Project Skylab: Helping You Get Your Cloud On

Project Skylab: Helping You Get Your Cloud On

Craig BaldingFounder, cloudsecurity.org

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Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed here are those of Craig Balding only and in no way

represent the views, positions or opinions - expressed or implied - of my employer or

anyone else.

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Last year at Brucon, I talked about Cloud Security and broke new ground through using the Beer and Brewing as an analogy for cloud computing. The climax of that talk was significant after-cloud.

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But as I sat there in the speaker room as the make-up crew and hairstylists did the best they could in the circumstances, I made myself a promise. If I got selected to talk in 2010 I would take things more seriously.

No More Gimmicks

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Cloud Security is not a laughing matter.

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No more clowning around.

Sorry

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But my apology is two-fold. My blatant lies about gimmicks to one side...

The Cloud Security Broken Record

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I was starting to feel like a stuck record, going on about high level cloud security issues.

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I became an “expert source” on all things cloud security and strangely enough: cloud.

Again, sorry...

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I promise to mend my ways. Hence, the birth of my Skylab project. Rather than just talking about it, lets do something with it. Something useful, something that might just draw you into my cloud...

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But I wasn’t just challenging myself with Skylab. I’m challenging you, my fellow infosec pros. Perhaps you’re ignoring cloud, hoping it will just ‘blow over’. Or maybe, you’re convinced yourself you’re so busy, you just don’t have time to ‘get into it’. Or perhaps, you just haven’t seen the writing on the wall or believe its another dot com bust in the making.

s/LUKE/CLOUD?

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We tend to take apply a ‘DEFAULT DENY’ rule to new tech. In the case of cloud, its been DEFAULT DROP. As a community it sometimes seems like our reactions sometimes cloud our vision. Why do we feel the need to be anti-something and thus not examine it critically and carefully? I think we do a dis-service to our employers when we do that.

Cloud Is Coming

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I’m not here to make predictions about cloud. Personally, I see writing on the wall, but I’m not trying to convince you of that. Rather, I want to ask you a question.

What AreYou

Doing To

Keep Up?

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What are you doing to keep up? Cloud is just the latest big thing. But before that we had virtualization, we had VoIP, we had converged networking. I think we all need to challenge ourselves a little more. Seek our own truths as it were. Stop paying attention and reacting to the endless media sound bites by people that clearly don’t get security. Do original research. Apply the new technologies for ourselves before the people that pay our wages do...

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This boils down to something really simple. We have to find our Droids. Each of have droids to seek out. What Droids are you looking for? How hard are you looking? What are you waiting for? Don’t wait til you feel you’re ‘good enough’ or until ‘you have more free time’. I hope to offer you something that may make you change your mind.

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For me, I wanted to commit a little more to building something. I wanted to find out what cloud technology I could use right now to do something useful for my own R&D purposes. There are many things that can get in your way, but one big one is....

F r i c t i o n

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Friction is the enemy of your imagination. I don’t know about you, but for me its not having the right set up at the right time. I’m always trading one resource for another. My free disk space is *always* on the wrong machine. I can never run enough virtual machines... Not only that, I have whims. I also have a Wim (looks at Wim), but they are mostly 2 different things... I have kites I want to fly. I have ideas I want to quickly test. But most of them never see the light of day, which makes me feel sad and deprives me of valuable learning lessons. Why? Because of friction. Infrastructure friction. Changing my test network setup is a pain. I’ll have to shuffle resources around and make compromises as I don’t have an army of machines to play with. I’ll have to “make do” and collapse multiple workloads onto single machines. Virtual machines have certainly helped - they’ve given me more options than I had before. But at the same time virtual compute has highlighted that I can never own enough hardware (“I just want to run one more”). Plus I’ve got the virtual headache of managing an ever increasing stable of virtual machine images. I want my infrastructure to be malleable like code and my operations to be automated. Or to put it another way, I need some serious lubrication.

Prior Art

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Along came project Skylab. This is my meta-idea. The idea that can help bring my other ideas to life. Skylab will help me fail faster and cheaper than I can today. This isn’t pessimism, this is how great ideas come to be - you just have to let all the bad ones get themselves out of you first.

Learn

Get Practical

Home Server RIP

Geekin’ Out

Open Source

Community Project

Motives

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# whoami

Tech Security Lead @F500

UNIX Background

Pen-Test

Incident Response

EuroTrash SecurityPodcast

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Do you use cloud storage?

Have you booted a machine in a public cloud?

Have you played with cloud network overlays?

3 Questions For You

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Wannabe Cloudtroopers

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Come to the darkside my friends. Embrace the cloud. Or at least dip your toe in it so you can backup whatever opinion you profer. If that doesn’t convince you, I’m offering free sea-shell hats for cloud converts.

On Demand Test Labs

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So Skylabs is about on demand test labs. I’m sure you can think of times when you having an inflatable test lab that you can spin up and shutdown when you want could be pretty darn handy

Testing new/updated tools

NIDS/NIPS testing

Exploit testing

Target practice

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On the offense side of security, there is target practice. Don’t be a dummy and ride exploits bareback. Tut tut. Always practice in a lab. For every action there is a reaction. Observe, learn, practice, profit. For your career with not be cut-short... But its not just pen-test labs...Capture the Flag, Hands-on Practicals when hiring so-called experienced pen-testers etc.

Package Golden Image as AMI

Upload, launch [1...n]

Apply patches, workarounds & run tests

Assurance Testing

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Then on the defensive side of the house, what about someone to test your mitigating controls...or heaven forbid, patches! Deploying new security tools? Again, good to have a lab. Or 3. Or 7.

During a Pen-Test?

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Need a disposable IP?Need to run a phishing scam?The latest svn update from the Social Engineer Toolkit burning a hole in your toolkit?

What’s your use case?

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It’s a Commodity

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The key to remember when thinking about cloud is that its a commodity. You get what you pay for. But sometimes, commodity is just what you want.

Infrastructure as a Service

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So what are we talking about? We’re talking about using infrastructure as a service to create on-demand test labs. We’re intentionally confining ourselves to just 1 layer of the cloud services model: we’re ignoring Platform as a Service and Software as a Service. In fact, Skylab itself will have attributes of platform and software as a service in terms of doing some of the heavy lifting for you.

Design

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Lets touch on some design principles

Design Principles

Hit common use cases

On demand

Infrastructure as code ("agility")

Cost-conscious

Hardware reuse: bring your own lab, or not

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Need a disposable IP?Need to run a phishing scam?The latest svn update from the Social Engineer Toolkit burning a hole in your toolkit?

Design PrinciplesHypervisor agnostic: Xen, kvm, VMware

Security test lab "features"

Freedom: open source

Pragmatic: don't reinvent infrastructure wheels

Scriptable & Fun

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Need a disposable IP?Need to run a phishing scam?The latest svn update from the Social Engineer Toolkit burning a hole in your toolkit?

Shopping for a Cloud Platform

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API

Core

Source

Development

Decision Making

OPEN?

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Private/Public/Hybrid

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Private

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Hybrid

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RH Delta-cloud

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Turbo charge your hybrid cloud with RedHats Delta Cloud...access more cloud providers

Don’t Forget

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Leaving cloud compute instances running at the cloud provider does actually cost money. It is surprisingly easy to do though. Do it once and you’ll feel stupid, do it twice and you’ll find yourself writing a script to remind you not to feel stupid :)

Terms of Service

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Know the terms of service of your hosting and/or cloud provider. Check clauses about introduction of malware in particular.

Cloud Networking

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Public Cloud Networking 101

One NIC Per VM

Limited Routing

Basic Firewalls

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Use cases

Overlay Networks

An overlay network is a computer network which is built on top of another network. Nodes in the overlay can be thought of as being connected by virtual or logical links, each of which corresponds to a path, perhaps through many physical links, in the underlying network

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Use cases

Amazon VPC

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Amazon recently opened up their Virtual Private Cloud, currently beta

This is a cloud provider specific network overlay

Hook up your existing network. Software VPN on your side, Hardware on their side.

All traffic traverses the customer gateway - no Internet access from within VPC

Can use existing AMIs and Elastic Block Storage

Amazon rapidly innovating - keep up with release details!

VPNCubed

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The first overlay network service for the cloud market.

Based on OpenVPN, uses CohesiveFT created VMs as cloud VPN endpoints

Supports multicast.

Cross connect clouds, extend your home/business network

Supports Amazon EC2 and gogrid

Config Management

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Chef from Opscode

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The Practical

Bit(wakey, wakey)

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DEMO: Sneak Peek

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TO DO

Establish Amazon VPC Connection

Build Visibility VM (Splunk + extras)

Chef Recipes for Security Extras & CM

Build Range of Victim/Enterprise VMs

Create easy “DC Creator” front-end script

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Beyond x86Multi-providerDocumentation

VMware SupportEnhanced routing

Explore ecosystem Improved Automation

Define more Use CasesMore Security Related AMIs

Futures

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cloudsecurity.org

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Check out cloudsecurity.org/resources for recommended reading on cloud security.

Project Updates

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Recently created the cloud security forum (cloudsecurity.org/forum)- an independent hang out for IT and IT security people to discuss cloud security issues

Topic areas out as per CSA security domains

There’s a dedicated forum for Skylab which I’ll be posting to with progress updates.

If you have suggestions for Skylab, please share with me there.

CreditsStormtroopers: Stefan

http://stormtroopers365.com/

Creators of KVM, Xen, Qemu, libvirt, OpenNebula, DeltaCloud, Chef, libcloud

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Stefan made some great images and all credit is due to him.

I’m also extremely grateful for all the open source software I’m gluing together for this project. Skylab would have been very difficult, it not impossible, for a sole person to piece together without all the effort from numerous developers.

Questions?

craig@cloudsecurity.org / @craigbalding

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