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Training should focus on properly handling security events. As many projects are now multi-institutional and multinational building trust and notification channels with collaborating E-Infrastructures should also be covered. Incident processes (if/when to make public, when to close) and announcement procedures (who to contact, how to contact, etc.) frameworks should be discussed.
Contingency planning and disaster recovery
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Organisation, roles, responsibilities (generic introduction)
High level introduction to security concepts tailored to organizational goals. This would touch on many of the aspects of other subjects by defining them, offering examples, and increasing awareness of organizational policy related to information security. This training should not attempt to cover technical details which are covered in other subjects, but should give the user a sense of the importance of information security and cover any policy necessary for the user to meet organizational requirements. It should also prepare the trainee to deal with any security emergencies they may encounter and give them the background to make sound information security choices.
AAI processes and procedures, FIM, SSO
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Setting up an overall authentication and authorization infrastructure is a comprehensive task already. A lot of processes have to be defined, setup and managed. Those processes become much more complicated when dealing with collaborative environments. Here several partnes with their own authentication systems policies and procedures have to agree on common principles and procedures. Federated Identity Management (FIM) will come into the game and since the user doesn’t want to authenticate several times at different systems a global single-sign-on (SSO) solution would be preferable.
Trainings of different kinds could be offered starting from AAI in local organizations up to management platforms for collaborative environments. The traing should investigate on those areas and provide the participant with hands-on information. how to set-up those AAI infrastructures.
Systems design
This training should provide insight to secure system design concepts. These could include some set if not all of the following concepts as well as including others important to the organization or stakeholders.
- Least Privilege - A subject/program should be given only the minimum set of privileges necessary to complete its task
- Fail-Safe Defaults - Unless a subject is given explicit access to an object, it should be denied access to that object
- Economy of Mechanism - Security mechanisms should be as simple as possible
- Complete Mediation - All accesses to objects must be checked to ensure that they are allowed
- Open Design - The security of a mechanism should not depend on the secrecy of its design
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- or implementation
- Separation of Privilege - A system should not grant permission based on a single condition
- Least Common Mechanism - Mechanisms used to access resources should not be shared
- Psychological Acceptability - Security mechanisms should not make the resource more difficult to access than if the security mechanism were not present
- Multiple Lines of Defense – Increase odds that no single vulnerability is common to all functionality
Reference: http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/protection/index.html
IT security awareness for users
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- Hot Topic Phishing and Tips for using e-mail
- Secure passwords and Tips for using passwords
- Viruses and Trojans and Protection against them
- Advice for securely using cloud services and social networks
- IT security at home and while travelling
Developing Developing and maintaining policies and procedures
Applying policies and procedures
System acquisition
Decommissioning (data leakage prevention)
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The risk an organisation will commit itself to is highly dependend on the security policy it wants to implement. If no access from outside is offered, only internal weak point have tob e considered.
The other way round, a very open organisation provides numerous attack points to external intruders.
The training should provide an overview about different kinds of IT security policies, the risks associated with those, and the security tools available to cope with those environments. Furthermore there should be hints how to maintain the installed procedures. Since it is also required to have the defined security level up and running all the time, hints should be given also how IT security awareness of staff members and users can be periodicly refreshed.
Applying policies and procedures
Every organisation has setup its own IT security policies and procedures. All systems installed in this organisation have to apply to those policies. Therefore it is the task of any system administrator to implement these policies in a way that they are compliant to the intended security level.
The traing should provide an overview about default policies and procedures implemented out in the field and give hints how to handle those scenarios in a comprehensive way. After participating to the training the system administrator should be able to map the relevant organisational security policies to the system tools available in the corresponding systems.
System acquisition
The acquisition of a system can be structured into different areas spreading from budgetarian issues (purchasing the system), needed space, cooling, power consumtion etc. Most often the security aspects are neglected Is the system to be purchased the right one for the environment where it should be used and for the tasks to be fullfilled? Where some systems provide very good security features out of the box, others have to be adapted with a lot of effort. Some system designs are optimized for intranet usage only whereas others fit excellently in distributed envoironments.
The trainings offered should give the participants an overview about system architectures fittting into the one or the other scenario making it easier to decide for the best fitting architecture.
Decommissioning (data leakage prevention)
Setting up a system is straight forward, but decommissioning the system might become much more complex. It is not just turning off power. System decommissioning includes freeing the system of any user data by providing processes how to do those transfers and setting up a logical time schedule for doing so. Any priviledges offered have to be withdrawn, disk drive content has to be deleted in a professinal manner etc.
The training should give an overall overview about the tasks to be fullfilled by system admins on the system itself as well as the tasks to put in place for freeing organisational ressources, e.g. deleting user info in AAI infrastructures etc.
Risk management
When controlling security you need to know what risks you need to control. A risk analysis and an associated risk management process will support making the right choice for security measures. A risk analysis is aimed at identifying and quantifying risks, the chance and the impact of risks. There are several methods and standards that can be used to analyse and manage risks. Risk management can be on a broader scope for the whole system but can also be used to analyse the impact of an incident in a structured way.