Behavior Transparency: Where Application Security Meets Cyber Awareness


How can you tell when software is behaving strangely if you don’t know what the right behavior is? That’s an important question when it comes to threat actors. After all, attackers often hijack honest software, networks and systems for dishonest ends. To stop them with security tools, the first step must be to have great cyber awareness. 


The best evolving approach to this problem is behavior transparency. This is a broad term for applying the concept of transparency (such as app tracking transparency, certificate transparency and transparency around external network actions) for software to internal network activity.


In its simplest form, this is a practical list of expected behaviors for any piece of software. It helps your defense team tell the difference between normal software actions and what could be malicious ones that could lead to a data breach. 


What Should Be Transparent? 


The benefit of behavior transparency is that it helps cope with the huge quantity of noise whenever any security system seeks out strange actions. After all, it’s much easier to find a needle in a haystack if you first remove all the known hay. 


There are two elements to this: technical transparency and transparency as used in cyber awareness for non-security personnel. On the technical side, it should specify the ports software should use and what it will use those ports for. It should also include expected connection behavior, such as connection to other software components and network regions. 


This isn’t just a matter of sharing that information within one company or agency. It must happen industrywide, and there’s reason to believe it will happen. Behavioral information is most useful when it’s published, ..

Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.