יום ראשון, 10 בנובמבר 2013

Cisco ACI - Security Challenges key notes


"Cisco’s ACI delivers centralized application-driven policy automation and management of, and visibility into, both physical and virtual environments as a single system. It is optimized to support an “application anywhere” model, with complete freedom of application movement and placement. This novel approach empowers IT teams to offer cloud-based services to their customers directly, with the associated service-level agreements (SLAs) and performance requirements for the most demanding business applications".

Cisco ACI Architecture brings new challenges to security Domain in the Data Cetner.
In this short blog I will try to address some of the security challenge face the insieme group  responsible to develop the ACI.

Automation
With ACI solution cisco aim solve the slowness of the IT department, By automation the way application deployed in the datacenter.
To deploy new application ACI will use "application profile", this profile contain all the detail need from network perspective like:  vlan connectivity, routing, computing, storage and security.  Same analogy to service-profile in UCS world.
Let's take for example deployment of SharePoint application with ACI.
IS security policy for internal SharePoint or external internet SharePoint is the same?
Different application will need different custom security policy.


APIC - Control Plane
The APIC will use control plane protocol to be able talk with other entities. APIC will needs to provision, configure and measure for health status check.
There must be strong authentication method for new devices to connect to APIC control plane, the connection must be secured with very strong and fast encryption.

Attacking the APIC
One of the most common attack methods to take down public service is DDoS-distributed denial-of-service attack attack.
The APIC will need to be able have internal mechanism to protect himself from this form of attack.


Compromise of the APIC
APIC is the heart of ACI architecture, one of the biggest threats to all ACI architecture is unauthorized access or compromise of the APIC that control the entire entities.
The OS of the APIC will need to be build from harden custom kernel  instead of public Linux kernel with minimum open services.
The ip address for access to APIC need to narrow for few specific  management IP's


 Northbound interfaces API
One of the key of ACI is the ability of Third-party application to be able to communicate with APIC. Northbound Interface allows Cloud management system like openstack or cloupia to program and Orchestration the APIC.
what if an attacker manages to inject a malicious script into a third-party solution which returns that script in an API response that you are handling

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