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Archive for February, 2011

Video Of My CSA Presentation: “Commode Computing: Relevant Advances In Toiletry & I.T. – From Squat Pots to Cloud Bots – Waste Management Through Security Automation”

February 19th, 2011 13 comments

This is probably my most favorite presentation I have given.  It was really fun.  I got so much positive feedback on what amounts to a load of crap. 😉

This video is from the Cloud Security Alliance Summit at the 2011 RSA Security Conference in San Francisco.  I followed Mark Benioff from Salesforce and Vivek Kundra, CIO of the United States.

Here is a PDF of the slides if you are interested.

Part 1:

Part 2:

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My Warm-Up Acts at the RSA/Cloud Security Alliance Summit Are Interesting…

February 8th, 2011 2 comments
Red and Yellow, two of M&M's

Besides a panel or two and another circus-act talk with Rich Mogull, I’m thrilled to be invited to present again at the Cloud Security Alliance Summit at RSA this year.

One of my previous keynotes at a CSA event was well received: Cloudersize – A cardio, strength & conditioning program for a firmer, more toned *aaS

Normally when negotiating to perform at such a venue, I have my people send my diva list over to the conference organizers.  You know, the normal stuff: only red M&M’s, Tupac walkout music, fuzzy blue cashmere slippers and Hoffaccinos on tap in the green room.

This year, understanding we are all under pressure given the tough economic climate, I relaxed my requirements and instead took a deal for a couple of ace warm-up speakers to goose the crowd prior to my arrival.

Here’s who Jim managed to scrape up:

9:00AM – 9:40AM // Keynote: “Cloud 2: Proven, Trusted and Secure”
Speaker: Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce.com

9:40AM – 10:10AM // Keynote: Vivek Kundra, CIO, White House

10:10AM – 10:30AM // Presentation: “Commode Computing: Relevant Advances In Toiletry – From Squat Pots to Cloud Bots – Waste Management Through Security Automation”
Presenting: Christofer Hoff, Director, Cloud & Virtualization Solutions, Cisco Systems

I guess I can’t complain 😉

See you there. Bring rose petals and Evian as token gifts to my awesomeness, won’t you?

/Hoff

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CloudPassage & Why Guest-Based Footprints Matter Even More For Cloud Security

February 1st, 2011 4 comments
VM (operating system)

Image via Wikipedia

Every day for the last week or so after their launch, I’ve been asked left and right about whether I’d spoken to CloudPassage and what my opinion was of their offering.  In full disclosure, I spoke with them when they were in stealth almost a year ago and offered some guidance as well as the day before their launch last week.

Disappointing as it may be to some, this post isn’t really about my opinion of CloudPassage directly; it is, however, the reaffirmation of the deployment & delivery models for the security solution that CloudPassage has employed.  I’ll let you connect the dots…

Specifically, in public IaaS clouds where homogeneity of packaging, standardization of images and uniformity of configuration enables scale, security has lagged.  This is mostly due to the fact that for a variety of reasons, security itself does not scale (well.)

In an environment where the underlying platform cannot be counted upon to provide “hooks” to integrate security capabilities in at the “network” level, all that’s left is what lies inside the VM packaging:

  1. Harden and protect the operating system [and thus the stuff atop it,]
  2. Write secure applications and
  3. Enforce strict, policy-driven information-centric security.

My last presentation, “Cloudinomicon: Idempotent Infrastructure, Building Survivable Systems and Bringing Sexy Back to Information Centricity” addressed these very points. [This one is a version I delivered at the University of Michigan Security Summit]

If we focus on the first item in that list, you’ll notice that generally to effect policy in the guest, you must have a footprint on said guest — however thin — to provide the hooks that are needed to either directly effect policy or redirect back to some engine that offloads this functionality.  There’s a bit of marketing fluff associated with using the word “agentless” in many applications of this methodology today, but at some point, the endpoint needs some sort of “agent” to play*

So that’s where we are today.  The abstraction offered by virtualized public IaaS cloud platforms is pushing us back to the guest-centric-based models of yesteryear.

This will bring challenges with scale, management, efficacy, policy convergence between physical and virtual and the overall API-driven telemetry driven by true cloud solutions.

You can read more about this in some of my other posts on the topic:

Finally, since I used them for eyeballs, please do take a look at CloudPassage — their first (free) offerings are based upon leveraging small footprint Linux agents and a cloud-based SaaS “grid” to provide vulnerability management, and firewall/zoning in public cloud environments.

/Hoff

* There are exceptions to this rule depending upon *what* you’re trying to do, such as anti-malware offload via a hypervisor API, but this is not generally available to date in public cloud.  This will, I hope, one day soon change.

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