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Posts Tagged ‘Virtualization’

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

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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

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Security As A Service: “The Cloud” & Why It’s a Net Security Win

March 19th, 2012 3 comments
Cloud Computing Image

Cloud Computing Image (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you’ve been paying attention to the rash of security startups entering the market today, you will no doubt notice the theme wherein the majority of them are, from the get-go, organizing around deployment models which operate from “The Cloud.”

We can argue that “Security as a service” usually refers to security services provided by a third party using the SaaS (software as a service) model, but there’s a compelling set of capabilities that enables companies large and small to be both effective, efficient and cost-manageable as we embrace the “new” world of highly distributed applications, content and communications (cloud and mobility combined.)

As with virtualization, when one discusses “security” and “cloud computing,” any of the three perspectives often are conflated (from my post “Security: In the Cloud, For the Cloud & By the Cloud…“):

In the same way that I differentiated “Virtualizing Security, Securing Virtualization and Security via Virtualization” in my Four Horsemen presentation, I ask people to consider these three models when discussing security and Cloud:

  1. In the Cloud: Security (products, solutions, technology) instantiated as an operational capability deployed within Cloud Computing environments (up/down the stack.) Think virtualized firewalls, IDP, AV, DLP, DoS/DDoS, IAM, etc.
  2. For the Cloud: Security services that are specifically targeted toward securing OTHER Cloud Computing services, delivered by Cloud Computing providers (see next entry) . Think cloud-based Anti-spam, DDoS, DLP, WAF, etc.
  3. By the Cloud: Security services delivered by Cloud Computing services which are used by providers in option #2 which often rely on those features described in option #1.  Think, well…basically any service these days that brand themselves as Cloud… ;)

What I’m talking about here is really item #3; security “by the cloud,” wherein these services utilize any cloud-based platform (SaaS, PaaS or IaaS) to delivery security capabilities on behalf of the provider or ultimate consumer of services.

For the SMB/SME/Branch, one can expect a hybrid model of on-premises physical (multi-function) devices that also incorporate some sort of redirect or offload to these cloud-based services. Frankly, the same model works for the larger enterprise but in many cases regulatory issues of privacy/IP concerns arise.  This is where the capability of both “private” (or dedicated) versions of these services are requested (either on-premises or off, but dedicated.)

Service providers see a large opportunity to finally deliver value-added, scaleable and revenue-generating security services atop what they offer today.  This is the realized vision of the long-awaited “clean pipes” and “secure hosting” capabilities.  See this post from 2007 “Clean Pipes – Less Sewerage or More Potable Water?”

If you haven’t noticed your service providers dipping their toes here, you certainly have seen startups (and larger security players) do so.  Here are just a few examples:

  • Qualys
  • Trend Micro
  • Symantec
  • Cisco (Ironport/ScanSafe)
  • Juniper
  • CloudFlare
  • ZScaler
  • Incapsula
  • Dome9
  • CloudPassage
  • Porticor
  • …and many more

As many vendors “virtualize” their offers and start to realize that through basic networking, APIs, service chaining, traffic steering and security intelligence/analytics, these solutions become more scaleable, leveragable and interoperable, the services you’ll be able to consume will also increase…and they will become more application and information-centric in nature.

Again, this doesn’t mean the disappearance of on-premises or host-based security capabilities, but you should expect the cloud (and it’s derivative offshoots like Big Data) to deliver some really awesome hybrid security capabilities that make your life easier.  Rich Mogull (@rmogull) and I gave about 20 examples of this in our “Grilling Cloudicorns: Mythical CloudSec Tools You Can Use Today” at RSA last month.

Get ready because while security folks often eye “The Cloud” suspiciously, it also offers up a set of emerging solutions that will undoubtedly allow for more efficient, effective and affordable security capabilities that will allow us to focus more on the things that matter.

/Hoff

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SecurityAutomata: A Reference For Security Automation…

June 24th, 2011 No comments

The SecurityAutomata Project is themed toward enabling consumers, service and technology solution providers to collectively share knowledge on how to automate and focus on the programmability of “security” across physical, virtual and cloud environments.

It’s a bit of an experiment, really. I want to enable better visibility into the state-of-the-art (as it were) of security automation by providing a neutral ground to discuss and demonstrate how security can be automated in physical, virtual and cloud computing environments.

There are many solutions available today but it’s often difficult to grasp how the approaches differ from one another and what sort of capabilities must exist to get them to work.

Please help us organize and contribute content to the SecurityAutomata Wiki here.

/Hoff

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Incomplete Thought: Why Security Doesn’t Scale…Yet.

January 11th, 2011 1 comment
X-ray machines and metal detectors are used to...
Image via Wikipedia

There are lots of reasons one might use to illustrate why operationalizing security — both from the human and technology perspectives — doesn’t scale.

I’ve painted numerous pictures highlighting the cyclical nature of technology transitions, the supply/demand curve related to threats, vulnerabilities, technology and compensating controls and even relevant anecdotes involving the intersection of Moore’s and Metcalfe’s laws.  This really was a central theme in my Cloudinomicon presentation; “idempotent infrastructure, building survivable systems and bringing sexy back to information centricity.”

Here are some other examples of things I’ve written about in this realm.

Batting around how public “commodity” cloud solutions forces us to re-evaluate how, where, why and who “does” security was an interesting journey.  Ultimately, it comes down to architecture and poking at the sanctity of models hinged on an operational premise that may or may not be as relevant as it used to be.

However, I think the most poignant and yet potentially obvious answer to the “why doesn’t security scale?” question is the fact that security products, by design, don’t scale because they have not been created to allow for automation across almost every aspect of their architecture.

Automation and the interfaces (read: APIs) by which security products ought to be provisioned, orchestrated, and deployed are simply lacking in most security products.

Yes, there exist security products that are distributed but they are still managed, provisioned and deployed manually — generally using a management hub-spoke model that doesn’t lend itself to automated “anything” that does not otherwise rely upon bubble-gum and bailing wire scripting…

Sure, we’ve had things like SNMP as a “standard interface” for “management” for a long while 😉  We’ve had common ways of describing threats and vulnerabilities.  Recently we’ve seen the emergence of XML-based APIs emerge as a function of the latest generation of (mostly virtualized) firewall technologies, but most products still rely upon stand-alone GUIs, CLIs, element managers and a meat cloud of operators to push the go button (or reconfigure.)

Really annoying.

Alongside the lack of standard API-based management planes, control planes are largely proprietary and the output for correlated event-driven telemetry at all layers of the stack is equally lacking.  Of course the applications and security layers that run atop infrastructure are still largely discrete thus making the problem more difficult.

The good news is that virtualization in the enterprise and the emergence of the cultural and operational models predicated upon automation are starting to influence product roadmaps in ways that will positively affect the problem space described above but we’ve got a long haul as we make this transition.

Security vendors are starting to realize that they must retool many of their technology roadmaps to deal with the impact of dynamism and automation.  Some, not all, are discovering painfully the fact that simply creating a virtualized version of a physical appliance doesn’t make it a virtual security solution (or cloud security solution) in the same way that moving an application directly to cloud doesn’t necessarily make it a “cloud application.”

In the same way that one must often re-write or specifically design applications “designed” for cloud, we have to do the same for security.  Arguably there are things that can and should be preserved; the examples of the basic underpinnings such as firewalls that at their core don’t need to change but their “packaging” does.

I’m privy to lots of the underlying mechanics of these activities — from open source to highly-proprietary — and I’m heartened by the fact that we’re beginning to make progress.  We shouldn’t have to make a distinction between crafting and deploying security policies in physical or virtual environments.  We shouldn’t be held hostage by the separation of application logic from the underlying platforms.

In the long term, I’m optimistic we won’t have to.

/Hoff

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VMware’s (New) vShield: The (Almost) Bottom Line

September 1st, 2010 2 comments

After my initial post yesterday (How To Wield the New vShield (Edge, App & Endpoint) remarking on the general sessions I sat through on vShield, I thought I’d add some additional color given my hands-on experience in the labs today.

I will reserve more extensive technical analysis of vShield Edge and App (I didn’t get to play with endpoint as there is not a lab for that) once I spend some additional quality-time with the products as they emerge.

Because people always desire for me to pop out of the cake quickly, here you go:

You should walk away from this post understanding that I think the approach holds promise within the scope of what VMware is trying to deliver. I think it can and will offer customers choice and flexibility in their security architecture and I think it addresses some serious segmentation, security and compliance gaps. It is a dramatically impactful set of solutions that is disruptive to the security and networking ecosystem. It should drive some interesting change. The proof, as they say, will be in the vPudding.

Let me first say that from VMware’s perspective I think vShield “2.0” (which logically represents many technologies and adjusted roadmaps both old and new) is clearly an important and integral part of both vSphere and vCloud Director’s future implementation strategies. It’s clear that VMware took a good, hard look at their security solution strategy and made some important and strategically-differentiated investments in this regard.

All things told, I think it’s a very good strategy for them and ultimately their customers. However, there will be some very interesting side-effects from these new features.

vShield Edge is as disruptive to the networking space (it provides L3+ networking, VPN, DHCP and NAT capabilities at the vDC edge) as it is to the security arena. When coupled with vShield App (and ultimately endpoint) you can expect VMware’s aggressive activity in retooling their offers here to cause further hastened organic development, investment, and consolidation via M&A in the security space as other vendors seek to play and complement the reabsorption of critical security capabilities back into the platform itself.

Now all of the goodness that this renewed security strategy brings also has some warts. I’ll get into some of them as I gain more hands-on experience and get some questions answered, but here’s the Cliff Note version with THREE really important points:

  1. The vShield suite is the more refined/retooled/repaired approach toward what VMware promised in delivery three years ago when I wrote about it in 2007 (Opening VMM/HyperVisors to Third Parties via API’s – Goodness or the Apocalypse?) and later in 2008 (VMware’s VMsafe: The Good, the Bad, and the Bubbly…“) and from 2009, lest we forget The Cart Before the Virtual Horse: VMware’s vShield/Zones vs. VMsafe API’s
    _
    Specifically, as the virtualization platform has matured, so has the Company’s realization that security is something they are going to have to take seriously and productize themselves as depending upon an ecosystem wasn’t working — mostly because doing so meant that the ecosystem had to uproot entire product roadmaps to deliver solutions and it was a game of “supply vs. demand chicken.”
    _
    However, much of this new capability isn’t fully baked yet, especially from the perspective of integration and usability and even feature set capabilities such as IPv6 support. Endpoint is basically the more streamlined application of APIs and libraries for anti-malware offloading so as to relieve a third party ISV from having to write fastpath drivers that sit in the kernel/VMM and disrupt their roadmaps. vShield App is the Zones solution polished to provide inter-VM firewalling capabilities.
    _
    Edge is really the new piece here and represents a new function to represent vDC perimeterized security capabilities.Many of these features are billed — quite openly — as relieving a customer from needing to use/deploy physical networking or security products. In fact, in some cases even virtual networking products such as the Cisco Nexus 1000v are not usable/supportable. This is and example of a reasonably closed, software-driven world of Cloud where the underlying infrastructure below the hypervisor doesn’t matter…until it does.
    _
  2. vShield Edge and App are, in the way they are currently configured and managed, very complex and unwieldy and the performance, resiliency and scale described in some of the sessions is yet unproven and in some cases represents serious architectural deficiencies at first blush. There are some nasty single points of failure in the engineering (as described) and it’s unclear how many reference architectures for large enterprise and service provider scale Cloud use have really been thought through given some of these issues.
    _
    As an example, only being able to instantiate a single (but required) vShield App virtual appliance per ESX host brings into focus serious scale, security architecture and resilience issues. Being able to deploy numerous Edge appliances brings into focus manageability and policy sprawl concerns.There are so many knobs and levers leveraged across the stack that it’s going to be very difficult in large environments to reconcile policy spread over the three (I only interacted with two) components and that says nothing about then integrating/interoperating with third party vSwitches, physical switches, virtual and physical security appliances. If you think it was challenging before, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
    _
  3. The current deployment methodology reignites the battle that started to rage when security teams lost visibility into the security and networking layers and the virtual administrators controlled the infrastructure from the pNIC up. This takes the gap-filler virtual security solutions from small third parties such as Altor which played nicely with vCenter but allowed the security teams to manage policy and blows that model up. Now, security enforcement is a commodity feature delivered via the virtualization platform but requires too complex a set of knowledge and expertise of the underlying virtualization platform to be rendered effective by role-driven security teams.

While I’ll cover items #1 and #2 in a follow-on post, here’s what VMware can do in the short term to remedy what I think is a huges issue going forward with item #3, usability and management.

Specifically, in the same way vCloud Director sits above vCenter and abstracts away much of the “unnecessary internals” to present a simplified service catalog of resources/services to a consumer, VMware needs to provide a dedicated security administrator’s “portal” or management plane which unites the creation, management and deployment of policy from a SECURITY perspective of the various disparate functions offered by vShield App, Edge and Endpoint. [ED: This looks as though this might be what vShield Manager will address. There were no labs covering this and no session I saw gave any details on this offering (UI or API)]

If you expect a security administrator to have the in-depth knowledge of how to administer the entire (complex) virtualization platform in order to manage security, this model will break and cause tremendous friction. A security administrator shouldn’t have access to vCenter directly or even the vCloud Director interfaces.

Since much of the capability for automation and configuration is made available via API, the notion of building a purposed security interface to do so shouldn’t be that big of a deal. Some people might say that VMware should focus on building API capabilities and allow the ecosystem to fill the void with solutions that take advantage of the interfaces. The problem is that this strategy has not produced solutions that have enjoyed traction today and it’s quite clear that VMware is interested in controlling their own destiny in terms of Edge and App while allowing the rest of the world to play with Endpoint.

I’m sure I’m missing things and that given the exposure I’ve had (without any in-depth briefings) there may be material issues associated with where the products are given their early status, but I think it important to get these thoughts out of my head so I can chart their accuracy and it gives me a good reference point to direct the product managers to when they want to scalp me for heresy.

There’s an enormous amount of detail that I want to/can get into. The last time I did that it ended up in a 150 slide presentation I delivered at Black Hat…

Allow me to reiterate what I said in the beginning:

You should walk away from this post understanding that I think the approach holds promised within the scope of what VMware is trying to deliver. I think it can and will offer customers choice and flexibility in their security architecture and I think it addresses some serious segmentation, security and compliance gaps. It is a dramatically impactful set of solutions that is disruptive to the security and networking ecosystem. It should drive some interesting change. The proof, as they say, will be in the vPudding.

…and we all love vPudding.

/Hoff

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How To Wield the New vShield (Edge, App & Endpoint)

August 30th, 2010 4 comments
Image representing VMware as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase

Today at VMworld I spent my day in and out of sessions focused on the security of virtualized and cloud environments.

Many of these security sessions hinged on the release of VMware‘s new and improved suite of vShield product offerings which can be simply summarized by a deceptively simple set of descriptions:

  • vShield Edge – Think perimeter firewalling for the virtual datacenter (L3 and above)
  • vShield App – Think internal segmentation and zoning (L2)
  • vShield Endpoint – Anti-malware service offload

The promised capabilities of these solutions offer quite a well-rounded set of capabilities from a network and security perspective but there are many interesting things to consider as one looks at the melding of the VMsafe API, vShield Zones and the nepotistic relationship enjoyed between the vCloud (nee’ VMware vCloud Director) and vSphere platforms.

There are a series of capabilities emerging which seek to solve many of the constraints associated with multi-tenancy and scale challenges of heavily virtualized enterprise and service provider virtual data center environments.  However, many of the issues associated with those I raised in the Four Horsemen of the Virtualization Security Apocalypse still stand (performance, resilience/scale, management and cost) — especially since many of these features are delivered in the form of a virtual appliance.

Many of the issues I raise above (and asked again today in session) don’t have satisfactory answers which just shows you how immature we still are in our solution portfolios.

I’ll be diving deeper into each of the components as the week proceeds (and more details around vCloud Director are made available,) but one thing is certain — there’s a very interesting amplification of the existing tug-of-war  between the security capabilities/functionality provided by the virtualization/cloud platform providers and the network/security ecosystem trying to find relevance and alignment with them.

There is going to be a wringing out of the last few smaller virtualization/Cloud security players who have not yet been consolidated via M&A or attrition (Altor Networks, Catbird, HyTrust, Reflex, etc) as the three technologies above either further highlight an identified gap or demonstrate irrelevance in the face of capabilities “built-in” (even if you have to pay for them) by VMware themselves.

Further, the uneasy tension between  the classical physical networking vendors and the virtualization/cloud platform providers is going to come to a boil, especially as it comes to configuration management, compliance, and reporting as the differentiators between simple integration at the API level of control and data plane capabilities and things like virtual firewalling (and AV, and overlay VPNs and policy zoning) begins to commoditize.

As I’ve mentioned before, it’s not where the network *is* in a virtualized environment, it’s where it *isn’t* — the definition of where the network starts and stops is getting more and more abstracted.   This in turn drives the same conversation as it relates to security.  How we’re going to define, provision, orchestrate, and govern these virtual data centers concerns me greatly as there are so many touchpoints.

Hopefully this starts to get a little more clear as more and more of the infrastructure (virtual and physical) become manageable via API such that ultimately you won’t care WHAT tool is used to manage networking/security or even HOW other than the fact that policy can be defined consistently and implemented/instantiated via API across all levels transparently, regardless of what’s powering the moving parts.

This goes back to the discussions (video) I had with Simon Crosby on who should own security in virtualized environments and why (blog).

Now all this near term confusion and mess isn’t necessarily a bad thing because it’s going to force further investment, innovation and focus on problem solving that’s simply been stalled in the absence of both technology readiness, customer appetite and compliance alignment.

More later this week. [Ed: You can find the follow-on to this post here “VMware’s (New) vShield: The (Almost) Bottom Line]

/Hoff

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Dear Verizon Business: I Have Some Questions About Your PCI-Compliant Cloud…

August 24th, 2010 5 comments

You’ll forgive my impertinence, but the last time I saw a similar claim of a PCI compliant Cloud offering, it turned out rather anti-climatically for RackSpace/Mosso, so I just want to make sure I understand what is really being said.  I may be mixing things up in asking my questions, so hopefully someone can shed some light.

This press release announces that:

“…Verizon’s On-Demand Cloud Computing Solution First to Achieve PCI Compliance” and the company’s cloud computing solution called Computing as a Service (CaaS) which is “…delivered from Verizon cloud centers in the U.S. and Europe, is the first cloud-based solution to successfully complete the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) audit for storing, processing and transmitting credit card information.”

It’s unclear to me (at least) what’s considered in scope and what level/type of PCI certification we’re talking about here since it doesn’t appear that the underlying offering itself is merchant or transactional in nature, but rather Verizon is operating as a service provider that stores, processes, and transmits cardholder data on behalf of another entity.

Here’s what the article says about what Verizon undertook for DSS validation:

To become PCI DSS-validated, Verizon CaaS underwent a comprehensive third-party examination of its policies, procedures and technical systems, as well as an on-site assessment and systemwide vulnerability scan.

I’m interested in the underlying mechanicals of the CaaS offering.  Specifically, it would appear that the platform – compute, network, and storage — are virtualized.  What is unclear is if the [physical] resources allocated to a customer are dedicated or shared (multi-tenant,) regardless of virtualization.

According to this article in The Register (dated 2009,) the infrastructure is composed like this:

The CaaS offering from Verizon takes x64 server from Hewlett-Packard and slaps VMware’s ESX Server hypervisor and Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances atop it, allowing customers to set up and manage virtualized RHEL partitions and their applications. Based on the customer portal screen shots, the CaaS service also supports Microsoft’s Windows Server 2003 operating system.

Some details emerge from the Verizon website that describes the environment more:

Every virtual farm comes securely bundled with a virtual load balancer, a virtual firewall, and defined network space. Once the farm is designed, built, and named – all in a matter of minutes through the CaaS Customer Management Portal – you can then choose whether you want to manage the servers in-house or have us manage them for you.

If the customer chooses to manage the “servers…in-house (sic)” is the customer’s network, staff and practices now in-scope as part of Verizon’s CaaS validation? Where does the line start/stop?

I’m very interested in the virtual load balancer (Zeus ZXTM perhaps?) and the virtual firewall (vShield? Altor? Reflex? VMsafe-API enabled Virtual Appliance?)  What about other controls (preventitive or detective such as IDS, IPS, AV, etc.)

The reason for my interest is how, if these resources are indeed shared, they are partitioned/configured and kept isolated especially in light of the fact that:

Customers have the flexibility to connect to their CaaS environment through our global IP backbone or by leveraging the Verizon Private IP network (our Layer 3 MPLS VPN) for secure communication with mission critical and back office systems.

It’s clear that Verizon has no dominion over what’s contained in the VM’s atop the hypervisor, but what about the network to which these virtualized compute resources are connected?

So for me, all this all comes down to scope. I’m trying to figure out what is actually included in this certification, what components in the stack were audited and how.  It’s not clear I’m going to get answers, but I thought I’d ask any way.

Oh, by the way, transparency and auditability would be swell for an environment such as this. How about CloudAudit? We even have a PCI DSS CompliancePack 😉

Question for my QSA peeps: Are service providers required to also adhere to sections like 6.6 (WAF/Binary analysis) of their offerings even if they are not acting as a merchant?

/Hoff

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You Can’t Secure The Cloud…

April 30th, 2010 3 comments

That’s right. You can’t secure “The Cloud” and the real shocker is that you don’t need to.

You can and should, however, secure your assets and the elements within your control that are delivered by cloud services and cloud service providers, assuming of course there are interfaces to do so made available by the delivery/deployment model and you’ve appropriately assessed them against your requirements and appetite for risk.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy, cheap or agile, and lest we forget, just because you can “secure” your assets does not mean you’ll achieve “compliance” with those mandates against which you might be measured.

Even if you’re talking about making investments primarily in solutions via software thanks to the abstraction of cloud (and/or virtualization) as well adjusting processes and procedures due to operational impact, you can generally effect compensating controls (preventative and/or detective) that give you security on-par with what you might deploy today in a non-Cloud based offering.

Yes, it’s true. It’s absolutely possible to engineer solutions across most cloud services today that meet or exceed the security provided within the walled gardens of your enterprise today.

The realities of that statement come crashing down, however, when people confuse possibility with the capability to execute whilst not disrupting the business and not requiring wholesale re-architecture of applications, security, privacy, operations, compliance, economics, organization, culture and governance.

Not all of that is bad.  In fact, most of it is long overdue.

I think what is surprising is how many people (or at least vendors) simply suggest or expect that the “platform” or service providers to do all of this for them across the entire portfolio of services in an enterprise.  In my estimation that will never happen, at least not if one expects anything more than commodity-based capabilities at a cheap price while simultaneously being “secure.”

Vendors conflate the various value propositions of cloud (agility, low cost, scalability, security) and suggest you can achieve all four simultaneously and in equal proportions.  This is the fallacy of Cloud Computing.  There are trade-offs to be found with every model and Cloud is no different.

If we’ve learned anything from enterprise modernization over the last twenty years, it’s that nothing comes for free — and that even when it appears to, there’s always a tax to pay on the back-end of the delivery cycle.  Cloud computing is a series of compromises; it’s all about gracefully losing control over certain elements of the operational constructs of the computing experience. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s a painful process for many.

I really enjoy the forcing function of Cloud Computing; it makes us re-evaluate and sharpen our focus on providing service — at least it’s supposed to.  I look forward to using Cloud Computing as a lever to continue to help motivate industry, providers and consumers to begin to fix the material defects that plague IT and move the ball forward.

This means not worrying about securing the cloud, but rather understanding what you should do to secure your assets regardless of where they call home.

/Hoff

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The Four Horsemen Of the Virtualization (and Cloud) Security Apocalypse…

April 25th, 2010 No comments

I just stumbled upon this YouTube video (link here, embedded below) interview I did right after my talk at Blackhat 2008 titled “The 4 Horsemen of the Virtualization Security Apocalypse (PDF)” [There’s a better narrative to the PDF that explains the 4 Horsemen here.]

I found it interesting because while it was rather “new” and interesting back then, if you ‘s/virtualization/cloud‘ especially from the perspective of heavily virtualized or cloud computing environments, it’s even more relevant today!  Virtualization and the abstraction it brings to network architecture, design and security makes for interesting challenges.  Not much has changed in two years, sadly.

We need better networking, security and governance capabilities! 😉

Same as it ever was.

/Hoff

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