Industry View

Twelve Reasons Pen Testing Won't Die

Core Security Technologies CTO Ivan Arce lists 12 reasons Fortify Co-Founder and Chief Scientist Brian Chess is wrong about 2009 marking the end of pen testing

By Ivan Arce

So, yes, indeed, I hereby predict that "2009 will not mark the end of pen tests as we know them." In fact, since I am feeling quite bold right now, I will double down and predict that "2009 will not mark the end of pen tests as we don't know them," either.

Of course, now I am required to provide a plausible rationale for such bold statements, so if you're still reading bear with me.

First I will need to clarify what penetration testing is as I know it.

Penetration testing is an information security practice that is at least 35 years old, and its origins can be traced back to the Multics Security Evaluation performed by the US Air Force in 1974 and IBM's Penetrating an operating system: a study of VM/370 integrity from 1976. It is often -- mistakenly -- considered an arcane and costly infosec practice due to its perceived dependence on highly-skilled and specialized professionals that can successfully model the mindset and modus operandi of real attackers.

Contrary to somewhat popular belief, pen testing is not a simple "badness-o-meter" that can only produce two outputs: "broken security" or "don't know."

As a time-constrained exercise of realistic testing of an organization's security posture using an attacker's perspective, penetration testing provides a much richer output that can be encoded with a single bit. It highlights actual, specific weaknesses that a set of modeled attackers with a given set of skills could combine to generate successful attack paths that realize threats to the organization within a specific timespan.

The natural (and expected) result of a penetration test is a detailed account of the set of attacks (all of them) that were preformed that could and could not successfully breach the organization's security, their respective impact and a corresponding set of actionable items to address them. Bearing that in mind, I will now attempt to justify and rationalize my counter-prediction to Brian's prediction.

Penetration tests will not die or suddenly turn or become assimilated into something else in 2009 because:

• 1. A 35-year old practice with steadily increasing adoption rates does not usually disappear or transform itself substantially within just 12 months.
• 2. Penetration testing is intrinsically operational in nature. While pre-emptive measures such as security QA and testing and other SDLC practices may be useful to reduce the number of security vulnerabilities in custom or newly developed software, existing operational environments will continue to have bugs during 2009 due to the deployment of legacy or un-audited buggy applications.
• 3. Penetration testing is operational in nature (did I say that?). It deals with multistage and multilayered threats or attacks (not just vulnerabilities!) in real-world environments (not test labs) and then maps them explicitly to actual security risks. This will remain a valid use case scenario during 2009.
• 4. Penetration testing is tactical. It provides tangible, actionable information on how to incrementally improve an organization's security posture effectively to prevent real and specific attacks from happening and do so efficiently since it makes it easier to measure at least some for of return on security investment considering both the defense and offense technology currently available.
• 5. Penetration testing is strategic. If performed regularly, consistently and as part of an organization's overall security strategy, it becomes a useful and valuable practice to implement a program of constant improvement of information security.
• 6. Penetration testing is strategic. Incorporating an attacker's perspective to an organization's overall security strategy provides necessary checks and balances and improves the organization's ability to steer security policy in accordance to current trends in the threat landscape.
• 7. Penetration testing is not a silver bullet. It is best used in conjunction with other security practices and in doing so it amplifies those results with both positive and negative feedback (about what does and does not work).
• 8. Penetration testing is -- at least partially -- driven by compliance. It is a recommended or even a mandatory practice in several regulations, industry standards and organization's internal policies that will not go away in 2009.
• 9. The IT landscape is constantly evolving and will continue to do so in the next year. As new technologies emerge, new attack vectors become prevalent. Monitoring the evolution over time of sophisticated penetration testing techniques is a good leading indicator of threats that may see mass-adoption in the future which makes pen testing almost a necessity to improve SISSP qualifications.
• 10. There is money to be made selling penetration services and products. The opportunity will not go away in 2009.
• 11. Financial crisis and economic turmoil means also more and better opportunities for cybercrime. In the context of 2009 testing one's defenses periodically will be more (not less) necessary than if we had a more globally stable scenario.
• 12. Last but not least, five years ago IDS technology and its respective market was the "in thing" to make predictions about. Although predicted several times, the death of the IDS has been greatly exaggerated in the past years.

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