Project Skylab:

Craig Balding Founder, cloudsecurity.org

Helping You Get Your Cloud On

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.

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 signicant after-cloud.

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

Cloud Security is not a laughing matter.

No more clowning around.

Sorry

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

The Cloud Security Broken Record

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

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

Again, sorry...

10

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...

11

But I wasnt just challenging myself with Skylab. Im challenging you, my fellow infosec pros. Perhaps youre ignoring cloud, hoping it will just blow over. Or maybe, youre convinced yourself youre so busy, you just dont have time to get into it. Or perhaps, you just havent seen the writing on the wall or believe its another dot com bust in the making.

s/LUKE/CLOUD?

12

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

13

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

What Are You Doing To Keep Up?

14

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 dont get security. Do original research. Apply the new technologies for ourselves before the people that pay our wages do...

15

This boils down to something really simple. We have to nd 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? Dont wait til you feel youre good enough or until you have more free time. I hope to offer you something that may make you change your mind.

16

For me, I wanted to commit a little more to building something. I wanted to nd 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

17

Friction is the enemy of your imagination. I dont know about you, but for me its not having the right set up at the right time. Im 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 y. 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. Ill have to shuffle resources around and make compromises as I dont have an army of machines to play with. Ill have to make do and collapse multiple workloads onto single machines. Virtual machines have certainly helped - theyve 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 Ive 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

18

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 isnt pessimism, this is how great ideas come to be - you just have to let all the bad ones get themselves out of you rst.

Motives
Learn Get Practical Home Server RIP Geekin Out Open Source Community Project

19

# whoami Tech Security Lead @F500 UNIX Background Pen-Test Incident Response EuroTrash Security Podcast

20

3 Questions For You

Do you use cloud storage? Have you booted a machine in a public cloud? Have you played with cloud network overlays?

21

Wannabe Cloudtroopers

22

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 doesnt convince you, Im offering free seashell hats for cloud converts.

On Demand Test Labs

23

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

Target practice

Testing new/updated too NIDS/NIPS testing Exploit testing

24

On the offense side of security, there is target practice. Dont be a dummy and ride exploits bareback. Tut tut. Always practice in a lab. For every action there is a reaction. Observe, learn, practice, prot. 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.

Assurance Testing
Package Golden Image as AMI Upload, launch [1...n] Apply patches, workarounds & run tests

25

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?

26

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?

Whats your use case?

27

Its a Commodity

28

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

29

So what are we talking about? Were talking about using infrastructure as a service to create on-demand test labs. Were intentionally conning ourselves to just 1 layer of the cloud services model: were 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

30

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

31

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 Principles
Hypervisor agnostic: Xen, kvm, VMware Security test lab "features" Freedom: open source Pragmatic: don't reinvent infrastructure wheels Scriptable & Fun

32

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

33

OPEN?
API Core Source Development Decision Making

34

Private/Public/Hybrid

35

Private

36

Hybrid

37

RH Delta-cloud

38

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

Dont Forget

39

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

Terms of Service

40

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

Cloud Networking

41

Public Cloud Networking 101

One NIC Per VM Limited Routing Basic Firewalls

42

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

43

Use cases

Amazon VPC

44

Amazon recently opened up their Virtual Private Cloud, currently beta This is a cloud provider specic 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

45

The rst 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

Cong Management

46

Chef from Opscode

47

The Practical Bit

(wakey, wakey)

48

DEMO: Sneak Peek

49

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

50

Futures
Beyond x86 Multi-provider Documentation VMware Support Enhanced routing Explore ecosystem Improved Automation Dene more Use Cases More Security Related AMIs

51

cloudsecurity.org

52

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

Project Updates

53

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 Theres a dedicated forum for Skylab which Ill be posting to with progress updates. If you have suggestions for Skylab, please share with me there.

Credits
Stormtroopers: Stefan http://stormtroopers365.com/

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

54

Stefan made some great images and all credit is due to him. Im also extremely grateful for all the open source software Im 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
55

56