Welcome to the NIAP TLS 1.0 Functional Package

Greg McLearn Uncategorized

NIAP recently released their first, and widely anticipated, modular protection profile package targeting the TLS communication protocol. This package is not meant to stand on its own and is designed to be included within new versions of NIAP protection profiles. While it is unlikely to be explicitly referenced by collaborative Protection Profiles (cPP), the requirements will almost certainly be highly similar.

Some highlights about the new package:

  • Largely the same as existing TLS requirements
  • TLS clients are no longer restricted to only the set of claimed ciphersuites
  • An admin can accept an X.509 certificate that fails validation if permitted by explicit override
  • DHE parameters of up to 8192 bits are now allowed
  • NIAP gives a hat tip to automated testing by explicitly stating that testing may be performed manually or with an automated framework that provides empirical evidence
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Execution and Ambition – Year in Review

Jason Lawlor Lightship News

December marks the 3-year anniversary of the founding of Lightship.  As such, we’ve been taking stock to consider our progress, challenges and future plans.

First the good news.  In 2018, Lightship was able to successfully execute on the following: 

  • Became the 5th and only independently owned and accredited Common Criteria lab in Canada 
  • Completed our accreditation to become 1 of 22 FIPS 140-2 labs worldwide 
  • Completed one of the fastest formal NDcPP v2 end to end CC evaluations ever completed in North America 
  • Secured development funding from the Government of Canada for Greenlight test automation innovations 
  • Added more modules and utilities as part of the Greenlight platform to improve reporting, ease of integration and usability for us and our clients 
  • Added critical mass to our development and delivery team to support our growing client base
  • Earned the certification business of several new domestic and international industry leading security vendors through our modernized and automated Functional Gap Analysis offering and end to end expedited CC certification methodology

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The Mother of All NIAP Protection Profiles – NDcPP

Lachlan Turner Certifications, Common Criteria

We took a strategic decision early on at Lightship Security to focus our initial Greenlight development efforts on automating the tests specified by the Network Device collaborative Protection Profile (NDcPP). There are two main reasons for this:

  1. It is the most widely used Common Criteria Protection Profile in North America (given its generic applicability)
  2. It is the forerunner for most NIAP Approved Protection Profiles which re-use a large portion of the NDcPP Security Functional Requirements (SFRs)

Now, we have automated the testing not only for NDcPP but also several other Protection Profiles by virtue of this SFR re-use.  Below we present an analysis of the re-use of NDcPP requirements across NIAP Approved Protection Profiles (all but a few).

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irap2018

Government of Canada Funding for Greenlight Conformance Test Automation

Jason Lawlor Common Criteria, Lightship News

As part of our continued commitment to develop innovative certification automation solutions, Lightship Security is pleased to announce that it has received additional development funding from the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC IRAP).

The NRC IRAP support will be used by Lightship to provide advanced functionality of our industry first Conformance Automation Platform – Greenlight, specifically to support our growing list of clients with continuous certification readiness through automated functional pre-testing.

ndcppv2_1_changes

Notable NDcPPv2.1 Changes (from v2.0e)

Lachlan Turner Certifications, Common Criteria

NDcPPv2.1 is hot off the presses from the Network iTC.  It is yet to be officially accepted by NIAP for PCL usage however this is probably not too far off, perhaps with some minor tweaks (the new NTP SFR being something to watch).

Here are some notes from our initial review:

  • NTP. A new SFR has been added for NTP which we understand refers to mechanisms that are supported by commonly available NTP clients.  Vendors still have the option of specifying manual time configuration. If v2.1 is accepted by NIAP as is, this will remove the mandated use of a trusted channel for NTP which was causing problems for some vendors in v2.0e.
  • TLS. Administrators can now elect to ignore certificate validation failures. Support for 192-bit ciphersuites has been removed and a couple of new suites have been added.
  • X.509. Certificate revocation checking requirements have been ‘clarified’ by an application note. This may result in changes for implementations that meet the current requirements.
  • Audit Events. All generation/import/change of long-term cryptographic keys (i.e. not session keys) need to be audited, including those that are automatically generated by the TOE.

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SSH Rekey Limits with OpenSSH

Greg McLearn Common Criteria

Background

In the current version of the NDcPP there is a cryptographic Security Functional Requirement (SFR) called FCS_SSH*_EXT.1.8.  On the face of it, FCS_SSH*_EXT.1.8 is a fairly straightforward SFR with a relatively straightforward means to enforce it:

FCS_SSHS_EXT.1.8: The TSF shall ensure that within SSH connections the same session keys are used for a threshold of no longer than one hour, and no more than one gigabyte of transmitted data. After either of the thresholds are reached a rekey needs to be performed.

However, it is vitally important to read the application note (Application Note 102 in NDcPP v2.0+20180314) that follows this SFR element, because one small detail appears to be catching vendors by surprise:

For the maximum transmitted data threshold, the total incoming and outgoing data needs to be counted.
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6 Tips to Help Avoid Surprises In Your Next Common Criteria Evaluation

Jason Lawlor Certifications, Common Criteria

Undertaking a Common Criteria (CC) evaluation should not be an opaque process from a timing, process or cost perspective. In this post, the testing experts at Lightship provide 6 practical tips to ensure that you are getting the best value and outcomes for your certification dollar. The following is targeted primarily at Protection Profile (PP) based evaluations, but most also apply to Security Target (EAL) based projects.

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Lightship at IAEA Meeting on Cyber Risk in the Nuclear Supply Chain

Lachlan Turner Common Criteria, Lightship News

Lightship Security Director of Consulting, Lachlan Turner, was nominated by the Government of Canada to participate in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Technical Meeting on Reducing Cyber Risks in the Supply Chain which was held at IAEA’s Headquarters in Vienna, Austria, from 25 to 29 June 2018. Lachlan attended along with some 110 other delegates from around the world. Delegates included nuclear regulators, operators, suppliers and various other industry representatives.Read More

Don’t Call it a Bash Script: Automation is Not Scripting

Alex Thurston Certifications, Common Criteria

Or, maybe it is.  In reality, the answer is that all automation is scripting but not all scripting is automation.  Automation is really a maturation or evolution of scripting.  Calculators script the mathematical principles defined by Thales, Pythagoras, Euclid and Archimedes.  To-do applications script the act of making a list of tasks on a piece of paper and scratching them off.  The directions given by Google Maps on a road trip script the job normally performed by the person with a paper map sitting in the passenger seat.

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