#compartmentation

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There’s a lot to unpack here, but one thing I’d like to highlight is the mental fatigue of living a double life. It has been highlighted before in numerous places. An Atomic spy, Klaus Fuchs, called it “controlled schizophrenia”, and I’ve pointed out that the compartmented mind is less than the sum of its parts.

People say ‘I understand’, or ‘I know what it’s like to have secrets,’” he went on. Yet they have no idea what it’s like living with secrets on the level he has, according to DPR2. “It’s isolating in the fact that one group of people you can tell some stuff to, and one group of people you can tell other stuff to, there was no one that you could tell everything to. It was far too risky.” “I think that was the only thing that bothered me with it,” he admitted. “There was no one I could tell everything to.”

An important part of the OPSEC approach to security is implementing compartmentation to limit the damage of any one penetration or compromise. This is sometimes referred to as impact containment. By compartmenting your operations, the control center over your accounts, and the information available from any single persona source, you are limiting the impact of a compromise.

High value targets should be separated and kept clear of low value targets. For example, your personal Amazon account should be separate from the account used to manage your business Amazon services. Your email accounts used for controlling critical online services should be resilient against compromise (gmail, for example, with 2FA). This email account should not be used for anything other than managing those services, and it should be separate from your personal account.

The security of proper compartmentation is that it limits the pain and damage of any one compromise. This security is robust regardless of the technological safe guards in place because it resides outside of the technological realm. The strength of this compartmentation is directly proportional to how strong your compartment walls are, and how well you maintain them. This takes discipline. But it is hardly impossible.

There are multiple cases where regular people are starting to discover that the operational security approach is the only protection against a determined targeted attack.

The case of the stolen twitter handle @n

The case of @jb's hijacked Amazon account

The case of @mat

In every instance, it is the lack of compartmentation between accounts and personas that has been the cause of the pain. Without proper compartmentation, attackers are able to leverage information from one compromised account to access another related account. Increasing privileges and traversing across the persona’s exposed and interlinked account control centers.

At a bare minimum — keep your business and personal life (and accounts) separate.