SECURITY COMPLIANCE CHALLENGES ON CLOUDS

Ph.D. YURY CHEMERKIN

Cyber Times International Journal of Technology & Management 2013

[ Yury Chemerkin ]
www.linkedin.com/in/yurychemerkin http://sto-strategy.com yury.chemerkin@gmail.com
Experienced in : Reverse Engineering & AV Software Programming & Documentation Mobile Security and MDM Cyber Security & Cloud Security Compliance & Transparency and Security Writing Hakin9 Magazine, PenTest Magazine, eForensics Magazine, Groteck Business Media Participation at conferences InfoSecurityRussia, NullCon, AthCon CYBERCRIME FORUM, Cyber Intelligence Europe/Intelligence-Sec ICITST, CyberTimes, EBW

Cloud Issues
Known Issues
Threats Privacy Compliance Legal Vendor lock-in Open source / Open standards Security Abuse IT governance Ambiguity of terminology

Known Solutions
Customization and best practices Cryptoanarchism CSA, ISO, PCI, SAS 70 US Location Platform, Data, Tools Lock-In Top clouds are not open-source Physical clouds more secured than Public Botnets and Malware Infections Depends on organization needs Reference to wide services, solutions, etc.

Common Security Recommendations for clouds

Object Data Ownership Data Segmentation Data Encryption Backup/Recovery Data Destruction Access Control Log Management Incident Response Security Controls Patch Management What to do Full rights and access to data An isolation data from other customers data A data encryption in transit/memory/storage, at rest An availability for recovery An Ability to securely destroy when no longer needed Who has access to data? A data access that logged and monitored regularly Are there processes and notifications in place for incidents (including breaches) that affect data? An appropriate security and configuration control to data protection Patching for the latest vulnerabilities and exploits?

What is about Amazon Web Services

Some known facts about AWS
Top clouds are not OpenSource OpenStack is APIs compatible with Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 and thus client applications written for AWS can be used with OpenStack with minimal porting effort Platform lock-in
Beside of OpenStack, there are Import/Export tools to migrate from/to VMware Data Lock-in

in order to issues mentioned above

Tools Lock-in Longing for an inter-cloud managing tools that are industrial and built with compliance APIs Lock-In Longing for inter-cloud APIs, however there were known inter-OS APIs for PC, MDM, Mobiles, etc. No Transparency Weak compliance and transparency due to SAS 70 and NDA relationships between cloud vendor and third party auditors and experts Abuse Abusing is not a new issue and is everywhere AWS Vulnerability Bulletins as a kind of quick response and stay tuned

Native AWS solutions linked with Cisco routers to upload, download and tunneling as well as 3rd party storage like SMEStorage (AWS, Azure, Dropbox, Google, etc.)

Clouds: Public against Private

Known security issues of Amazon Web Services
"All Your Clouds are Belong to us Security Analysis of Cloud Management Interfaces", 3rd CCSW, October 2011 A black box analysis methodology of AWS control interfaces compromised via the XSS techniques, HTML injections, MITM [AWS] :: Reported SOAP Request Parsing Vulnerabilities Utilizing the SSL/HTTPS only with certificate validation and utilizing API access mechanisms like REST/Query instead of SOAP Activating access via MFA and creating IAM accounts limited in access, AWS credentials rotation enhanced with Key pairs and X.509 Limiting IP access enhanced with API/SDK & IAM

and significant researches on it as a POC

The most dangerous code in the world: validating SSL certificates in non-browser software, 19th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, October 2012 Incorrect behavior in the SSL certificate validation mechanisms of AWS SDK for EC2, ELB, and FPS [AWS] :: Reported SSL Certificate Validation Errors in API Tools and SDKs Despite of that, AWS has updated all SDK (for all services) to redress it

Clouds: Public against Private

Longing for managing CPU, Memory and other closed resources
[Intel] :: The Essential Intelligent Client
Applied are known for VMware

[Elcomsoft] :: Cracking Passwords in the Cloud: Breaking PGP on EC2 with EDPR
Serious performance problems regardless of where the trusted/untrusted control agents are

Ability to control clouds due the Intel AMT commands or else is applied for Vmware There were not known successful implementations for AWS, Azure, GAE or other clouds.

Overloading the virtual OS with analysing CPU commands and system calls Overloading is multiplied by known issues the best of all demonstrated in case of GPU (Elcomsoft, GPU Cracking)

Clouds: Public against Private

It is generally known, that private clouds are most secure There is no a POC to prove a statement on public clouds
[AWS] :: Xen Security Advisories There are known XEN attacks (Blue Pills, etc.) No one XEN vulnerability was not applied to the AWS services Very customized clouds [CSA] :: CSA The Notorious Nine Cloud Computing Top Threats in 2013 Replaced a document published in 2009 Such best practices provides a least security No significant changes since 2009, even examples Top Threats Examples 1.0. Threat: Data Breaches // Cross-VM Side Channels and Their Use to Extract private Keys, 7.0. Threat: Abuse of Cloud Services // Cross-VM Side Channels and Their Use to Extract private Keys 4.0. Threat: Insecurity Interfaces and APIs Besides of Reality of CSA Threats 1.0 & 7.0 cases highlight how the public clouds e.g. AWS EC2 are vulnerable 1.0 & 7.0 cases are totally focused on a private cloud case (VMware and XEN), while there is no a known way to adopt it to AWS. 4.0 case presents issues raised by a SSO access not related to public clouds (except Dropbox, SkyDrive) and addressed to insecurity of APIs.

Compliance: AWS against CSA

On CSA side
The Goal is bringing a transparency of cloud controls and features, especially security controls and features Such documents have a claim to be up-to-date with expert-level understanding of significant threats and vulnerabilities Unifying recommendations for all clouds Up to now, it is a third revision All recommendations are linked with other standards PCI DSS ISO NIST COBIT FEDRAMP

On vendors and customers side

Top known cloud vendors announced they are in compliance with it Some of reports are getting old by now Customers have to control their environment by their needs Customers want to know whether it is in compliance in, especially local regulations and how far Customers want to know whether it makes clouds quite transparency to let to build an appropriate

Compliance: AWS against CSA

Compliance, Transparency, Elaboration
CAIQ/CCM provides equivalent of recommendations over several standards CAIQ provides more details on security and privacy than matrix aligned to Cloud Security Guidance in 13 domains CSA recommendations are pure with technical details It helps vendors to pass a compliance easier It helps not to have their solutions worked out in details and/or badly documented It helps to makes a lot of references on 3rd party reviewers under NDA (SOC 1 or SAS 70) Bad idea to let vendors fills such documents They provide fewer public details They take it to NDA reports Vendors general explanations multiplied by general standards recommendations are extremely far away from transparency Clouds call for specific levels of audit logging, activity reporting, security controlling and data retention It is often not a part of SLA offered by providers It is outside recommendations AWS often falls in details with their architecture documents AWS solutions are very well to be in compliance with old standards and specific local regulations such as Russian Law It additionally need to use CLI, API/SDK to reduce third party solutions and implement national crypto It offers a PenTest opportunity

CONCLUSION
THE VENDOR SECURITY VISION HAS NOTHING WITH REALITY AGGRAVATED BY SIMPLICITY
The best Security & Permissions ruled by AWS over other clouds
Most cases are not clear in according to the roles and responsibilities of cloud vendors and their customers

Some of such cases are not clear on background type: technical or non-technical Swapping responsibilities and shifting the vendor job on to customer shoulders
Referring to independent audits reports under NDA as many times as they can

All recommendations should be enhanced by independent analysis expert in certain areas CSA put the cross references to other standards that impact on complexity & lack of clarity like NIST SP800-53
NIST is more details and well documented with cross references and AWS matches to the NIST more

Q&A

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