Twittering for the Marines

The Marines recently issued an order banning social network sites (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.). The Pentagon is reviewing this sort of thing across all services. This follows on the heels of a restrictive NFL policy along the same lines. Slashdot has a nice thread, where among other things, we learn that some military personnel will contract with off-base ISPs for private Internet connections.

There are really two separate security issues to be discussed here. First, there’s the issue that military personnel might inadvertently leak information that could be used by their adversaries. This is what the NFL is worried about. The Marines order makes no mention of such leaks, and they would already be covered by rules and regulations, never mind continuing education (see, e.g., loose lips sink ships). Instead, our discussion will focus on the issue explicitly raised in the order: social networks as a vector for attackers to get at our military personnel.

For starters, there are other tools and techniques that can be used to protect people from visiting malicious web sites. There are black-list services, such as Google’s Safe Browsing, built into any recent version of Firefox. There are also better browser architectures, like Google’s Chrome, that isolate one part of the browser from another. The military could easily require the use of a specific web browser. The military could go one step further and provide sacrificial virtual machines, perhaps running on remote hosts and shared by something like VNC, to allow personnel to surf the public Internet. A solution like this seems infinitely preferable to forcing personnel to use third-party ISPs on personal computers, where vulnerable machines may well be compromised, yet go unnoticed by military sysadms. (Or worse, the ISP could itself be compromised, giving a huge amount of intel to the enemy; contrast this with the military, with its own networks and its own crypto, which presumably is designed to leak far less intel to a local eavesdropper.)

Even better, the virtual machine / remote display technique allows the military sysadm to keep all kinds of forensic data. Users’ external network behavior creates a fantastic honeynet for capturing malicious payloads. If your personnel are being attacked, you want to have the evidence in hand to sort out who the attacker is and why you’re being attacked. That helps you block future attacks and formulate any counter-measures you might take. You could do this just as well for email programs as web browsing. Might not work so well for games, but otherwise it’s a pretty powerful technique. (And, oh by the way, we’re talking about the military here, so personnel privacy isn’t as big a concern as it might be in other settings.)

It’s also important to consider the benefits of social networking. Military personnel are not machines. They’re people with spouses, children, and friends back home. Facebook is a remarkably efficient way to keep in touch with large numbers of friends without investing large amounts of time — ideal for the Marine, back from patrol, to get a nice chuckle when winding down before heading off to sleep.

In short, it’s problematic to ban social networking on “official” machines, which only pushes personnel to use these things on “unofficial” machines with “unofficial” ISPs, where you’re less likely to detect attacks and it’s harder to respond to them. Bring them in-house, in a controlled way, where you can better manage security issues and have happier personnel.