Cloud Insecurity

After a disappointing perspective on Cloud Security form InfoSec this year , where statements like "Cloud is Outsourcing Mach 2" were made, I saw a ray of light at the e-crime Cloud Security Forum. It was the first conference this year that seemed not to be influenced by the economic benefits of moving to the Cloud (fast!).

My Neighbour is a Hacker

The real dire consequences of not covering angles like multi tenancy and cloud cleansing where highlighted. If I knew that my next door neighbour was a serial killer I probably wont sleep at night. The same goes for the public Cloud , I share my resources with my neighbour , how many attack vectors does that open! How can I be sure that instance of VM that I created and then discarded was actually cleaned properly in the slack memory. Verizons answer to this is dedicated blades on demand , how scalable or easy to use will this be? we would have to wait and find out.

Logs? What Logs?

If you share resources with your neighbours surely you share logs too! how do we audit logs that have intermingled entries from you neighbour. Surely this affects data protection and privacy laws. This simple fact also affects every single SIM and SIEM tool out there. These tools already promise too much and deliver too little , this added handicap will make them totally inapplicable to the cloud as these tools primarily rely on logs.

Relying on logs to provide security and control never seemed right to me. Logs should only be for Operations and maintenance really. I am sure with enough duct tape we would still be able rely on logs for security , but do we really want to repeat mistakes for the Cloud?

IDS? What IDS?

Traditional NIDS cannot be applied in the cloud , hey you share the same connection! Network Virtualisation is something that is not considered by your Cloud Provider or is outright uneconomically . How can you apply IDS to shared traffic ? you cant ! The way forward is host based real time and distributed intrusion detection systems harnessing the power of the cloud. Why not?

Micheal Clark from Verizon stressed this point , the need for a HIDS and File integrity monitoring is far higher than Anti-Viruses when it comes to the Cloud.

Real Time

I really enjoyed Verizon's forensic perspective to the cloud infrastructure. The inadequacies of existing forensics techniques were demonstrated e.g. how do you image a cloud , is it economically viable? no its not, all the economic benefits of moving to the cloud will be negated if it needed to be done in a forensically sound manner. Moreover the cloud is dynamic , at one moment a server is there the next its gone! The only way to be forensically ready is to track the cloud in real time in all its dynamic glory.

The Super Super Users

One of the unsolvable corner cases of security has always been the super user how do you control the admin accounts? No simple way with existing tools really ! Internal fraud has always been the most expensive for companies and one of the hardest to control.

With cloud this problem will increase many folds as the super user will now be external. I call these users THE SUPER SUPER USERS employed by the Cloud Service Providers. They are like super heroes ( or villains) who can do anything( to the servers running your VM). Not only that but blame your neighbour for it and get away with it.

Security By Design

A major paradigm shift is required to deal with the Cloud Insecurity. This is our opportunity to have security by design and not by necessity . Stop reliance on logs and design other real time events that are designed with security in mind , agnostic of the platform . Let not design patchy-duct-taped-together-security this time round! can we? Please!!!