Archive

Archive for the ‘Virtualization’ Category

Incomplete Thought: The Time Is Now For OCP-like White Box Security Appliances

January 25th, 2015 3 comments

Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen some transformative innovation erupt in networking.

In no particular order OR completeness:

  • CLOS architectures and protocols are evolving
  • the debate over Ethernet and IP fabrics is driving toward the outcome that we need both
  • x86 is finding a home in networking at increasing levels of throughput thanks to things like DPDK and optimized IP stacks
  • merchant silicon, FPGA and ASICs are seeing increased investment as the speeds/feeds move from 10 > 40 > 100 Gb/s per NIC
  • programmable abstraction and the operational models to support it has been proven at scale
  • virtualization and virtualized services are now common place architectural primitives in discussions for NG networking
  • Open Source is huge in both orchestration as well as service delivery
  • Entirely new network operating systems like that of Cumulus have emerged to challenge incumbents
  • SDN, NFV and overlays are starting to see production at-scale adoption beyond PoCs
  • automation is starting to take root for everything from provisioning to orchestration to dynamic service insertion and traffic steering

Stir in the profound scale-out requirements of mega-scale web/cloud providers and the creation and adoption of Open Compute Platform compliant network, storage and compute platforms, and there’s a real revolution going on:

The Open Compute Networking Project is creating a set of technologies that are disaggregated and fully open, allowing for rapid innovation in the network space. We aim to facilitate the development of network hardware and software – together with trusted project validation and testing – in a truly open and collaborative community environment.

We’re bringing to networking the guiding principles that OCP has brought to servers & storage, so that we can give end users the ability to forgo traditional closed and proprietary network switches – in favor of a fully open network technology stack. Our initial goal is to develop a top-of-rack (leaf) switch, while future plans target spine switches and other hardware and software solutions in the space.

Now, interestingly, while there are fundamental shifts occurring in the approach to and operations of security — the majority of investment in which is still network-centric — as an industry, we are still used to buying our security solutions as closed appliances or chassis form-factors from vendors with integrated hardware and software.

While vendors offer virtualized versions of their hardware solutions as virtual appliances that can also run on bare metal, they generally have not enjoyed widespread adoption because of the operational challenges involved with the operationally-siloed challenges involved in distinguishing the distribution of security as a service layer across dedicated appliances or across compute fabrics as an overlay.

But let’s just agree that outside of security, software is eating the world…and that at some point, the voracious appetite of developers and consumers will need to be sated as it relates to security.

Much of the value (up to certain watermark levels of performance and latency) of security solutions is delivered via software which when coupled with readily-available hardware platforms such as x86 with programmable merchant silicon, can provide some very interesting and exciting solutions at a much lower cost.

So why then, like what we’ve seen with networking vendors who have released OCP-compliant white-box switching solutions that allow end-users to run whatever software/NOS they desire, have we not seen the same for security?

I think it would be cool to see an OCP white box spec for security and let the security industry innovate on the software to power it.

You?

/Hoff

 

 

 

My Information Security Magazine Cover Story: “Virtualization security dynamics get old, changes ahead”

November 4th, 2013 2 comments

ISM_cover_1113This month’s Search Security (nee Information Security Magazine) cover story was penned by none other than your’s truly and titled “Virtualization security dynamics get old, changes ahead”

I hope you enjoy the story; its a retrospective regarding the beginnings of security in the virtual space, where we are now, and we we’re headed.

I tried very hard to make this a vendor-neutral look at the state of the union of virtual security.

I hope that it’s useful.

You can find the story here.

/Hoff

Enhanced by Zemanta

Intel TPM: The Root Of Trust…Is Made In China

February 22nd, 2013 8 comments

This is deliciously ironic.

Intel‘s implementation of the TCG-driven TPM — the Trusted Platform Module — often described as a hardware root of trust, is essentially a cryptographic processor that allows for the storage (and retrieval) and attestation of keys.  There are all sorts of uses for this technology, including things I’ve written of and spoken about many times prior.  Here’s a couple of good links:

But here’s something that ought to make you chuckle, especially in light of current news and a renewed focus on supply chain management relative to security and trust.

The Intel TPM implementation that is used by many PC manufacturers, the same one that plays a large role in Intel’s TXT and Mt. Wilson Attestation platform, is apparently…wait for it…manufactured in…wait for it…China.

<thud>

I wonder how NIST feels about that?  ASSurance.

Intel_TPMROFLCoptr.  Hey, at least it’s lead-free. o_O

Talk amongst yourselves.

/Hoff

 

 

Enhanced by Zemanta

Wanna Be A Security Player? Deliver It In Software As A Service Layer…

January 9th, 2013 1 comment

As I continue to think about the opportunities that Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) bring into focus, the capability to deliver security as a service layer is indeed exciting.

I wrote about how SDN and OpenFlow (as a functional example) and the security use cases provided by each will be a differentiating capability back in 2011: The Killer App For OpenFlow and SDN? SecurityOpenFlow & SDN – Looking forward to SDNS: Software Defined Network Security, and Back To The Future: Network Segmentation & More Moaning About Zoning.

Recent activity in the space has done nothing but reinforce this opinion.  My day job isn’t exactly lacking in excitement, either 🙂

As many networking vendors begin to bring their SDN solutions to market — whether in the form of networking equipment or controllers designed to interact with them — one of the missing strategic components is security.  This isn’t a new phenomenon, unfortunately, and as such, predictably there are also now startups entering this space and/or retooling from the virtualization space and stealthily advertising themselves as “SDN Security” companies 🙂

Like we’ve seen many times before, security is often described (confused?) as a “simple” or “atomic” service and so SDN networking solutions are designed with the thought that security will simply be “bolted on” after the fact and deployed not unlike a network service such as “load balancing.”  The old “we’ll just fire up some VMs and TAMO (Then a Miracle Occurs) we’ve got security!” scenario.  Or worse yet, we’ll develop some proprietary protocol or insertion architecture that will magically get traffic to and from physical security controls (witness the “U-TURN” or “horseshoe” L2/L3 solutions of yesteryear.)

The challenge is that much of Security today is still very topologically sensitive and depends upon classical networking constructs to be either physically or logically plumbed between the “outside” and the asset under protection, or it’s very platform dependent and lacks the ability to truly define a policy that travels with the workload regardless of the virtualization, underlay OR overlay solutions.

Depending upon the type of control, security is often operationalized across multiple layers using wildly different constructs, APIs and context in terms of policy and disposition depending upon it’s desired effect.

Virtualization has certainly evolved our thinking about how we should think differently about security mostly due to the dynamism and mobility that virtualization has introduced, but it’s still incredibly nascent in terms of exposed security capabilities in the platforms themselves.  It’s been almost 5 years since I started raging about how we need(ed) platform providers to give us capabilities that function across stacks so we’d have a fighting chance.  To date, not only do we have perhaps ONE vendor doing some of this, but we’ve seen the emergence of others who are maniacally focused on providing as little of it as possible.

If you think about what virtualization offers us today from a security perspective, we have the following general solution options:

  1. Hypervisor-based security solutions which may apply policy as a function of the virtual-NIC card of the workloads it protects.
  2. Extensions of virtual-networking (i.e. switching) solutions that enable traffic steering and some policy enforcement that often depend upon…
  3. Virtual Appliance-based security solutions that require manual or automated provisioning, orchestration and policy application in user space that may or may not utilize APIs exposed by the virtual networking layer or hypervisor

There are tradeoffs across each of these solutions; scale, performance, manageability, statefulness, platform dependencies, etc.  There simply aren’t many platforms that natively offer security capabilities as a function of service delivery that allows arbitrary service definition with consistent and uniform ways of describing the outcome of the policies at these various layers.  I covered this back in 2008 (it’s a shame nothing has really changed) in my Four Horsemen Of the Virtual Security Apocalypse presentation.

As I’ve complained for years, we still have 20 different ways of defining how to instantiate a five-tupule ACL as a basic firewall function.

Out of the Darkness…

The promise of SDN truly realized — the ability to separate the control, forwarding, management and services planes — and deploy security as a function of available service components across overlays and underlays, means we will be able to take advantage of any of these models so long as we have a way to programmatically interface with the various strata regardless of whether we provision at the physical, virtual or overlay virtual layer.

It’s truly exciting.  We’re seeing some real effort to enable true security service delivery.

When I think about how to categorize the intersection of “SDN” and “Security,” I think about it the same way I have with virtualization and Cloud:

  • Securing SDN (Securing the SDN components)
  • SDN Security Services (How do I take security and use SDN to deliver security as a service)
  • Security via SDN (What NEW security capabilities can be derived from SDN)

There are numerous opportunities with each of these categories to really make a difference to security in the coming years.

The notion that many of our network and security capabilities are becoming programmatic means we *really* need to focus on securing SDN solutions, especially given the potential for abuse given the separation of the various channels. (See: Software Defined Networking (In)Security: All Your Control Plane Are Belong To Us…)

Delivering security as a service via SDN holds enormous promise for reasons I’ve already articulated and gives us an amazing foundation upon which to start building solutions we can’t imagine today given the lack of dynamism in our security architecture and design patterns.

Finally, the first two elements give rise to allow us to do things we can’t even imagine with today’s traditional physical and even virtual solutions.

I’ll be starting to highlight really interesting solutions I find (and am able to talk about) over the next few months.

Security enabled by SDN is going to be huge.

More soon.

/Hoff

Related articles

Enhanced by Zemanta

NIST’s Trusted Geolocation in the Cloud: PoC Implementation

December 22nd, 2012 3 comments

I was very interested and excited to learn what NIST researchers and staff had come up with when I saw the notification of the “Draft Interagency Report 7904, Trusted Geolocation in the Cloud: Proof of Concept Implementation.”

It turns out that this report is an iteration on the PoC previously created by VMware, Intel and RSA back in 2010 which utilized Intel’s TXT, VMWare’s virtualization platform and the RSA/Archer GRC platform, as this one does.

I haven’t spent much time to look at the differences, but I’m hoping as I read through it that we’ve made progress…

You can read about the original PoC here, and watch a video from 2010 about it here.  Then you can read about it again in its current iteration, here (PDF.)

I wrote about this topic back in 2009 and still don’t have a good firm answer to the question I asked in 2009 in a blog titled “Quick Question: Any Public Cloud Providers Using Intel TXT?” and the follow-on “More On High Assurance (via TPM) Cloud Environments

At CloudConnect 2011 I also filmed a session with the Intel/RSA/VMware folks titled “More On Cloud and Hardware Root Of Trust: Trusting Cloud Services with Intel® TXT

I think this is really interesting stuff and a valuable security and compliance capability, but is apparently still hampered with practical deployment challenges.

I’m also confused as to why RSA employees were not appropriately attributed under the NIST banner and this is very much a product-specific/vendor-specific set of solutions…I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a NIST-branded report like this.

At any rate, I am interested to see if we will get to the point where these solutions will have more heterogeneous uptake across platforms.

/Hoff

Enhanced by Zemanta

Are Flat Networkers Like Flat Earthers Of Yore?

December 4th, 2012 11 comments

Lori Macvittie is at the Gartner DC conference today and tweeted something extraordinary from one of the sessions focused on SDN (actually there were numerous juicy tidbits, but this one caught my attention:

Amazing, innit?

To which my response was:

Regardless of how one might “feel” about SDN, the notion of agility in service delivery wherein the network can be exposed and consumed as a service versus a trunk port and some VLANs is…the right thing.  Just because the network is “flat” doesn’t mean it’s services are or that the delivery of said services are any less complex.  I just wrote about this here: The Tyranny Of Taming (Network) Traffic: Steering, Service Insertion and Chaining…

“Flat networks” end up being carved right back up into VLANs and thus L3 routing domains to provide for isolation and security boundaries…and then to deal with that we get new protocols to deal with VLAN exhaustion, mobility and L2 stretch and…

It seems like some of the people at the Gartner DC show (from this and other tweets as I am not there) are abjectly allergic to abstraction beyond that which they can physically exercise dominion.

Where have I seen this story before?

/Beaker

Should/Can/Will Virtual Firewalls Replace Physical Firewalls?

October 15th, 2012 6 comments
Simulação da participação de um Firewall entre...

Simulação da participação de um Firewall entre uma LAN e uma WAN Français : Schéma d’un pare-feu entre un LAN et un WAN (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Should/Can/Will Virtual Firewalls Replace Physical Firewalls?”

The answer is, as always, “Of course, but not really, unless maybe, you need them to…” 🙂

This discussion crops up from time-to-time, usually fueled by a series of factors which often lack the context to appropriately address it.

The reality is there exists the ever-useful answer of “it depends,” and frankly it’s a reasonable answer.

Back in 2008 when I created “The Four Horsemen of the Virtualization Security Apocalypse” presentation, I highlighted the very real things we needed to be aware of as we saw the rapid adoption of server virtualization…and the recommendations from virtualization providers as to the approach we should take in terms of securing the platforms and workloads atop them.  Not much has changed in almost five years.

However, each time I’m asked this question, I inevitably sound evasive when asking for more detail when the person doing the asking references “physical” firewalls and what it is they mean.  Normally the words “air-gap” are added to the mix.

The very interesting thing about how people answer this question is that in reality, the great many firewalls that are deployed today have the following features deployed in common:

  1. Heavy use of network “LAG” (link aggregation group) interface bundling/VLAN trunking and tagging
  2. Heavy network virtualization used, leveraging VLANs as security boundaries, trunked across said interfaces
  3. Increased use of virtualized contexts and isolated resource “virtual systems” and separate policies
  4. Heavy use of ASIC/FPGA and x86 architectures which make use of shared state tables, memory and physical hardware synced across fabrics and cluster members
  5. Predominant use of “stateful inspection” at layers 2-4 with the addition of protocol decoders at L5-7 for more “application-centric” enforcement
  6. Increasing use of “transparent proxies” at L2 but less (if any) full circuit or application proxies in the classic sense

So before I even START to address the use cases of the “virtual firewalls” that people reference as the comparison, nine times out of ten, that supposed “air gap” with dedicated physical firewalls that they reference usually doesn’t compute.

Most of the firewall implementations that people have meet most of the criteria mentioned in items 1-6 above.

Further, most firewall architectures today aren’t running full L7 proxies across dedicated physical interfaces like in the good old days (Raptor, etc.) for some valid reasons…(read the postscript for an interesting prediction.)

Failure domains and the threat modeling that illustrates cascading impact due to complexity, outright failure or compromised controls is usually what people are interested in when asking this question, but this gets almost completely obscured by the “physical vs. virtual” concern and we often never dig deeper.

There are some amazing things that can be done in virtual constructs that we can’t do in the physical and there are some pretty important things that physical firewalls can provide that virtual versions have trouble with.  It’s all a matter of balance, perspective, need, risk and reward…oh, and operational simplicity.

I think it’s important to understand what we’re comparing when asking that question before we conflate use cases, compare and mismatch expectations, and make summary generalizations (like I just did 🙂 about that which we are contrasting.

I’ll actually paint these use cases in a follow-on post shortly.

/Hoff

POSTSCRIPT:

I foresee that we will see a return of the TRUE application-level proxy firewall — especially with application identification, cheap hardware, more security and networking virtualized in hardware.  I see this being deployed both on-premise and as part of a security as a service offering (they are already, today — see CloudFlare, for example.)

If you look at the need to terminate SSL/TLS and provide for not only L4-L7 sanity, protect applications/sessions at L5-7 (web and otherwise) AND the renewed dependence upon XML, SOAP, REST, JSON, etc., it will drive even more interesting discussions in this space.  Watch as the hybrid merge of the WAF+XML security services gateway returns to vogue… (see also Cisco EOLing ACE while I simultaneously receive an email from Intel informing me I can upgrade to their Intel Expressway Service Gateway…which I believe (?) was from the Cervega Sarvega acqusition?)

Enhanced by Zemanta

The Cuban Cloud Missile Crisis…Weapons Of Mass Abstraction.

September 7th, 2012 2 comments
English: Coat of arms of Cuba. Español: Escudo...

English: Coat of arms of Cuba. Español: Escudo de Cuba. Русский: Герб Кубы. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the midst of the Cold War in October of 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union stood periously on the brink of nuclear war as a small island some 90 miles off the coast of Florida became the focal point of intense foreign policy scrutiny, challenges to sovereignty and political arm wrestling the likes of which were never seen before.

Photographic evidence provided by a high altitude U.S. spy plane exposed the until-then secret construction of medium and intermediate ballistic nuclear missile silos, constructed by the Soviet Union, which were deliberately placed so as to be close enough to reach the continental United States.

The United States, alarmed by this unprecedented move by the Soviets and the already uneasy relations with communist Cuba, unsuccessfully attempted a CIA-led forceful invasion and overthrow of the Cuban regime at the Bay of Pigs.

This did not sit well with either the Cubans or Soviets.  A nightmare scenario ensued as the Soviets responded with threats of its own to defend its ally (and strategic missile sites) at any cost, declaring the American’s actions as unprovoked and unacceptable.

During an incredibly tense standoff, the U.S. mulled over plans to again attack Cuba both by air and sea to ensure the disarmament of the weapons that posed a dire threat to the country.

As posturing and threats continued to escalate from the Soviets, President Kennedy elected to pursue a less direct military action;  a naval blockade designed to prevent the shipment of supplies necessary for the completion and activation of launchable missiles.  Using this as a lever, the U.S. continued to demand that Russia dismantle and remove all nuclear weapons as they prevented any and all naval traffic to and from Cuba.

Soviet premier Krustchev protested such acts of “direct aggression” and communicated to president Kennedy that his tactics were plunging the world into the depths of potential nuclear war.

While both countries publicly traded threats of war, the bravado, posturing and defiance were actually a cover for secret backchannel negotiations involving the United Nations. The Soviets promised they would dismantle and remove nuclear weapons, support infrastructure and transports from Cuba, and the United States promised not to invade Cuba while also removing nuclear weapons from Turkey and Italy.

The Soviets made good on their commitment two weeks later.  Eleven months after the agreement, the United States complied and removed from service the weapons abroad.

The Cold War ultimately ended and the Soviet Union fell, but the political, economic and social impact remains even today — 40 years later we have uneasy relations with (now) Russia and the United States still enforces ridiculous economic and social embargoes on Cuba.

What does this have to do with Cloud?

Well, it’s a cute “movie of the week” analog desperately in need of a casting call for Nikita Khrushchev and JFK.  I hear Gary Busey and Aston Kutcher are free…

As John Furrier, Dave Vellante and I were discussing on theCUBE recently at VMworld 2012, there exists an uneasy standoff — a cold war — between the so-called “super powers” staking a claim in Cloud.  The posturing and threats currently in process don’t quite have the world-ending outcomes that nuclear war would bring, but it could have devastating technology outcomes nonetheless.

In this case, the characters of the Americans, Soviets, Cubans and the United Nations are played by networking vendors, SDN vendors, virtualization/abstraction vendors, cloud “stack” projects/efforts/products and underlying CPU/chipset vendors (not necessarily in that order…)  The rest of the world stands by as their fate is determined on the world’s stage.

If we squint hard enough at Cloud, we might find out very own version of the “Bay of Pigs,” with what’s going on with OpenStack.

The “community” effort behind OpenStack is one largely based on “industry” and if we think of OpenStack as Cuba, it’s being played as pawn in the much larger battle for global domination.  The munitions being stocked in this tiny little enclave threatens to disrupt relations of epic proportions.  That’s why we now see so much strategic movement around an initiative and technology that many outside of the navel gazers haven’t really paid much attention to.

Then there are players like Amazon Web Services who, like China of today, quietly amass their weapons of mass abstraction as the industry-jockeying and distractions play on (but that’s a topic for another post)

Cutting to the chase…if we step back for a minute

Intel is natively bundling more and more networking and virtualization capabilities into their CPU/Chipsets and a $7B investment in security company McAfee makes them a serious player there.  VMware is de-emphasizing the “hypervisor” and is instead positioning they are focused on end-to-end solutions which include everything from secure mobility, orchestration/provisioning and now, with Nicira, networking.  Networking companies like Cisco and Juniper continue to move up-stack to deeper integrate networking and security along with service overlays in order to remain relevant in light of virtualization and SDN.

…and OpenStack’s threat of disrupting all of those plays makes it important enough to pay attention to.  It’s a little island of technology that is causing huge behemoths to collide.  A molehill that has become a mountain.

If today’s announcements of VMware and Intel joining OpenStack as Gold Members along with the existing membership by other “super powers” doesn’t make it clear that we’re in the middle of an enormous power struggle, I’ve got a small Island to sell you 😉

Me?  I’m going to make some Lechon Asado, enjoy a mojito and a La Gloria Cubana.

Related articles

Enhanced by Zemanta

SiliconAngle Cube: Hoff On Security – Live At VMworld 2012

August 31st, 2012 3 comments

I was thrilled to be invited back to the SiliconAngle Cube at VMworld 2012 where John Furrier, Dave Vellante and I spoke in depth about security, virtualization and software defined networking (SDN)

I really like the way the chat turned out — high octane, fast pace and some great questions!

Here is the amazing full list of speakers during the event.  Check it out, ESPECIALLY Martin Casado’s talk.

As I told him, I think he is like my Obi Wan…my only hope for convincing my friends at VMware that networking and security require more attention and a real embrace of the ecosystem…

I’d love to hear your feedback on the video.

/Hoff

 

Enhanced by Zemanta

Software Defined Networking (In)Security: All Your Control Plane Are Belong To Us…

August 20th, 2012 No comments

My next series of talks are focused around the emerging technology, solutions and security architectures of so-called “Software Defined Networking (SDN)”

As this space heats up, I see a huge opportunity for new and interesting ways in which security can be delivered — the killer app? — but I also am concerned that, per usual, security is a potential after thought.

At an absolute minimum example, the separation of control and data planes (much as what we saw with compute-centric virtualization) means we now have additional (or at least bifurcated) attack surfaces and threat vectors.  And not unlike compute-centric virtualization, the C&C channels for network operation represents a juicy target.

There are many more interesting elements that deserve more attention paid to them — new protocols, new hardware/software models, new operational ramifications…and I’m going to do just that.

If you’re a vendor who cares to share what you’re doing to secure your SDN offerings — and I promise I’ll be fair and balanced as I always am — please feel free to reach out to me.  If you don’t and I choose to include your solution based on access to what data I have, you run the risk of being painted inaccurately <hint>

If you have any ideas, comments or suggestions on what you’d like to see featured or excluded, let me know.  This will be along the lines of what I did with the “Four Horsemen Of the Virtualization Security Apocalypse” back in 2008.

Check out a couple of previous ramblings related to SDN (and OpenFlow) with respect to security below.

/Hoff

Enhanced by Zemanta