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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

 

 

 

The Curious Case Of Continuous and Consistently Contiguous Crypto…

August 8th, 2013 9 comments

Here’s an interesting resurgence of a security architecture and an operational deployment model that is making a comeback:

Requiring VPN tunneled and MITM’d access to any resource, internal or external, from any source internal or external.

While mobile devices (laptops, phones and tablets) are often deployed with client or client-less VPN endpoint solutions that enable them to move outside the corporate boundary to access internal resources, there’s a marked uptake in the requirement to require that all traffic from all sources utilizing VPNs (SSL/TLS, IPsec or both) to terminate ALL sessions regardless of ownership or location of either the endpoint or the resource being accessed.

Put more simply: require VPN for (id)entity authentication, access control, and confidentiality and then MITM all the things to transparently or forcibly fork to security infrastructure.

Why?

The reasons are pretty easy to understand.  Here are just a few of them:

  1. The user experience shouldn’t change regardless of the access modality or location of the endpoint consumer; the notion of who, what, where, when, how, and why matter, but the user shouldn’t have to care
  2. Whether inside or outside, the notion of split tunneling on a per-service/per-application basis means that we need visibility to understand and correlate traffic patterns and usage
  3. Because the majority of traffic is encrypted (usually via SSL,) security infrastructure needs the capability to inspect traffic (selectively) using a coverage model that is practical and can give a first-step view of activity
  4. Information exfiltration (legitimate and otherwise) is a problem.

…so how are folks approaching this?

Easy.  They simply require that all sessions terminate on a set of  [read: clustered & scaleable] VPN gateways, selectively decrypt based on policy, forward (in serial or parallel) to any number of security apparatus, and in some/many cases, re-encrypt sessions and send them on their way.

We’ve been doing this “forever” with the “outside-in” model (remote access to internal resources,) but the notion that folks are starting to do this ubiquitously on internal networks is the nuance.  AVC (application visibility and control) is the inside-out component (usually using transparent forward proxies with trusted PAC files on endpoints) with remote access and/or reverse proxies like WAFs and/or ADCs as the outside-in use case.

These two ops models were generally viewed and managed as separate problems.  Now thanks to Cloud, Mobility, virtualization and BYOE (bring your own everything) as well as the more skilled and determined set of adversaries, we’re seeing a convergence of the two.  To make the “inside-out” and “outside-in” more interesting, what we’re really talking about here is extending the use case to include “inside-inside” if you catch my drift.

Merging the use case approach at a fundamental architecture level can be useful; this methodology works regardless of source or destination.  It does require all sorts of incidental changes to things like IdM, AAA, certificate management, etc. but it’s one way that folks are trying to centralize the distributed — if you get what I mean.

I may draw a picture to illustrate what I mean, but do let me know if either you’re doing this (many of the largest customers I know are) if it makes sense.

/Hoff

P.S. Remember back in the 80’s/90’s when 3Com bundled NIC cards with integrated IPSec VPN capability?  Yeah, that.

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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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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

The Tyranny Of Taming (Network) Traffic: Steering, Service Insertion and Chaining…

November 29th, 2012 No comments

You know what’s hard?

Describing the difficulties to anyone who doesn’t work inside of an actual “networking” company why the notions of traffic steering, services insertion and chaining across multiple physical boxes and/or combinations of physical and virtual service instantiations is freaking difficult.

12/3/12 [Ed: I realized I didn’t actually define these terms.  Added below.]

What do I mean by these terms?  Simplified definitions here:

  • Traffic Steering: directing and delivering traffic (flows/packets, tagged or otherwise) from one processing point to another
  • Service Insertion: addition of some form of processing (terminated or mirrored,) delivered as a service, that is interposed dynamically between processing points
  • Service Chaining: chaining (serialized or parallelized) and insertion of services with other services.
I didn’t get into the nuances of these capabilities with things like state, flow to service mapping tables, replication across flow/state tables in “clustered” processing points, etc., but I spoke to some of them in the “Four Horsemen of the Virtualization Security Apocalypse” presentation. See Pwnie #1 – War | Episode 7: Revenge Of the UTM Clones.

Now, with that out of the way and these terms simply defined, I suppose the “networking is simple” people are right.

I mean, all you have to do is agree on a common set of protocols, a consistent tagging format, flow and/or packet metadata, disposition mechanisms, flow redirection mechanisms beyond next hop unicast, tunneling, support for protocols other than unicast, state machine handling across disparate service chains, performance/availability/QoS telemetry across network domains and diameters, disparate control and data planes, session termination versus pass-through deltas, and then incidental stuff like MAC and routing table updates with convergence latencies across distributed entities, etc.

…and support for legacy while we’re at it.

It ain’t nuthin’ but a peanut, right?

Oh, this just must be an issue with underlay (physical) networks, right?

Overlays have this handled, right?

All these new APIs and control planes are secure by default, too, right?

Uh-huh.

Glad we’ve got this covered, apparently:

Things need to change dramatically at networking companies

This is true, by the way.

However, allow me to suggest that networking companies have experience, footprint, capabilities and relationships and are quite motivated to add value, increase feature velocity, reduce complexity in deployment and operation, and add more efficiency to their solutions.

Change is good.

See 18:45 if you want the juicy bits.

/Hoff

 

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.

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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

 

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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

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Back To The Future: Network Segmentation & More Moaning About Zoning

July 16th, 2012 5 comments

A Bit Of Context…

This image was selected as a picture of the we...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)A Bit Of Context…

The last 3 years have been very interesting when engaging with large enterprises and service providers as they set about designing, selecting and deploying their “next generation” network architecture. These new networks are deployed in timescales that see them collide with disruptive innovation such as fabrics, cloud, big data and DevOps.

In most cases, these network platforms must account for the nuanced impact of virtualized design patterns, refreshes of programmatic architecture and languages, and the operational model differences these things introduce.  What’s often apparent is that no matter how diligent the review, by the time these platforms are chosen, many tradeoffs are made — especially when it comes to security and compliance — and we arrive at the old adage: “You can get fast, cheap or secure…pick two.”

…And In the Beginning, There Was Spanning Tree…

The juxtaposition of flatter and flatter physical networks, nee “fabrics” (compute, network and storage,) with what seems to be a flip-flop transition between belief systems and architects who push for either layer 2 or layer 3 (or encapsulated versions thereof) segmentation at the higher layers is again aggravated by continued push for security boundary definition that yields further segmentation based on policy at the application and information layer.

So what we end up with is the benefits of flatter, any-to-any connectivity at the physical networking layer with a “software defined” and virtualized networking context floating both alongside (Nicira, BigSwitch, OpenFlow) as well as atop it (VMware, Citrix, OpenStack Quantum, etc.) with a bunch of protocols ladled on like some protocol gravy blanketing the Chicken Fried Steak that represents the modern data center.

Oh!  You Mean the Cloud…

Now, there are many folks who don’t approach it this way, and instead abstract away much of what I just described.  In Amazon Web Services’ case as a service provider, they dumb down the network sufficiently and control the abstracted infrastructure to the point that “flatness” is the only thing customers get and if you’re going to run your applications atop, you must keep it simple and programmatic in nature else risk introducing unnecessary complexity into the “software stack.”

The customers who then depend upon these simplified networking services must then absorb the gaps introduced by a lack of features by architecturally engineering around them, becoming more automated, instrumented and programmatic in nature or add yet another layer of virtualized (and generally encrypted) transport and execution above them.

This works if you’re able to engineer your way around these gaps (or make them less relevant,) but generally this is where segmentation becomes an issue due to security and compliance design patterns which depend on the “complexity” introduced by the very flexible networking constructs available in most enterprise of SP networks.

It’s like a layered cake that keeps self-frosting.

Software Defined Architecture…

You can see the extreme opportunity for Software Defined *anything* then, can’t you? With SDN, let the physical networks NOT be complex but rather more simple and flat and then unify the orchestration, traffic steering, service insertion and (even) security capabilities of the physical and virtual networks AND the virtualization/cloud orchestration layers (from the networking perspective) into a single intelligent control plane…

That’s a big old self-frosting cake.

Basically, this is what AWS has done…but all that intelligence provided by the single pane of glass is currently left up to the app owner atop them.  That’s the downside.  Those sufficiently enlightened AWS’ customers are aware generally  of this and understand the balance of benefits and limitations of this path.

In an enterprise environment, however, it’s a timing game between the controller vendors, the virtualization/cloud stack providers, the networking vendors, and security vendors …each trying to offer up this capability either as an “integrated” capability or as an overlay…all under the watchful eye of the auditor who is generally unmotivated, uneducated and unnerved by all this new technology — especially since the compliance frameworks and regulatory elements aren’t designed to account for these dramatic shifts in architecture or operation (let alone the threat curve of advanced adversaries.)

Back To The Future…Hey, Look, It’s Token Ring and DMZs!

As I sit with these customers who build these nextgen networks, the moment segmentation comes up, the elegant network and application architectures rapidly crumble into piles of asset-based rubble as what happens next borders on the criminal…

Thanks to compliance initiatives — PCI is a good example — no matter how well scoped, those flat networks become more and more logically hierarchical.  Because SDN is still nascent and we’re lacking that unified virtualized network (and security) control plane, we end up resorting back to platform-specific “less flat” network architectures in both the physical and virtual layers to achieve “enclave” like segmentation.

But with virtualization the problem gets more complex as in an attempt to be agile, cost efficient and in order to bring data to the workloads to reduce heaving lifting of the opposite approach, out-of-scope assets can often (and suddenly) be co-resident with in-scope assets…traversing logical and physical constructs that makes it much more difficult to threat model since the level of virtualized context supports differs wildly across these layers.

Architects are then left to think how they can effectively take all the awesome performance, agility, scale and simplicity offered by the underlying fabrics (compute, network and storage) and then layer on — bolt on — security and compliance capabilities.

What they discover is that it’s very, very, very platform specific…which is why we see protocols such as VXLAN and NVGRE pop up to deal with them.

Lego Blocks and Pig Farms…

These architects then replicate the design patterns with which they are familiar and start to craft DMZs that are logically segmented in the physical network and then grafted on to the virtual.  So we end up with relying on what Gunnar Petersen and I refer to as the “SSL and Firewall” lego block…we front end collections of “layer 2 connected” assets based on criticality or function, many of which stretched across these fabrics, and locate them behind layer 3 “firewalls” which provide basic zone-based isolation and often VPN connectivity between “trusted” groups of other assets.

In short, rather than build applications that securely authenticate, communicate — or worse yet, even when they do — we pigpen our corralled assets and make our estate fatter instead of flatter.  It’s really a shame.

I’ve made the case in my “Commode Computing” presentation that one of the very first things that architects need to embrace is the following:

…by not artificially constraining the way in which we organize, segment and apply policy (i.e. “put it in a DMZ”) we can think about how design “anti-patterns” may actually benefit us…you can call them what you like, but we need to employ better methodology for “zoning.”

These trust zones or enclaves are reasonable in concept so long as we can ultimately further abstract their “segmentation” and abstract the security and compliance policy requirements by expressing policy programmatically and taking the logical business and functional use-case PROCESSES into consideration when defining, expressing and instantiating said policy.

You know…understand what talks to what and why…

A great way to think about this problem is to apply the notion of application mobility — without VM containers — and how one would instantiate a security “policy” in that context.  In many cases, as we march up the stack to distributed platform application architectures, we’re not able to depend upon the “crutch” that hypervisors or VM packages have begun to give us in legacy architectures that have virtualization grafted onto them.

Since many enterprises are now just starting to better leverage their virtualized infrastructure, there *are* some good solutions (again, platform specific) that unify the physical and virtual networks from a zoning perspective, but the all-up process-driven, asset-centric (app & information) view of “policy” is still woefully lacking, especially in heterogeneous environments.

Wrapping Up…

In enterprise and SP environments where we don’t have the opportunity to start anew, it often feels like we’re so far off from this sort of capability because it requires a shift that makes software defined networking look like child’s play.  Most enterprises don’t do risk-driven, asset-centric, process-mapped modelling, [and SP’s are disconnected from this,] so segmentation falls back to what we know: DMZs with VLANs, NAT, Firewalls, SSL and new protocol band-aids invented to cover gaping arterial wounds.

In environments lucky enough to think about and match the application use cases with the highly-differentiated operational models that virtualized *everything* brings to bear, it’s here today — but be prepared and honest that the vendor(s) you chose must be strategic and the interfaces between those platforms and external entities VERY well defined…else you risk software defined entropy.

I wish I had more than the 5 minutes it took to scratch this out because there’s SO much to talk about here…

…perhaps later.

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Overlays: Wasting Away Again In Abstractionville…

May 5th, 2012 3 comments
IBM Cloud Computing

(Photo credit: IvanWalsh.com)

 

I’m about to get in a metal tube and spend 14 hours in the Clouds.  I figured I’d get something off my chest while I sit outside in the sun listening to some Jimmy Buffett.

[Network] overlays.  They bug me.  Let me tell you why.

The Enterprise, when considering “moving to the Cloud” generally takes one of two approaches depending upon culture, leadership, business goals, maturity and sophistication:

  1. Go whole-hog with an all-in Cloud strategy. 
    Put an expiration date on maintaining/investing in legacy apps/infrastructure and instead build an organizational structure, technology approach, culture, and operational model that is designed around building applications that are optimized for “cloud” — and that means SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS across public, private and hybrid models with a focus on how application delivery and information (including protecting) is very different than legacy deployments, or…
  2. Adopt a hedging strategy to get to Cloud…someday.
    This usually means opportunistically picking low risk, low impact, low-hanging fruit that can be tip-toed toward and scraping together the existing “rogue” projects already underway, sprinkling in some BYOD, pointing to a virtualized datacenter and calling a 3 day provisioning window with change control as “on-demand,” and “Cloud.”  Oh, and then deploying gateways, VPNs, data encryption and network overlays as an attempt to plug holes by paving over them, and calling that “Cloud,” also.

See that last bit?

This is where so-called “software defined networking (SDN),” the myriad of models that utilize “virtualization” and all sorts of new protocols and service delivery mechanisms are being conflated into the “will it blend” menagerie called “Cloud.”  It’s an “eyes wide shut” approach.

Now, before you think I’m being dismissive of “virtualization” or SDN, I’m not.  I believe. Wholesale. But within the context of option #2 above, it’s largely a waste of time, money, and effort.  It’s putting lipstick on a pig.

You either chirp or get off the twig.

Picking door #2 is where the Enterprise looks at shiny new things based on an article in the WSJ, Wired or via peer group golf outing and says “I bet if we added yet another layer of abstraction atop the piles of already rapidly abstracting piles of shite we already have, we would be more agile, nimble, efficient and secure.”  We would be “cloud” enabled.

[To a legacy-minded Enterprise,] Cloud is the revenge of VPN and PKI…

The problem is that just like the folks in Maine will advise: “You can’t get there from here.”  I mean, you can, but the notion that you’ll actually pull it off by stacking turtles, applying band-aids and squishing the tyranny of VLANs by surrounding them in layer 3 network overlays and calling this the next greatest thing since sliced bread is, well, bollocks.

Look, I think SDN, protocols like Openflow and VXLAN/NVGRE, etc. are swell.  I think the separation of control and data planes and the notion that I can programmatically operate my network is awesome.  I think companies like Nicira and Bigswitch are doing really interesting things.  I think that Cloudstack, Openstack and VMWare present real opportunity to make things “better.”

Hey, look, we’re just like Google and Amazon Web Services Now!

But to an Enterprise without a real plan as to what “Cloud” really means to their business, these are largely overlays within the context of #2.  Within the context of #1, they’re simply mom and apple pie and are, for the most part, invisible.  That’s not where the focus actually is.

That said, for a transitional Enterprise, these things give them pause, but should be looked upon as breadcrumbs that indicate a journey, not the destination.  They’re a crutch and another band-aid to solve legacy problems.  They’re really a means to an end.

These “innovations” *are* a step in the right direction.  They will let us do great things. They will let a whole new generation of operational models and a revitalized ecosystem flourish AND it will encourage folks to think differently.  But about what?  And to solve what problem(s)?

If you simply expect to layer them on your legacy infrastructure, operational models and people and call it “Cloud,” you’re being disingenuous.

Ultimately, to abuse an analogy, network overlays are a layover on the itinerary of our journey to the Cloud, but not where we should ultimately land. I see too many companies focusing on the transition…and by the time they get there, the target will have moved.  Again.  Just like it always does.

They’re hot now because they reflect something we should have done a long time ago, but like hypervisors, one day [soon] network overlays will become just a feature and not a focus.

/Hoff

 

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