Cloud Security Podcast by Google

Guests:  no guests (just us!) Topics: What are some of the fun security-related launches from Next 2024 (sorry for our brief “marketing hat” moment!)? Any fun security vendors we spotted “in the clouds”? OK, what are our favorite sessions? Our own, right? Anything else we had time to go to? What are the new security ideas inspired by the event (you really want to listen to this part! Because “freatures”...) Any tricky questions at the end? Resources: Live video (LinkedIn, YouTube) [live audio is not great in these] 15 must-attend security sessions at Next '24 Cloud CISO Perspectives: 20 major security announcements from Next ‘24 EP137 Next 2023 Special: Conference Recap - AI, Cloud, Security, Magical Hallway Conversations (last year!) EP136 Next 2023 Special: Building AI-powered Security Tools - How Do We Do It? EP90 Next Special - Google Cybersecurity Action Team: One Year Later! A cybersecurity expert's guide to securing AI products with Google SAIF Next 2024 session How AI can transform your approach to security Next 2024 session

Guests:  Umesh Shankar, Distinguished Engineer, Chief Technologist for Google Cloud Security Scott Coull, Head of Data Science Research, Google Cloud Security Topics: What does it mean to “teach AI security”? How did we make SecLM? And also: why did we make SecLM? What can “security trained LLM” do better vs regular LLM? Does making it better at security make it worse at other things that we care about? What can a security team do with it today?  What are the “starter use cases” for SecLM? What has been the feedback so far in terms of impact - both from practitioners but also from team leaders? Are we seeing the limits of LLMs for our use cases? Is the “LLM is not magic” finally dawning? Resources: “How to tackle security tasks and workflows with generative AI” (Google Cloud Next 2024 session on SecLM) EP136 Next 2023 Special: Building AI-powered Security Tools - How Do We Do It? EP144 LLMs: A Double-Edged Sword for Cloud Security? Weighing the Benefits and Risks of Large Language Models Supercharging security with generative AI  Secure, Empower, Advance: How AI Can Reverse the Defender’s Dilemma? Considerations for Evaluating Large Language Models for Cybersecurity Tasks Introducing Google’s Secure AI Framework Deep Learning Security and Privacy Workshop  Security Architectures for Generative AI Systems ACM Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Security Conference on Applied Machine Learning in Information Security  

Speakers:  Maria Riaz, Cloud Counter-Abuse, Engineering Lead, Google Cloud Topics: What is “counter abuse”? Is this the same as security? What does counter-abuse look like for GCP? What are the popular abuse types we face?  Do people use stolen cards to get accounts to then violate the terms with? How do we deal with this, generally? Beyond core technical skills, what are some of the relevant competencies for working in this space that would appeal to a diverse set of audience? You have worked in academia and industry. What similarities or differences have you observed? Resources / reading: Video EP165 Your Cloud Is Not a Pet - Decoding 'Shifting Left' for Cloud Security P161 Cloud Compliance: A Lawyer - Turned Technologist! - Perspective on Navigating the Cloud “Art of War” by Sun Tzu “Dare to Lead” by Brene Brown "Multipliers" by Liz Wiseman

Guests: Evan Gilman, co-founder CEO of Spirl Eli Nesterov, co-founder CTO of Spril Topics: Today we have IAM,  zero trust and security made easy. With that intro, could you give us the 30 second version of what a workload identity is and why people need them?  What’s so spiffy about SPIFFE anyway?  What’s different between this and micro segmentation of your network–why is one better or worse?  You call your book “solving the bottom turtle” could you tell us what that means? What are the challenges you’re seeing large organizations run into when adopting this approach at scale?  Of all the things a CISO could prioritize, why should this one get added to the list? What makes this, which is so core to our internal security model–ripe for the outside world? How people do it now, what gets thrown away when you deploy SPIFFE? Are there alternative? SPIFFE is interesting, yet can a startup really “solve for the bottom turtle”?  Resources: SPIFFE  and Spirl “Solving the Bottom Turtle” book [PDF, free] “Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!” book [also, one of Anton’s faves for years!] “Zero Trust Networks” book Workload Identity Federation in GCP

Guest: Ahmad Robinson,  Cloud Security Architect, Google Cloud Topics: You’ve done a BlackHat webinar where you discuss a Pets vs Cattle mentality when it comes to cloud operations. Can you explain this mentality and how it applies to security? What in your past led you to these insights?  Tell us more about your background and your journey to Google.  How did that background contribute to your team? One term that often comes up on the show and with our customers is 'shifting left.'  Could you explain what 'shifting left' means in the context of cloud security? What’s hard about shift left, and where do orgs get stuck too far right? A lot of “cloud people” talk about IaC and PaC but the terms and the concepts are occasionally confusing to those new to cloud. Can you briefly explain Policy as Code  and its security implications? Does PaC help or hurt security? Resources: “No Pets Allowed - Mastering The Basics Of Cloud Infrastructure” webinar EP33 Cloud Migrations: Security Perspectives from The Field EP126 What is Policy as Code and How Can It Help You Secure Your Cloud Environment? EP138 Terraform for Security Teams: How to Use IaC to Secure the Cloud  

Guest: Jennifer Fernick, Senor Staff Security Engineer and UTL, Google Topics: Since one of us (!) doesn't have a PhD in quantum mechanics, could you explain what a quantum computer is and how do we know they are on a credible path towards being real threats to cryptography? How soon do we need to worry about this one? We’ve heard that quantum computers are more of a threat to asymmetric/public key crypto than symmetric crypto. First off, why? And second, what does this difference mean for defenders? Why (how) are we sure this is coming? Are we mitigating a threat that is perennially 10 years ahead and then vanishes due to some other broad technology change? What is a post-quantum algorithm anyway? If we’re baking new key exchange crypto into our systems, how confident are we that we are going to be resistant to both quantum and traditional cryptanalysis?  Why does NIST think it's time to be doing the PQC thing now? Where is the rest of the industry on this evolution? How can a person tell the difference here between reality and snakeoil? I think Anton and I both responded to your initial email with a heavy dose of skepticism, and probably more skepticism than it deserved, so you get the rare on-air apology from both of us! Resources: Securing tomorrow today: Why Google now protects its internal communications from quantum threats How Google is preparing for a post-quantum world NIST PQC standards PQ Crypto conferences “Quantum Computation & Quantum Information” by Nielsen & Chuang book “Quantum Computing Since Democritus” by Scott Aaronson book EP154 Mike Schiffman: from Blueboxing to LLMs via Network Security at Google  

Guest: Phil Venables, Vice President, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) @ Google Cloud  Topics:  You had this epic 8 megatrends idea in 2021, where are we now with them? We now have 9 of them, what made you add this particular one (AI)? A lot of CISOs fear runaway AI. Hence good governance is key! What is your secret of success for AI governance?  What questions are CISOs asking you about AI? What questions about AI should they be asking that they are not asking? Which one of the megatrends is the most contentious based on your presenting them worldwide? Is cloud really making the world of IT simpler (megatrend #6)? Do most enterprise cloud users appreciate the software-defined nature of cloud (megatrend #5) or do they continue to fight it? Which megatrend is manifesting the most strongly in your experience? Resources: Megatrends drive cloud adoption—and improve security for all and infographic “Keynote | The Latest Cloud Security Megatrend: AI for Security” “Lessons from the future: Why shared fate shows us a better cloud roadmap” blog and shared fate page SAIF page “Spotlighting ‘shadow AI’: How to protect against risky AI practices” blog EP135 AI and Security: The Good, the Bad, and the Magical EP47 Megatrends, Macro-changes, Microservices, Oh My! Changes in 2022 and Beyond in Cloud Security Secure by Design by CISA  

Guest: Kat Traxler, Security Researcher, TrustOnCloud Topics: What is your reaction to “in the cloud you are one IAM mistake away from a breach”? Do you like it or do you hate it? A lot of people say “in the cloud, you must do IAM ‘right’”. What do you think that means? What is the first or the main idea that comes to your mind when you hear it? How have you seen the CSPs take different approaches to IAM? What does it mean for the cloud users? Why do people still screw up IAM in the cloud so badly after years of trying? Deeper, why do people still screw up resource hierarchy and resource management?  Are the identity sins of cloud IAM users truly the sins of the creators? How did the "big 3" get it wrong and how does that continue to manifest today? Your best cloud IAM advice is “assign roles at the lowest resource-level possible”, please explain this one? Where is the magic? Resources: Video (Linkedin, YouTube) Kat blog “Diving Deeply into IAM Policy Evaluation” blog “Complexity: a Guided Tour” book EP141 Cloud Security Coast to Coast: From 2015 to 2023, What's Changed and What's the Same? EP129 How CISO Cloud Dreams and Realities Collide  

Guest: Victoria Geronimo, Cloud Security Architect, Google Cloud Topics: You work with technical folks at the intersection of compliance, security, and cloud. So  what do you do, and where do you find the biggest challenges in communicating across those boundaries? How does cloud make compliance easier? Does it ever make compliance harder?  What is your best advice to organizations that approach cloud compliance as they did for the 1990s data centers and classic IT? What has been the most surprising compliance challenge you’ve helped teams debug in your time here?  You also work on standards development –can you tell us about how you got into that and what’s been surprising in that for you?  We often say on this show that an organization’s ability to threat model is only as good as their team’s perspectives are diverse: how has your background shaped your work here?   Resources: Video (YouTube) EP14 Making Compliance Cloud-native EP25 Beyond Compliance: Cloud Security in Europe  Fordham University Law and Technology site IAPP  site  

Guest: Merritt Baer, Field CTO,  Lacework, ex-AWS, ex-USG Topics: How can organizations ensure that their security posture is maintained or improved during a cloud migration? Is cloud migration a risk reduction move? What are some of the common security challenges that organizations face during a cloud migration? Are there different gotchas between the three public clouds? What advice would you give to those security leaders who insist on lift/shift or on lift/shift first? How should security and compliance teams approach their engineering and DevOps colleagues to make sure things are starting on the right foot? In your view, what is the essence of a cloud-native approach to security? How can organizations ensure that their security posture scales as their cloud usage grows? Resources: Video (LinkedIn, YouTube) EP69 Cloud Threats and How to Observe Them EP138 Terraform for Security Teams: How to Use IaC to Secure the Cloud EP67 Cyber Defense Matrix and Does Cloud Security Have to DIE to Win? 9 Megatrends drive cloud adoption—and improve security for all Darknet Diaries podcast  

Guests: Emre Kanlikilicer, Senior Engineering Manager @ Google Sophia Gu, Engineering Manager at Google  Topics Workspace makes the claim that unlike other productivity suites available today, it’s architectured for the modern threat landscape. That’s a big claim! What gives Google the ability to make this claim? Workspace environments would have many different types of data, some very sensitive. What are some of the common challenges with controlling access to data and protecting data in hybrid work?  What are some of the common mistakes you see customers making with Workspace security? What are some of the ways context aware access and DLP (now SDP) help with this? What are the cool future plans for DLP and CAA? Resources: Google Workspace blog & Workspace Update blog EP99 Google Workspace Security: from Threats to Zero Trust CISA Zero Trust Maturity Model 2.0  

Guest: Jason Solomon, Security Engineer, Google Topics: Could you share a bit about when you get pulled into incidents and what are your goals when you are? How does that change in the cloud? How do you establish a chain of custody and prove it for law enforcement, if needed? What tooling do you rely on for cloud forensics and is that tooling available to "normal people"?  How do we at Google know when it’s time to call for help, and how should our customers know that it’s time?  Can I quote Ray Parker Jr and ask, who you gonna call? What’s your advice to a security leader on how to “prepare for the inevitable” in this context?  Cloud forensics - is it easier or harder than the 1990s classic forensics?  Resource: EP157 Decoding CDR & CIRA: What Happens When SecOps Meets Cloud EP98 How to Cloud IR or Why Attackers Become Cloud Native Faster? EP103 Security Incident Response and Public Cloud - Exploring with Mandiant Google SRE Workbook (Ch 9) GRR Cloud Logging LibCloudForensics, Turbinia, Timesketch tools

Guest: Arie Zilberstein, CEO and Co-Founder at Gem Security Topics:  How does Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) differ from traditional, on-premises detection and response? What are the key challenges of cloud detection and response? Often we lift and shift our teams to Cloud, and not always for bad reasons, so  what’s your advice on how to teach the old dogs new tricks: “on-premise-trained” D&R teams and cloud D&R? What is this new CIRA thing that Gartner just cooked up?  Should CIRA exist as a separate market or technology or is this just a slice of CDR or even SIEM perhaps? What do you tell people who say that “SIEM is their CDR”? What are the key roles and responsibilities of the CDR team? How is the cloud D&R process related to DevOps and cloud-style IT processes?  Resources: Video version of this episode Cloud breaches databases EP98 How to Cloud IR or Why Attackers Become Cloud Native Faster? EP103 Security Incident Response and Public Cloud - Exploring with Mandiant EP76 Powering Secure SaaS … But Not with CASB? Cloud Detection and Response? 9 Megatrends drive cloud adoption—and improve security for all “Emerging Tech: Security — Cloud Investigation and Response Automation (CIRA) Offers Transformation Opportunities” (Gartner access required) “Does the World Need Cloud Detection and Response (CDR)?” blog

Guest: Sandra Joyce, VP at Mandiant Intelligence Topics: Could you give us a brief overview of what this power disruption incident was about? This incident involved both Living Off the Land and attacks on operational technology (OT). Could you explain to our audience what these mean and what the attacker did here? We also saw a wiper used to hide forensics, is that common these days? Did the attacker risk tipping their hand about upcoming physical attacks? If we’d seen this intrusion earlier, might we have understood the attacker’s next moves? How did your team establish robust attribution in this case, and how they do it in general? How sure are we, really?  Could you share how this came about and maybe some of the highlights in our relationship helping defend that country? Resources: Sandworm Disrupts Power in Ukraine Using a Novel Attack Against Operational Technology | Mandiant Andy Greenberg’s book Sandworm  EP155 Cyber, Geopolitics, AI, Cloud - All in One Book?  

Guests: Derek Reveron, Professor and Chair of National Security at the US Naval War College John Savage, An Wang Professor Emeritus of Computer Science of Brown University Topics: You wrote a book on cyber and war, how did this come about and what did you most enjoy learning from the other during the writing process? Is generative AI going to be a game changer in international relations and war, or is it just another tool? You also touch briefly on lethal autonomous weapons systems and ethics–that feels like the genie is right in the very neck of the bottle right now, is it too late? Aside from this book, and the awesome course you offered at Brown that sparked Tim’s interest in this field, how can we democratize this space better?  How does the emergence and shift to Cloud impact security in the cyber age? What are your thoughts on the intersection of Cloud as a set of technologies and operating model and state security (like sovereignty)? Does Cloud make espionage harder or easier?  Resources: “Security in the Cyber Age” book (and their other books’) “Thinking, Fast and Slow” book “No Shortcuts: Why States Struggle to Develop a Military Cyber-Force” book “The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age“ book “Active Cyber Defense: Applying Air Defense to the Cyber Domain” EP141 Cloud Security Coast to Coast: From 2015 to 2023, What's Changed and What's the Same? EP145 Cloud Security: Shared Responsibility, Shared Fate, Shared Faith?  

Guest: Mike Schiffman, Network Security “UTL” Topics: Given your impressive and interesting history, tell us a few things about yourself? What are the biggest challenges facing network security today based on your experience? You came to Google to work on Network Security challenges. What are some of the surprising ones you’ve uncovered here? What lessons from Google's approach to network security absolutely don’t apply to others? Which ones perhaps do? If you have to explain the difference between network security in the cloud and on-premise, what comes to mind first? How do we balance better encryption with better network security monitoring and detection? Speaking of challenges in cryptography, we’re all getting fired up about post-quantum and network security. Could you give us the maybe 5 minute teaser version of this because we have an upcoming episode dedicated to this? I hear you have some interesting insight on LLMs, something to do with blueboxing or something. What is that about? Resources: Video EP113 Love it or Hate it, Network Security is Coming to the Cloud EP122 Firewalls in the Cloud: How to Implement Trust Boundaries for Access Control “A History of Fake Things on the Internet” by WALTER J. SCHEIRER Why Google now protects its internal communications from quantum threats How Google is preparing for a post-quantum world NIST on PQC “Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit” (yes, really)  

Guest: Kevin Mandia, CEO at Mandiant, part of Google Cloud Topics: When you look back, what were the most surprising cloud breaches in 2023, and what can we learn from them? How were they different from the “old world” of on-prem breaches?  For a long time it’s felt like incident response has been an on-prem specialization, and that adversaries are primarily focused on compromising on-prem infrastructure. Who are we seeing go after cloud environments? The same threat actors or not? Could you share a bit about the mistakes and risks that you saw organizations make that made their cloud breaches possible or made them worse? Conversely, what ended up being helpful to organizations in limiting the blast radius or making response easier?  Tim’s mother worked in a network disaster recovery team for a long time–their motto was “preparing for the inevitable.” What advice do you have for helping security teams and IT teams get ready for cloud breaches? Especially for recent cloud entrants? Anton tells his “2000 IDS story” (need to listen for details!) and asks: what approaches for detecting threats actually detects threats today? Resources: EP148 Decoding SaaS Security: Demystifying Breaches, Vulnerabilities, and Vendor Responsibilities "Microsoft lost its keys, and the government got hacked" news article SEC Charges SolarWinds and Chief Information Security Officer with Fraud, Internal Control Failures  (must read by every CISO!)

Guest: Michee Smith, Director, Product Management for Global Affairs Works, Google Topics: What is Google Annual Transparency Report and how did we get started doing this?  Surely the challenge of a transparency report is that there are things we can’t be transparent about, how do we balance this? What are those? Is it a safe question? What Access Transparency Logs are and if they are connected to the report –other than in Tim's mind and your career?  Beyond building the annual transparency report, you also work on our central risk data platform. Every business has a problem managing risk–what’s special here? Do we have any Google magic here?  Could you tell us about your path in Product Management here? You have been here eight years, and recently became Director. Do you have any advice for the ambitious Google PMs listening to the show?   Resources: Google Annual Transparency report Access Transparency Logs “Digital Asset Valuation and Cyber Risk Measurement: Principles of Cybernomics“ book Keyun Ruan “Trapped in a frame: Why leaders should avoid security framework traps”  blog

Guest: Monica Shokrai, Head Of Business Risk and Insurance For Google Cloud  Topics: Could you give us the 30 second run down of what cyber insurance is and isn't? Can you tie that to clouds? How does the cloud change it? Is it the case that now I don't need insurance for some of the "old school" cyber risks? What challenges are insurers facing with assessing cloud risks? On this show I struggle to find CISOs who "get" cloud, are there insurers and underwriters who get it? We recently heard about an insurer reducing coverage for incidents caused by old CVEs! What's your take on this? Effective incentive structure to push orgs towards patching operational excellence or someone finding yet another way not to pay out? Is insurance the magic tool for improving security? Doesn't cyber insurance have a difficult reputation with clients? “Will they even pay?” “Will it be enough?” “Is this a cyberwar exception?” type stuff? How do we balance our motives between selling more cloud and providing effective risk underwriting data to insurers? How soon do you think we will have actuarial data from many clients re: real risks in the cloud? What about the fact that risks change all the time unlike say many “non cyber” risks?   Resources: Video (LinkedIn, YouTube) Google Cloud Risk Protection program “Cyber Insurance Policy”  by Josephine Wolff  InsureSec

Guest: Dr Gary McGraw, founder of the Berryville Institute of Machine Learning Topics: Gary, you’ve been doing software security for many decades, so tell us: are we really behind on securing ML and AI systems?  If not SBOM for data or “DBOM”, then what? Can data supply chain tools or just better data governance practices help? How would you threat model a system with ML in it or a new ML system you are building?  What are the key differences and similarities between securing AI and securing a traditional, complex enterprise system? What are the key differences between securing the AI you built and AI you buy or subscribe to? Which security tools and frameworks will solve all of these problems for us?  Resources: EP135 AI and Security: The Good, the Bad, and the Magical Gary McGraw books “An Architectural Risk Analysis Of Machine Learning Systems: Toward More Secure Machine Learning“ paper “What to think about when you’re thinking about securing AI” Annotated ML Security bibliography   Tay bot story (2016) “Can you melt eggs?” “Microsoft AI researchers accidentally leak 38TB of company data” “Random number generator attack” “Google's AI Red Team: the ethical hackers making AI safer” Introducing Google’s Secure AI Framework