Pragmatic Security for Cloud and Hybrid Networks: Introduction
This is the start in a new series I’m posting for public feedback, licensed by Algosec. Well, that is if they like it – we are sticking to our Totally Transparent Research policy. I’m also live-writing the content on GitHub if you want to provide any feedback or suggestions. With that, here’s the content… For a few decades we have been refining our approach to network security. Find the boxes, find the wires connecting them, drop a few security boxes between them in the right spots, and move on. Sure, we continue to advance the state of the art in exactly what those security boxes do, and we constantly improve how we design networks and plug everything together, but overall change has been incremental. How we think about network security doesn’t change – just some of the particulars. Until you move to the cloud. While many of the fundamentals still apply, cloud computing releases us from the physical limitations of those boxes and wires by fully abstracting the network from the underlying resources. We move into entirely virtual networks, controlled by software and APIs, with very different rules. Things may look the same on the surface, but dig a little deeper and you quickly realize that network security for cloud computing requires a different mindset, different tools, and new fundamentals. Many of which change every time you switch cloud providers. The challenge of cloud computing and network security Cloud networks don’t run magically on pixie dust, rainbows, and unicorns – they rely on the same old physical network components we are used to. The key difference is that cloud customers never access the ‘real’ network or hardware. Instead they work inside virtual constructs – that’s the nature of the cloud. Cloud computing uses virtual networks by default. The network your servers and resources see is abstracted from the underlying physical resources. When you server gets IP address 10.0.0.12, that isn’t really that IP address on the routing hardware – it’s a virtual IP address on a virtual network. Everything is handled in software, and most of these virtual networks are Software Defined Networks (SDN). We will go over SDN in more depth in the next section. These networks vary across cloud providers, but they are all fundamentally different from traditional networks in a few key ways: Virtual networks don’t provide the same visibility as physical networks because packets don’t move around the same way. We can’t plug a wire into the network to grab all the traffic – there is no location all traffic traverses, and much of the traffic is wrapped and encrypted anyway. Cloud networks are managed via Application Programming Interfaces – not by logging in and provisioning hardware the old-fashioned way. A developer has the power to stand up an entire class B network, completely destroy an entire subnet, or add a network interface to a server and bridge to an entirely different subnet on a different cloud account, all within minutes with a few API calls. Cloud networks change faster than physical networks, and constantly. It isn’t unusual for a cloud application to launch and destroy dozens of servers in under an hour – faster than traditional security and network tools can track – or even build and destroy entire networks just for testing. Cloud networks look like traditional networks, but aren’t. Cloud providers tend to give you things that look like routing tables and firewalls, but don’t work quite like your normal routing tables and firewalls. It is important to know the differences. Don’t worry – the differences make a lot of sense once you start digging in, and most of them provide better security that’s more accessible than on a physical network, so long as you know how to manage them. The role of hybrid networks A hybrid network bridges your existing network into your cloud provider. If, for example, you want to connect a cloud application to your existing database, you can connect your physical network to the virtual network in your cloud. Hybrid networks are extremely common, especially as traditional enterprises begin migrating to cloud computing and need to mix and match resources instead of building everything from scratch. One popular example is setting up big data analytics in your cloud provider, where you only pay for processing and storage time, so you don’t need to buy a bunch of servers you will only use once a quarter. But hybrid networks complicate management, both in your data center and in the cloud. Each side uses a different basic configuration and security controls, so the challenge is to maintain consistency across both, even though the tools you use – such as your nifty next generation firewall – might not work the same (if at all) in both environments. This paper will explain how cloud network security is different, and how to pragmatically manage it for both pure cloud and hybrid cloud networks. We will start with some background material and cloud networking 101, then move into cloud network security controls, and specific recommendations on how to use them. It is written for readers with a basic background in networking, but if you made it this far you’ll be fine. Share:
