The WiKID Blog

The WiKID Blog, musings on two-factor authentication, information security and some other stuff.

Looking for a C developer to create a WIKID PAM module

Posted by: admin 12 years, 10 months ago

We're interested in development of a wAuth C library and a WiKID PAM module that can be packaged for the major flavors of Linux.  The module should allow users to be authenticated using wAuth to a WiKID two-factor authentication server and include support for the offline challenge-response mechanism.  Documentation on the wAuth API is available and examples of other wAuth API packages (Java, C#, PHP, Ruby & Python) are also available.  Familiarity with PAM and C are probably more helpful than knowledge of two-factor authentication.   The license for the packages will be GPL. 

Determining Cost of Capital

Posted by: admin 12 years, 11 months ago

A key underlying premise in finance is the cost of capital. Information security professionals need to understand that investors can put their money into other stocks and bankers can loan their money to other borrowers. The reason they loan money to your company is to make a good return for the risks they are taking. The less the risk, the cheaper the money.

Information Security and Economic Profit

Posted by: admin 12 years, 11 months ago

This is the third in a series of blog posts (that I hope to be able to finish, because otherwise these first ones will seem stupid). My goal is to provide information security professionals a basis for discussing risks with business professionals - especially finance people - and to dispel some myths. In the first post, I discussed how businesses create value arguing that reducing risk increases value. In the second, I bitched about how I hated the term 'ROI', it's over-use in marketing and it's short-comings. While NPV is better, it too has some shortcomings, including the fact that it isn't a very good tool for ongoing evaluation.  NPV basically states "According to these assumptions, this project should create value".  However, it does not track the outcome nor can it easily be used as a basis for incentives.

Financial Analysis for InfoSec Pros

Posted by: admin 12 years, 11 months ago

This is the second in (hopefully) a series of blog posts. My goal is to provide information security professionals a basis for discussing risks with business professionals - especially finance people - and to dispel some myths.  The first post discussed how reducing risk creates value. This goal of this post is to lay some groundwork for proper financial analysis techniques - or at least minimize the dumber ones. 

How firms create value

Posted by: admin 12 years, 12 months ago

The first myth is that information security needs to contribute to the top line or to reduce costs to create value for an enterprise.  This myth is based on the assumption that firms create value solely by increasing revenue or decreasing expenses.  In particular, I'm picking on my friend Rafal Los at HP for his post on "Business Relevant Security - The Top and Bottom Lines" in which he states:

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