposals and changes according to members’ needs. In another case, the ecosystem usually does not survive for long. Additionally, everyone can review the code and search for security holes.
Better collaboration: Legally speaking, if two organizations want to work together, they should sign a contract on every point they want to collaborate. Organizations already know how to work with the various Open Source licenses and do not need to reinvent the wheel for their specific case.
The bad
Lack of responsibility: Most Open Source software comes without any obligations for the authors. Whether there are security holes, bugs, or losses by using the software – authors are not responsible.
Too much decentralization: When a project becomes too popular, the lack of centralization increases politics and power struggles. By having multiple controlling bodies or boards of people governing the project, the number of interested parties increases and thus sometimes making the decision-making nightmare.
Lack of support: Some Open Source projects entirely lack technical or user support. Even if they offer support, the customer must pay too much money to get any meaningful help. The plans with the lower cost usually are not helpful enough.
On the diagram, you can see a standard crawler architecture diagram. Most of the products implementing this diagram would use Open Source components to speed up the development and lower the cost. They must live with the problems derived from using these components
The ugly
Sometimes less secure: Many projects do not have the proper set of resources to ensure their level of cybersecurity, despite being used by many people. A recent example of that is log4j – all major Java products use it, and at the same time, a big security hole was discovered a couple of weeks ago.
Complicated business model: Open Source is complex for monetization. Many products try surviving on donations or support. However, this monetization model does not scale as much as the proprietary one.
Legal mess: Usually, proprietary products step on Open Source ones to speed up the development time. This technique is used primarily in Start-Ups or consulting companies. However, this approach has its problems. What happens in a similar case such as log4j, where a security hole or a bug in one of your Open Source components leads to data leaks or financial losses? Who is responsible? By default, this is the user of the component, aka you.
In conclusion, Open Source is not for everyone. It could be more secure or with better support, but only if the code comes from a reputable software vendor. In all other cases, the user is left on its own to handle their security and support. Another question is whether the alternative (using only proprietary software) is better, but I will analyze this in another article.
In the last two parts of this series, we discussed our network protocol and the architecture of our body camera system. We shall discuss our backend recording and streamers service in this final part. After that, we shall present the budget we burnt for this MVP, and finally, we shall discuss why it did not work.
There are multiple server video streaming solutions across the market. Unfortunately, most of them require installing new desktop software or plugins. At the same time, we saw that no video storage format is codec agnostic and could support multiple frames using different codecs. All these weaknesses forced us to develop our storage format for our videos. After a reasonable amount of time of thinking about what would be the format we need for this kind of work, we formulated the following requirements:
Blazing fast append: We wanted to write down the incoming frames as fast as possible. Every slowdown of reindexing the frames would decrease performance and increase the cost.
File-based: Storing a significant amount of data into a database is the wrong approach for media-based files. So the file format had to be binary based. Because of the previous requirement, we had to skip the index. Every index recalculation would end up in a lousy performance.
To support telemetry: We did not stream only video and audio data, but we also streamed telemetry. There had to be a way to stream its frames as well. Plus, there were use cases in which the user of the body camera could want to stream only telemetry, but not video.
Websocket streaming: Since we can not support another streaming format, we decided that streaming from our server to the web browser clients in the headquarters will be based on WebSockets. To do this properly, we had to implement our video player.
Fortunately, if we analyze our network protocol, we can see the following characteristics which will fulfill the requirements:
Partitioning: Every network packet has a unique user id and date. And that is enough to determine the filename of the stream uniquely.
Counter: Every network packet has a unique counter value, and this value is attached to the date. At the beginning of every day, we moved the counter to zero. If we analyze further the logic of this counter, it could be used as an index key, by which we can sort by time the whole stream.
Supports telemetry: Our network protocol supports telemetry by default.
Supports WebSockets: We can reuse the same binary message we received from the Android device for WebSocket streaming. The message must be just encoded properly for WebSocket streaming.
You can see the modified version of our frames container on the diagram. It follows the header:body format, where the header represents a metadata structure for the next frame. By iterating the whole file, we could index the metadata into our server’s memory
With the information from the previous bullets, we can define the following logic. We append every incoming packet to its corresponding file on the filesystem, similarly to what pcap is doing with the network packets. At the same time, another process is reading the file and building the index in memory of our service. And the service uses this index to restream the recorded network packets through web sockets to the web browser player.
To implement the described logic, we decided to build the following system modules:
UDP server listener module: The idea of this module is to listen for UDP packets and reroute them to a concurrent queue. The FileWriter module later consumes this concurrent queue.
Concurrent queue module: Having in mind that we can have multiple process workers, instead of using mutexes or any other synchronization mechanisms, we decided to communicate using queues between the processes.
FileReader module: This module’s primary duty is to read the file packet by packet, using the already loaded index.
FileWriter module: The idea of this module is to take the packets from the queue and store them into the file. Partitioning per file per queue was implemented, and every file had a FileWriter process.
Indexer module: It reads the file and indexes the network packets into the memory. After that, it is used by the Streamer module to stream data.
Streamer module: This was a collection of processes that started by given offset and used the indexer module to send data to the WebSocket server.
Web browser player module: The module was used to decode the network packets coming from the WebSocket server and play video and telemetry data in the browser.
Synchronization module: The idea of this module was to provide a way for the synchronization of missing packets between the Android device and the streaming server. We used the index module to return a given user and date for which frames are missing.
One can easily modify the proposed architecture to support cloud deployment and high scalability by replacing the concurrent queues with message brokers and the local filesystem with GlusterFS.
You can see a sample system architecture on the diagram describing the listed components. Arrows represent the data flows and how the data passed through the system
After we finished the technical details of the implementation, let’s discuss how much it cost for us to implement the MVP:
Budget:
Android device (200$): We decided to use a standard Redmi 3 device. It supported all the needed features, and it had an excellent battery.
Extended battery development (3000$): We developed two battery versions because the first one was not good enough, and our hardware vendor did not provide a quality job. We had to switch vendors, etc.
USB Camera (200$): Fortunately, we used an already produced board, so the price was relatively low. Still, we had to buy multiple cameras until we found the most suitable one.
3d printing (400$): 3d printing of multiple prototypes is expensive. And we had to try with various variations.
Camera mounts (30$): The camera mounts were already manufactured.
Software development (23000$): One developer spent a whole year working part-time on this project. He implemented the backend server and the mobile application for the Android device.
Hardware development (8000$): Our hardware guy spent a couple of months developing proper housing and an alternative battery unit for our Android device.
Business development (1500$): Fortunately, we did not spend a lot of money on business development.
So we managed to implement the technical MVP for a total cost of 36330$. We tried to sell it, and we failed brutally.
Why we failed
As a team without experience in developing hardware products, we made many errors. Fortunately, it was our first and last try at selling a hardware product. We took our lessons, which I shall list:
No business need: For every successful product, you need a local business need, with which you can test your idea and see whether you will have traction. Burgas is an almost crime-free city, so no need for such a system.
No hardware ecosystem: There is no ecosystem of electronic hardware manufacturers in Burgas. So you become dependent on people you do not know and even have never met.
No delivery pipelines: Making hardware depends on your components delivery pipelines. We did not have any established channels and no partners with such.
No investor: Hardware startups are not for bootstrapping. You need a good amount of money to hire the proper people and to make sure once you have MVP, you can buy a good amount of items. Hardware items supply can end, and after that, you have to redesign your solution.
Wrong paradigm: Hardware products do not scale so much as digital ones. It will help if you have a good global distribution network and marketing to do it successfully. Being in the 4th city by size in Bulgaria, with 200,000 people, did not help.
In conclusion, despite the problems, we managed to produce MVP, which is a piece of fantastic news. Unfortunately, we could never sell this MVP to anyone for the listed reasons. Looking at the good side of things, we learned what mistakes to avoid when penetrating a market. It helped us with our following products.
New Year is coming, and usually, during this period, people assess what they did during the previous year. As a person with skills and experience in the defensive part of cybersecurity, I am always quite sensitive about sharing information, contracts, and legal documents with anyone, including institutions. During the last year on multiple times, I had to present official documents and explanations of why and how I did something. On one of the occurrences, I had to deliver around 20, again 20 papers to prove my right. Some of the documents did not relate to the right I wanted to execute, but the institution tried to enforce on me their policy. The representatives in the office even told me that I should trust the institution and that this was the first time someone asked for their data retention period, how they will assure that they will destroy the documents after that period and why they need the data at all.
During the last year, all of these experiences triggered the following questions in my mind – Is my data safe in any institution? Will it be in a safer place if I take care of my data, but not an institution? Can an ordinary person achieve a better level of security than an institution?
The diagram shows a standard SSD storage system architecture used in almost all database systems. Because of its unique way of storing information, the standard secure delete procedures do not erase the data securely. Special tools are needed for this action, and we could only hope that the institution SysOps department is qualified enough to erase the information properly
For all of these questions, the answers are usually – it depends on the level of expertise of the defending side. So it largely depends on the professionals the institution hired. To strengthen my statement, I can list several case studies that showed how attackers could penetrate even institutions and leak data:
Bank Hack: During a regular penetration testing exercise, a team of white hats managed to penetrate multiple office branches of a substantial French bank. Only in one of the offices did the employees ask the penetration expert to identify himself and ask the headquarters whether they sent anyone.
Government Taxes Authorities Hack: A couple of years ago, a hacker managed to leak multiple gigabytes of data from the Bulgarian Taxes Agency. The security hole had been opened for an extended period, reported numerous times, and no one took action to close it.
Universities Hack: At the beginning of 2021, multiple US universities, including members of the Ivy League, were hacked, and the personal information and documents of their students, lecturers, and professors were leaked to the public.
In conclusion, I think we could safely assume that taking care of our data is our right and responsibility. I am happy to delegate this responsibility only to legal professionals (lawyers, notaries, and judges). They work with confidential documents every day and know how a data leak can affect people. In any other case, sharing data with 3rd parties must come with at least a declaration for their data retention practices and how they destroy the data (there are security practices for doing that correctly).
And this is the last article on cybersecurity tactics for small teams series. We have already finished the hardware computer-based parts, and I shall use this last article to cover more the social side of cybersecurity. We shall spend the following paragraphs speaking about your organization’s public image and how it can be affected by your cybersecurity defenses. At the end of the article, we shall present a summarized budget using all the budgets we created during the last couple of months. So let’s start.
Social media
During the last decades, we witnessed the rapid growth of various social media platforms. These days every organization has to show a stable social presence to improve its marketing. It is fascinating how virtual space can reflect on real people and places with its data and information. Having this in mind, we have to treat all the social accounts of a given organization as assets, and by assets, we have to find a strategy to keep them safe and secured.
Imagine what will happen if an attacker takes control of your team accounts. Usually, these accounts are used to have private chats with clients or customers in different social media systems. Data dump consisting of such talks can sometimes be quite hazardous to your organization.
You can see a Venn chart representing the different social media platforms on the diagram. As you can see, almost all of our digital life is located there, and this data is an asset
Internal Team Communication
As we discussed in the previous article, teams must communicate. In remote-first groups, this communication must happen in some virtual place, where team members can coordinate and write. By default, every email server, chat server, and video conferencing server record things into a historical log. It is essential to take into account that these logs are information and company assets.
Sometimes the tone there is inappropriate, and thus dumping them over the Internet can cause significant problems to your organization. It is essential to understand that a cultural change must happen to make your organization understand the effects such an attack can have.
Personal Space
Unfortunately, with the rise of digitalization, the following tendency started to emerge – your personal digital life can affect and hurt your professional one. It means you have to be aware that simple private communication can be leaked and can cause tremendous problems to your persona and your organization.
Influencer economy and personal branding changed over the Internet during the last decade. Despite its asymmetric nature, the personal brands managed to keep going with the big enterprises. It is more and more common for companies to start using their employees’ brands to promote themselves. Which, in short, we can phrase as an asset’s loan. Employees loan out their assets to their employer during the period of working together. From a cybersecurity point of view, your organization must understand that now you defend company infrastructure and personal ones.
Now, after we covered the effects that public image can have on your organization, it is a good idea to cover how you can defend yourself from penetration:
Security awareness course: A good security course will cover all these topics and many more. Still, it is good to touch some information security, not only cybersecurity topics, during the period. I would advise you to search for vendors providing information security business-based courses.
2FA: Especially for an account that is not part of your infrastructure, a 2FA is a must, including the organizational accounts and the personal accounts.
Personal Development: Personal development of your team members can help a lot to avoid such attacks. There are multiple use cases and stories on the Internet from which you can take inspiration.
Budget
As we already discussed in the final paragraph of this article will be a combined budget from all the previous articles together with this one. The budget will have two categories – per team and person. The per team will be for your whole team, and per person will be for one team member. The budget will be for two years because this is the service life of most of the hardware equipment. The team will be five people. So let’s do it.
Per team
Hardware toolkit (100$)
Paper Shredder (50$)
Camping Gear (50$)
Safe (500$)
Office Security System (4000$)
SIEM System (0$)
Email And Chat Server(85.68$)
VPN Server(85.68$)
GitLab Server(85.68$)
Video Conferencing Server(85.68$)
Cloud Storage(222.44$)
Security Awareness Course(1000$)
Total per team: 6266$
Per person
Router (180$)
Switch (150$)
Group Policy Server (150$)
Pacsafe Backpack (190$)
Business Series Laptop (1000$)
Laptop Operating System(0$)
Smartphone(200$)
Total per team member: 5 x 1870$ = 9350$
With a total budget of around 15616$ for two years, we achieved a pretty good level of security. Still, a determined attacker can penetrate this setup, but it will take him more time and resources. The budget is almost less than 3300$ per team member and around 140$ per month.
And this brings our series to an end. I hope you enjoyed our journey, and in case of questions, you can always book a session with me. I shall be more than happy to answer.
Several months ago, I had to make a trip over the weekend to a city sitting 160km far from Burgas. I decided to take the more direct route, which goes through Stara Planina, one of the mountains located in Bulgaria. There were many trucks on the road. Other car drivers and I were driving behind them without a clear opportunity to overtake. I wanted to check something on my smartphone, and I misclicked on the WIFi network indicator. To my surprise, the list showed one item – a WiFi network with a mobile phone number as its name.
And then it clicked in my mind that the two cars in front of me, trying to overtake the truck for the last twenty minutes, were most probably a company traveling together, and the owner of one of the cars was sharing his/her hot spot with the passengers. He/She had most likely decided to name his/her WiFi network with his/her mobile phone number.
The defensive cybersecurity expert in me started clicking with his tongue in disapproval because I now had the driver’s phone number and his/her car registration plate. Additionally, I had the knowledge that someone in the cars in front of me was using the listed WiFi network. With all that information, a motivated attacker could do the following exciting things:
On the diagram, you can see a typical remote attack on a vehicle. The attacker usually uses another vehicle to get data and use it for attacking the target
Find the driver of the car: With some search in the dark web, a motivated attacker could find illegal databases with phone numbers and vehicle registration plates mapped to their owners. Additionally, if the phone number owner had posted an online ad for something using that number, it usually got indexed by most search engines.
Get the metadata of the WiFi users: The WiFi search protocol is quite leaky in terms of metadata sharing. For example, your WiFi client usually broadcasts all the network SSIDs your device was connected to for the last couple of days. Using this weakness, we could collect that data for every device connected to the hot spot and use that data for malicious activities. One such activity is finding the places where the owner of any of the connected devices was. Especially if the owner of the devices regularly connects to public WiFi networks in hotels, cafes, etc. There are many databases in the dark and on the regular web with such mappings betweens WiFi SSIDs and GPS coordinates.
Enforce the WiFi client to connect to a malicious endpoint: With the proper equipment, the attacker could enforce all the WiFi clients to connect to his/her malicious WiFi endpoint and sniff all the data coming from the devices. Modern smartphones software usually comes with proper protection, but bugs happen, and the attacker could keep the collected data and decrypt it offline or in the future.
Social engineer the owner of the car: A motivated attacker could call the owner of the vehicle and present himself/herself as a police officer asking the owner where the car is at the moment and that someone made a complaint about the vehicle parked not correctly. To make the lie ever more truthful, the attacker could tell the driver that he/she and his/her colleague must go and check the car personally. If this attack is performed after work hours, the victim will probably give his/her an address near his/her home.
In conclusion, the car driver in front of me had a bit of good luck that I was driving behind them, but not a criminal. In another case, all of these attack vectors could happen. Unfortunately or fortunately, cars have become more and more intelligent. But with becoming more intelligent, more and more security holes have become open for attack. We should be concerned, especially with the increasing adoption of electric vehicles in our lives. They are, in fact, computers on wheels. And these computers have and will have more and more security vulnerabilities.
In the last couple of months, we discussed how you could achieve a good level of personal security for your team members. We covered the topics of physical information security, home network security, and finally, your hardware devices cybersecurity. With this article, we shall cover the issue of how you can upgrade your cybersecurity defenses as a team. The article will cover the necessities of remote-first groups because they are harder to defend. You can use the same approach to protect your office or shared space-based team. Still, the focus will be on underfunded small groups. At the end of the article, I shall present a sample budget for your team infrastructure.
But before going to the budget, let’s analyze how a remote team of workers communicates and collaborates. I shall list down the different infrastructure requirements for a technical IT team. Keeping in mind how digitilized our World is, they will work fine for any other distributed team.
Communication Channels
For every remote-first team, it is essential to have a communication channel. We can categorize the different communication channels by their speed. But let’s do this in the following list:
Email: Email is usually categorized as an official communication channel, which we can use for communication inside and outside of your organization. It is heavily asynchronous, with messages response going from minutes to days. Usually, this kind of communication is used for strategic discussions and long-term plans. That’s the reason it could be the most valuable target for an attacker.
Online Chat: Online chats are a faster way of exchanging messages. Usually, they are used when you need a quicker response from your peer, and there is no good time for a short, not planned call. Usually, the rule of thumb is to spend no more than 15 minutes chatting, and if the issue is not resolved, move to something faster. This one will be the second most significant target after the email for an attacker.
Video Conferencing: This one is the fastest. Usually, it is used to exchange a burst of already prepared information. Most of the time, the data is a tactical one, and thus this way of communication is with the lowest priority for attackers.
You can see a standard corporation infrastructure on the upper part of the diagram, where you have multiple zones and a load balancer. On the lower part is the typical small team setup, where all the data for communication is going through one cloud provider and one zone
Information Storage and Sharing
These days everything is done using information and files. But, you must store these files first and, after that, share them with your team members. Doing this using the standard communication channels is no good because there are no excellent categorization and tagging tools implemented in these systems. In short, they are not appropriately tailored for this kind of activity. That’s the reason the IT industry created a good amount of tools for solving this problem. Our small team will use them as well. So let me list them:
Project/Product Management System: Project management software (PMS) can help plan, organize, manage resource tools and develop resource estimates. Depending on the sophistication of the software, it can manage estimation and planning, scheduling, cost control, and budget management, resource allocation, collaboration software, communication, decision-making, quality management, time management, and documentation or administration systems. As you can see, most of the vital information for your project/product will be in this system, making it an excellent target for an attacker.
Cloud Storage Solution: Project management systems are outstanding in documentation storage, but they lack some of the features a full-scale cloud-based storage solution can offer. In this kind of solution, you usually store big files in a format such as video, audio, high definition graphics, etc. As such, you can leave a big part of your intellectual property lying in such cloud storage, making it a good target for an attacker.
Automation System: Especially in IT teams, sometimes your team will need automated jobs to happen. If you have automation specialists, know how to write scripts, you can automate a big part of your daily routes. In the case of programming teams, this is usually building, deploying, and testing procedures for a new version of your product/project. It means that you have to give access from your automation system to your programming code, for example. And this makes it an excellent target for an attacker.
As we already discussed in the upper paragraphs, you need at least these six types of systems working and secured to have a functional remote-first team. Coming back to our knowledge of network defenses, the ideal solution for these systems is to be defended by VPN or a similar solution and expose only port 25 of the email server to support external communication.
Unfortunately, this kind of setup will be possible only if you deploy the services in your infrastructure. In the case of cloud providers, you don’t have much control of what is exposed to the Internet and how the cloud provider takes care of your security. Plus, the infrastructure is shared between multiple organizations, and there is no guarantee that these organizations follow such strict cybersecurity rules, such as your team.
Budget
But anyway, let’s create a budget for on-premise deployment of your infrastructure, and we shall use a VPS provider because it will be cheaper for us. A virtual private server runs its copy of an operating system (OS). Customers may have super user-level access to that active system instance, so they can install almost any software that runs on that OS. For many purposes, it is functionally equivalent to a dedicated physical server and, being software-defined, can much more easily be created and configured.
The most famous VPS providers are Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Still, there are some smaller players, such as Digital Ocean and Hetzner. As we shall do the infrastructure for a small team, we shall need a VPS with a not big pool of resources and go for the lowest price, which means CX1 instance in Hentzer. So let’s list now the different servers we shall need. All the prices are per month.
Email And Chat Server(3.57$): As there will be no significant demand for these two services, we can place them on the same machine.
VPN Server(3.57$): We shall have one machine for the VPN server, and all of the services without port 25 will be behind this VPN.
GitLab Server(3.57$): Gitlab is a project management/automation system. As it can become quite a hungry beast, a standalone instance is a way to go.
Video Conferencing Server(3.57$): One more hungry beast, it is a good idea to have it as a standalone server.
Cloud Storage(9.31$): This one will be a CX1 instance + an additional 100GB to store larger files. For a small team, a total of 120GB will be enough.
With a total budget of around 23.59$ per month, we achieved a pretty good level of security. Still, a determined attacker can penetrate this setup, but it will take him more time and resources. We shall use the standard VPS provider firewall. Still, if we want to achieve a higher level of security, we could add a server that will serve as a software-based firewall and IPS solution. Additionally, there are Open Source solutions for all the services types, and they will cost us 0$ per month.
In the last part, we finished the description of our network protocol and its advantages over other encrypted video streaming protocols. In this part, we shall discuss how we created our hardware prototype for the body camera system and what performance problems we had to resolve when we implemented the software part of it. At the end of the article, we shall show you how much our prototype costs and a sample budget for doing something similar.
But before that, let’s first see what our competition was and what features they had for their cameras.
Axon Body 2
The Axon Body 2 is a camera system incorporating an audio and video recording device. This camera is designed for use in harsh environmental conditions encountered in law enforcement, corrections, military, and security activities. The Axon Body 2 camera is designed to record events for secure storage, retrieval, and analysis via Evidence.com services. The recorded events are transferred to your storage solution via the Axon Dock or by using Evidence Sync software installed on a Windows computer.
HD Video and Dual Audio Channels: Record in low-light and HD, and make voices more distinct with automatic tuning and noise reduction.
Wireless Activation: Axon Signal reports events, like when you open the car door or activate the light bar, so your camera can start recording.
Wi-Fi & Bluetooth Connectivity: Use Wi-Fi to stream videos and Bluetooth to assign metadata.
Mobile App: Connect with Axon View to stream, tag, and replay videos from your phone.
Unmatched Durability: Handle in extreme weather and brutal conditions.
Full-Shift Battery: Record for more than 12 hours.
Axon RapidLock Mounts: Keep your shot steady with versatile mounts.
Motorola V300 Body Camera
This camera is built specifically for law enforcement. The V300 continuous-operation body-worn camera is ready to go when you are with its detachable battery, 128GB of storage space, wireless uploading, and Record-after-the-Fact® technology. Integrated with the technology you use daily to enhance your focus and combined with powerful device and evidence management software, the V300 body-worn video solution enables you to capture every encounter.
Detachable Battery: Easily change the V300’s rechargeable battery while on the go. Keep an extra battery at the ready for unexpectedly long shifts, extra shifts, or part-time jobs where a body-worn camera is required.
Natural Field of View: Eliminate the fisheye effect from wide-angle lenses that warps video footage. Our distortion-correction technology provides clear and complete video evidence.
Built-in Display: A clear LCD on the top of the camera allows easy viewing of device status.
Absolute Encryption: Elevate your data security with encryption at rest and in transit. The V300 guards your data and your reputation.
Rugged & Durable: Tested ruthlessly to survive in a public safety environment, the V300 is shockproof and waterproof to IP67.
Automatic Wireless Upload: Send critical video back to headquarters while still in the field. When docked in the car, the V300 body camera uploads to cloud-based or on-premise evidence management systems via wireless networks like LTE and FirstNet, anytime, anywhere.
During the time of development, these were the two main competitions. Both of them lacked the real-time streaming support we wanted. However, both of them had pretty exciting features, without which our solution would not have enough commercial traction.
After a good amount of market analysis and tests of different technologies, we decided our body camera system to have the following features:
Full-Shift Battery: Record for more than 12 hours.
Automatic Upload: Send critical video back to headquarters while still in the field.
LTE Real-Time Streaming: With adaptive bitrate, we could make our camera system send data during the whole shift.
Rugged & Durable: Tested ruthlessly to survive in a public safety environment
Built-in Display: A clear LCD in the camera system to allow easy viewing of system status.
Absolute Encryption: We wanted data security with encryption at rest and in transit.
Fisheye Field Of View: We wanted our camera system to support more than 100 degrees field of view.
Low Light Vision: Having in mind that most of the crimes happen during the night, we wanted this feature.
But we had a problem. Being a small, underfunded team located in Burgas, we did not have access to many hardware vendors, nor did we have the hardware team who could implement a body camera system from scratch. We had to take another approach. After a couple of weeks of analysis, we decided to implement a pluggable system using manufactured customer devices. The final system design consisted of the following components:
Hardware
Android-based hardware device: For the last decade, almost all Android devices have supported USB On-The-Go. USB On-The-Go (USB OTG or just OTG) is a specification first used in late 2001 that allows USB devices, such as tablets or smartphones, to act as a host, allowing other USB devices, such as USB flash drives, digital cameras, mouse or keyboards, to be attached to them. USB OTG allows those devices to switch back and forth between the roles of Host and Device. A mobile phone may read from removable media as the Host but present itself as a (USB Mass Storage) Device when connected to a host computer. In short, we could attach a standard USB web camera to a typical smartphone.
Body mounted USB camera: Here, we had quite an interesting problem. Standard USB web cameras are not tailored for body mounting, neither are they durable enough. We spent a good amount of time checking how to solve this issue, and finally, we managed to find a suitable USB camera vendor using Sony-based camera sensors. The vendor could mount any lens to the camera sensor, and the whole board came with a good amount of mounting holes. After that, one of our hardware people designed a custom mountable case for our USB camera and 3d printed it.
New extended battery: The standard battery of our Android device was around 4100mah. Unfortunately, after multiple tests, we saw that with every needed hardware capability activated, aka LTE, USB OTG, GPS, and microphone, the Android device was taking around 800-900mah per hour. And this was not enough for the whole 12 hours shift. So we took the extraordinary decision of creating our battery. Finally, we managed to produce a proof of concept 12400 mah battery replacement for our Android device. And indeed, it took 12 hours to recharge.
Mount for cars and bicycles: We wanted our system to support multiple different mounting points. So, to allow this to happen, we bought standard multi-camera mounts for vehicles and bikes and created adapters for our 3d printed camera to enable attachment to the stock mounts.
Software
On the diagram, you can see a sample architecture diagram of the solution. With that architecture, we managed to achieve 22 frames per second with streaming and encryption.
UDP streamer module: This module’s main functionality was sending UDP packets and receiving answers for these UDP packets. It sent analytics data to the Adaptive bitrate control module to decide how to switch between different formats and resolutions.
Encryption module: This module was highly optimized to perform hybrid encryption and decryption of byte objects. We managed to optimize the performance, so the module supported encryption and decryption of real-time h.264 frames coming from the USB module.
Network protocol module: Main functionality here was to construct and decode UDP datagrams messages. It used the encryption module to encrypt the data before sending it to the UDP streamer.
Adaptive bitrate and codec control module: This module controlled what type of compression strategy to use to ensure that the headquarters will receive data no matter the LTE signal.
Objects pool module: The idea of the module was to reuse different bytes arrays during the lifecycle of the h.264 packets. With around 24 frames streamed per second, creating and destroying many bytes arrays would entirely kill our application.
USB camera module: This module wrapped the communication and handling of the USB video camera bus. The idea was to support multiple different cameras and formats here.
Telemetry module: In this module, we collected all the additional data we had – current battery consumption, remaining battery time, GPS coordinates, sd card storage, etc.
h.264 decoding module: This module’s main functionality was to transfer video frame data in a different format. For example, we supported h.264 frames, png, and jpeg formats. The application was intelligent enough to decide when to switch between the different formats.
We used Java and C++ programming languages for the implementation of all the modules. The only C++ part was the USB camera module because of the low-level communication with the USB bus.
Let me share some notes on why we decided to use an Android device. We could implement our body camera system using an ARM-based board with Linux installed on top of it. It would dramatically reduce our software efforts. However, from a hardware point of view, most ARM-based boards lacked good CPUs, battery support, and housing. Not to mention, the development of a custom ARM board was entirely outside of our budget. Fortunately, our software was designed this way, so we could easily switch the hardware platform in case of investment or more considerable client interest.
In conclusion, our body camera system managed to fulfill our initial requirements for MVP. It worked well, and we made multiple videos and streams testing it in various environments and locations. Our system even managed to send data through 3G mobile cells in areas where LTE/4G was not supported.
A sample video of how the system works could be found here
Some photos of our POC build. With that build we managed to fulfill our requirements.
As you can see from the previous paragraphs, there are multiple ways to penetrate your devices. In the following sections, I shall list some methods of making your devices more secure. You can find the previous part – here.
Hardware Security
There are multiple options for physically securing your laptop and smartphone. At the end of the article, I shall give multiple variants for your budget, but ideally, the essential hardware security upgrades are:
Secured Notebook Backpack: There are multiple hardware vendors for securing your laptop backpack. It is essential to know the standard branded bags do not offer enough security options. For example, most backpacks do not provide RFID protection and proper locking mechanism.
USB Port Lockers: Port lockers can keep your laptop safe from Rubber Ducky-based attacks. At the same time, port lockers are pretty interesting because they make attackers’ lives more complicated in case of steal. To access the USB port of the device, they have to break the locker, which can damage the USB port and make it unusable.
Hardware Tokens: Bussines series laptops usually come with internal TPM chips, which can encrypt your entire hard drive. It is terrific, but if you want better security, it is advisable to encrypt your most critical files using external USB hardware tokens.
Antivirus Software
The average number of new malware programs per day is around 450 000. It is an astonishing number and almost destroys the necessity of antivirus software. Still, it is crucial to understand that the goal of your Antivirus Software is to stop the most critical pieces of malware, but not all of them. Let me list some of the mechanisms your Antivirus Software uses to keep you safe.
Malware Database: Every Antivirus program comes with a malware database with different strains of already analyzed computer malware. As we already understood, there are around 450 000 new strains per day. Antivirus companies’ teams keep only the most dangerous strains in the database to keep with the speed of making new strains.
Malware Scanner: Usually, every malware tries to gain access to resources, which are not part of its resources pool. Antivirus software can monitor your operating system for such activities and can block them and finally notify you.
Operating System Files Hash Check: Some antivirus software can check whether there are changes in your operating systems and notify you and revert the system files for the previous state. It is especially true with Red Hat-based Linux distros.
Open Source
One of the reasons people choose Open Source is the level of security it offers. You can perfectly set up your business to use an open-source stack from the beginning. And this is not only the applications but the operating system and even your hardware. Especially Linux is a beautiful example of how an Open Source ecosystem can increase its security by being open. Instead of using pirated software, you download it from a free repo, which has the source code of the app already reviewed. Every major Linux distro has all of its packages signed, and the repo can verify them. But let me list the different advantages an open-source operating system has.
On the diagram, you can see a sample architecture of a Linux system. Usually, SELinux and AppArmor are working on the Kernel level. After version 4.4, Android has SELinux enabled by default.
SELinux and AppArmor: SELinux and AppArmor are kernel modifications and user-space tools added to various Linux distributions. Its architecture strives to separate enforcement of security decisions from the security policy and streamlines the amount of software involved with security policy enforcement. Significantly, the fundamental concepts underlying SELinux can be traced to several earlier projects by the United States National Security Agency (NSA).
Open Source Repos: All the packages are part of the software repos, maintained by the distro authors. Bigger Linux distros such as Red Hat and SUSE support big security teams to find and patch holes.
Open Source Hardware: There are multiple open-source hardware initiatives, including PowerPC and ARM-based processors. It is essential to know those hardware devices attached to your PC come with drivers, and sometimes these drivers can be an entire operating system. For example, server-based Intel Xeon processors come with network-based remote access control.
Budget:
So after we have listed most of the penetration vectors which an attacker can take, we can finish the topic by creating a budget. We will focus the funding towards underfunded organizations with a limited budget for their cybersecurity program. The budget will be per employee.
Pacsafe Backpack (190$): Pacsafe is a brand of travel equipment emphasizing anti-theft features. The company’s products include adventure backpacks, urban and leisure bags, women’s bags, photography bags, luggage, and travel accessories such as straps, cables, and locks. Their middle-end backpacks offer a pretty good level of security.
Business Series Laptop (1000$): For this one, I would choose Lenovo Thinkpad-based laptop. It supports TPM and will offer a good level of harddrive encryption. It is essential to mention here that you have to encrypt all of your storage drives, no matter SSD or HDD ones.
Laptop Operating System(0$): Here, we shall go with either CentOS or OpenSUSE. I would personally go with CentOS here because of the native SELinux support. If you want to use the Ubuntu operating system, you should live with AppArmor or set yourself SELinux. CentOS additionally support free Antivirus Sofware supporting all the listed features in the previous paragraphs.
Smartphone(200$): Here, we shall use any device, which supports LineageOS. LineageOS is an operating system for smartphones, tablet computers, and set-top boxes, based on Android with primarily free and open-source software. It is the successor to the custom ROM CyanogenMod, from which the devs forked it in December 2016. It offers a good level of privacy, including the complete removal of the Google Play Store for the most paranoid ones. Most of the devices officially supported are in the 200$ range.
With a total budget of around 1390$, we achieved a pretty good level of security. Still, a determined attacker can penetrate this setup, but it will take him more time and resources. If you want to improve this setup further, you can add USB locks and hardware tokens. But, again, the improvement will not be much because, in case of hardware steal, hackers would have to break your TPM module, and the TPM modules are designed to resist this kind of attack.
