Tony Sager: KEYNOTE: The NSA Information Assurance Directorate and the National Security Community

Black Hat Briefings, USA 2007 [Audio] Presentations from the security conference.

The Information Assurance Directorate (IAD) within the National Security Agency (NSA) is charged in part with providing security guidance to the national security community. Within the IAD, the Vulnerability Analysis and Operations (VAO) Group identifies and analyzes vulnerabilities found in the technology, information, and operations of the Department of Defense (DoD) and our other federal customers. This presentation will highlight some of the ways that the VAO Group is translating vulnerability knowledge in cooperation with many partners, into countermeasures and solutions that scale across the entire community. This includes the development and release of security guidance through the NSA public website (www.nsa.gov) and sponsorship of a number of community events like the Cyber Defense Initiative and the Red Blue Symposium. It also includes support for, or development of, open standards for vulnerability information (like CVE, the standard naming scheme for vulnerabilities); the creation of the extensible Configuration Checklist Description Format (XCCDF) to automate the implementation and measurement of security guidance; and joint sponsorship, with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), of the Information Security Automation Program (ISAP), to help security professionals automate security compliance and manage vulnerabilities.
The presentation will also discuss the cultural shift we have been making to treat network security as a community problem, one that requires large -scale openness and cooperation with security stakeholders at all points in the security supply chainoperators, suppliers, buyers, authorities and practitioners.
Tony Sager is the Chief of the Vulnerability Analysis and Operations (VAO) Group, part of the Information Assurance Directorate at the National Security Agency. The mission of the VAO organization is to identify, characterize, and put into operational context vulnerabilities found in the technology, information, and operations of the DoD and the national security community and to help the community identify countermeasures and solutions. This group is known for its work developing and releasing security configuration guides to provide customers with the best options for securing widely used products. The VAO Group also helps to shape the development of security standards for vulnerability naming and identification, such as the Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language (OVAL), partnering with National Institute for Standards and technology (NIST) on the Information Security Automation Program (ISAP), developing the eXtensible configuration checklist description format (XCCDF), and for hosting the annual Cyber Defense Exercise and the Red Blue Symposium. Mr. Sager is active in the public network security community, as a member of the CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) Senior Advisory Council and the Strategic Advisory Council for The Center for Internet Security. He is in his 29th year with the National Security Agency, all of which he has spent in the computer and network security field.