


This is an excellent example where security through obscurity helps the security team, in this case forcing the attacker to perform noisy scanning and likely raising the chance of detection by the organization's defensive tools and processes. In fact, without access to a database of hosts to users or a list of items, attackers are usually forced to scan or perform NETBios probes to each machine to identify logged on users. If your organization uses random system names for example, it becomes much harder for an attacker to target the workstations of key staff members, even if that attacker has access to Active Directory and such. Using security through obscurity for example to use unpredictable system names, account names and other information makes the job of an attacker much more difficult in many ways. He was the third employee, responsible for the overall operations and strategic technology development, implementation, and maintenance of the various CA systems.There are primarily two ways in which organizations can use security through obscurity as a useful component in their security posture today. He has international experience developing and managing public key infrastructures primarily for the financial services industry.Įpstein was the CTO for Digital Signature Trust Co., a start-up company formed to address the legal and technical issues of secure electronic commerce across the Internet, and one of the first licensed Certificate Authorities (CAs) in the United States. Clay Epstein holds a bachelor of science in computer science from the University of Utah and a master of business administration in management information systems from Westminster College (Salt Lake City, Utah).
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His introduction to cryptography began when he was assigned to develop a global key management system for MasterCard, and as part of that assignment, he began attending an Accredited Standards Committee (ASC) X9 Workgroup for retail banking security in 1989.ĭuring his career, he has spoken at many conferences participated in the development of numerous ANSI and ISO standards and published various papers, articles, chapters, and his first book- Security without Obscurity.

Louis, Missouri), maintaining and developing credit card and debit card transaction applications on its global network, Banknet. He continued his work in the financial service industry at MasterCard International (St.
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Louis, Missouri, in 1982, as a software engineer writing 8-bit assembler code for a turnkey savings and loan teller system. Stapleton began his career at Citicorp Information Resources, St. Stapleton is the author of Security without Obscurity: A Guide to Confidentiality, Authentication, and Integrity (CRC Press). This book offers readers the opportunity to benefit from the authors’ more than 50 years of combined experience in developing PKI-related policies, standards, practices, procedures, and audits, as well as designing and operating various commercial and private PKI systems. The highlighted bad practices, based on real-world scenarios from the authors’ experiences, illustrate how bad things are often done with good intentions but cause bigger problems than the original one being solved. Scattered throughout the book are anonymous case studies identifying both good and bad practices. In addition to discussions on PKI best practices, the book supplies warnings against bad PKI practices.

Security without Obscurity: A Guide to PKI Operations provides a no-nonsense approach and realistic guide to operating a PKI system. While algorithms, certificates, and theoretical policy are all excellent discussions, the real-world issues for operating a commercial or private CA can be overwhelming. Most books on public key infrastructure (PKI) seem to focus on asymmetric cryptography, X.509 certificates, certificate authority (CA) hierarchies, or certificate policy (CP), and certificate practice statements.
