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OpenStack Cloud Security
OpenStack Cloud Security

OpenStack Cloud Security: Your OpenStack cloud storage contains all your vital computing resources and potentially sensitive data – secure it with this essential OpenStack tutorial

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Profile Icon Fabio Alessandro Locati
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€15.99 €23.99
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon 3.7 (3 Ratings)
eBook Jul 2015 160 pages 1st Edition
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€15.99 €23.99
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Arrow left icon
Profile Icon Fabio Alessandro Locati
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€15.99 €23.99
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon 3.7 (3 Ratings)
eBook Jul 2015 160 pages 1st Edition
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€15.99 €23.99
Paperback
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OpenStack Cloud Security

Chapter 2. OpenStack Security Challenges

As we have seen in the first chapter, each level of your infrastructure can be an object of the unwanted attention for an attacker. Software is no exception to this. There are a lot of attacks that aim to find bugs or misconfigurations in software and exploit them to gain access to the machines that run the software, or to data. OpenStack, with all its parts and all the software it relies on, can be a very effective attack vehicle if not safely configured, due to its very trustful policy that allows nodes to access all data if the node requires it. So, an attacker can quickly compromise and obtain your data if he or she is able to compromise a single node.

Before looking at OpenStack directly, I would like to deal with a critical aspect: security in cloud environments; that is, the ownership of machines.

In this chapter, we will to cover:

  • The differences between the private and the public cloud with a focus on the security aspects
  • The possible...

Private cloud versus public cloud security

Very often people say cloud when they actually mean public cloud. For this reason, in the book, we'll always specify private cloud or public cloud and when we do not specify anything, the word cloud is used in both senses at the same time.

This is a necessary disclaimer because when speaking of security, private and public clouds have completely different issues, but let's start from the beginning.

The private cloud

A private cloud environment is operated solely for a single organization (or person) by internal or third-party personnel. In a private cloud situation, all machines are owned (or leased) by the organization and will run that organization's software exclusively.

From an economical perspective, private clouds are less flexible; in fact, the number of machines will stay pretty stable over time compared to public clouds.

From a scalability perspective, private clouds are not very flexible because you can't use more processing...

The different kinds of security threats

As we have seen in the previous chapter, when we speak about security, we can mean multiple things. Also, as we have just seen that private and public clouds present different kinds of security issues. We are now going to analyze the various attacks that you can encounter when administering an OpenStack cloud.

Possible attackers

Let's start by identifying the possible attackers we can face. They can be divided in different ways based on their goals; in this case, we will distinguish them as the following:

  • Automated attacks/Script kiddies: Automated vulnerability scanning/exploitation.
  • Motivated individuals: This includes multiple kinds of attackers, such as small-scale industrial espionage, rogue or malicious employees, or disaffected customers. They act alone.
  • Highly capable groups: These groups often refer to themselves as Hacktivist and are not typically commercially funded, but can pose a serious threat to service providers and cloud operators...

The possible attacks

There are multiple kinds of attacks that can be put into action. The main kinds are as follows:

  • Denial of Service
  • 0-day
  • Brute force
  • Advanced Persistent Threat
  • Automated exploitation tools
  • ISP intercept
  • Supply chain attack
  • Social engineering
  • Hypervisor Breakout

Denial of Service

A Denial of Service (DoS) attack is an attack that aims to make some service unavailable. In the last few years, usually we speak about DDoS, since those are very effective and cheap and for those reasons have become the most used DoS attack. DDoS attacks consist in multiple machines trying to overload a server or its connection to make the services that are running on that server unavailable.

The good part about DoS attacks is that in majority of the cases, as soon as they end it, all is back to normal. When this is not true, small actions have to be executed by system administrators, such as restarting a service or rebooting a machine.

Note

There is no way to completely protect a server from a DoS attack...

The OpenStack structure

OpenStack is an orchestration suite to create clouds mainly focused to create Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions. OpenStack has multiple components, each one aiming to provide a piece to the cloud. As I write, last OpenStack stable version is Juno that has the following components:

OpenStack Compute Service – Nova

Computing is one of the core parts of any IaaS solution, as well as OpenStack. This is also one of the two oldest modules of OpenStack, since it has been part of the project since its first version, Austin, which was released in October, 2010. Nova derives from NASA's Nebula platform.

Nova is a cloud computing fabric controller. It is designed to manage and automate pools of computer resources and can work with many hypervisors such as KVM, VMware, and Xen.

It is written in Python and uses many external libraries. Nova was created with horizontal scalability in mind; in fact, it's able to scale horizontally on commercial off-the-shelf...

Future components

Since the OpenStack community is increasing its size very quickly, the OpenStack Technical Committee has created a procedure to accept new components as part of OpenStack.

To grant maximum safety and code-continuity, it has been decided that the new components have to pass a given time in incubation. In this period, the component has to show a few releases as if they were already parts of OpenStack before they can be promoted to official components. This makes the incubation process pretty long but you can be assured that only high quality components are allowed to be officially part of OpenStack.

Due to this long process, we already know that some components that will soon become part of OpenStack. The following components are being considered to be part of the next release (Kilo) and some of them will very likely be integrated. These components are explained next.

Ironic – bare metal provisioning

The ironic goal is to provide the same interface that is used to create...

Summary

In this chapter, we have seen the differences between private and public cloud with a specific focus on security, the different kind of attackers, and attacks with a focus on cloud computing, as well as the components of OpenStack.

In the next chapter, we will focus on networking security for OpenStack.

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Description

If you are an OpenStack administrator or developer, or wish to build solutions to protect your OpenStack environment, then this book is for you. Experience of Linux administration and familiarity with different OpenStack components is assumed.

Who is this book for?

If you are an OpenStack administrator or developer, or wish to build solutions to protect your OpenStack environment, then this book is for you. Experience of Linux administration and familiarity with different OpenStack components is assumed.

What you will learn

  • Secure your servers, data center, and network to improve your environment for the cloud
  • Gain insights into ISP intercept and social engineering
  • Explore automated attacks with the help of mass phishing, brute force, and automated exploitation tools
  • Secure your OpenStack installation from a networking perspective at both low and high levels
  • Get to know how to secure your OpenStack to use only encrypted communications for APIs
  • Configure secure communications on the OpenStack API
  • Harden OpenStack Keystone and Horizon for a more secure environment
  • Protect the Swift replication mechanism through network hardening

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Publication date : Jul 28, 2015
Length: 160 pages
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Length: 160 pages
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Table of Contents

8 Chapters
1. First Things First – Creating a Safe Environment Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. OpenStack Security Challenges Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Securing OpenStack Networking Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Securing OpenStack Communications and Its API Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Securing the OpenStack Identification and Authentication System and Its Dashboard Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Securing OpenStack Storage Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Securing the Hypervisor Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon 3.7
(3 Ratings)
5 star 66.7%
4 star 0%
3 star 0%
2 star 0%
1 star 33.3%
ruben Sep 11, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
I have read the book and it is a great title because it covers all the basics for an environment security system.It has the necessary to work with an implementation of a complete and protect your network also you can see that everything is real information to apply in the real world.It talks about the software APIS to see if an application can introduce to a network data so it explains how to do that.I really recomnend this book it helps me a lot how to improve my knowledge in this area.ThanksWrote by Ruben Oliva Ramos
Amazon Verified review Amazon
JORGE CARLOS FRANCO Aug 26, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
I bought the book because the title and description was interesting for me, I've some years of experience on the systems administration field. The last two yeard I've spent time for enriching my knowledge of the OpenStack 'universe'.Inside the book you can find useful topics explained in a good way, the author describe it in short but precise paragraphs all topics in an introductory way to apply on your OpenStack deployments. Maybe a just term is, he makes overview from the professional OpenStack experience to dump it into the book.I like the book because, he makes overview from the professional OpenStack experience to dump it into the book. No matter if the reader has a large experience on the system administration and system security field, you can use the book as handy guide to proceed with your OpenStack hardening process.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Marcus John Sep 06, 2017
Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 1
Dieses Buch enthält keine einzige konkrete Massnahme, um Sicherheit für eine OpenStack Installation anzupassen.Stattdessen wird Seite um Seite geschunden mit Darstellungen zum ISO-OSI Schichtenmodell, man erfährt so wichtige Dinge, wie das eine Firewall und ein IDS wichtig sind. Wer hätte das gedacht?Dummerweise hatte ich das Buch bestellt und zu lange liegen gelassen, um es zurücksenden zu können.Fehlkauf des Jahres!!!
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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