Rational Survivability

[The following is a re-post from the Microsoft (Technet) blog I did as a lead up to my Cloudifornication presentation at Bluehat v9 I’ll be posting after I deliver the revised edition tomorrow.]

There have been many disruptive innovations in the history of modern computing, each of them in some way impacting how we create, interact with, deliver, and consume information. The platforms and mechanisms used to process, transport, and store our information likewise endure change, some in subtle ways and others profoundly.

Cloud computing is one such disruption whose impact is rippling across the many dimensions of our computing experience. Cloud – in its various forms and guises — represents the potential cauterization of wounds which run deep in IT; self-afflicted injuries of inflexibility, inefficiency, cost inequity, and poor responsiveness.

But cost savings, lessening the environmental footprint, and increased agility aren’t the only things cited as benefits. Some argue that cloud computing offers the potential for not only equalling what we have for security today, but bettering it. It’s an interesting argument, really, and one that deserves some attention.

To address it, it requires a shift in perspective relative to the status quo.

We’ve been at this game for nearly forty years. With each new (r)evolutionary period of technological advancement and the resultant punctuated equilibrium that follows, we’ve done relatively little to solve the security problems that plague us, including entire classes of problems we’ve known about, known how to fix, but have been unable or unwilling to fix for many reasons.

With each pendulum swing, we attempt to pay the tax for the sins of our past with technology of the future that never seems to arrive.

Here’s where the notion of doing better comes into play.

Cloud computing is an operational model that describes how combinations of technology can be utilized to better deliver service; it’s a platform shuffle that is enabling a fierce and contentious debate on the issues surrounding how we secure our information and instantiate trust in an increasingly open and assumed-hostile operating environment which is in many cases directly shared with others, including our adversaries.

Cloud computing is the natural progression of the reperimeterization, consumerization, and increasingly mobility of IT we’ve witnessed over the last ten years. Cloud computing is a forcing function that is causing us to shine light on the things we do and defend not only how we do them, but who does them, and why.

To set a little context and simplify discussion, if we break down cloud computing into a visual model that depicts bite-sized chunks, it looks like this:

Infostructure/Metastructure/Infrastructure

At the foundation of this model is the infrastructure layer that represents the traditional computer, network and storage hardware, operating systems, and virtualization platforms familiar to us all.

Cresting the model is the infostructure layer that represents the programmatic components such as applications and service objects that produce, operate on, or interact with the content, information, and metadata.

Sitting in between infrastructure and infostructure is the metastructure layer. This layer represents the underlying set of protocols and functions such as DNS, BGP, and IP address management, which “glue” together and enable the applications and content at the infostructure layer to in turn be delivered by the infrastructure.

We’ve made incremental security progress at the infrastucture and infostructure layers, but the technology underpinnings at the metastructure layer have been weighed, measured, and found lacking. The protocols that provide the glue for our fragile Internet are showing their age; BGP, DNS, and SSL are good examples.

Ultimately the most serious cloud computing concern is presented by way of the “stacked turtles” analogy: layer upon layer of complex interdependencies predicated upon fragile trust models framed upon nothing more than politeness and with complexities and issues abstracted away with additional layers of indirection. This is “cloudifornication.”

The dynamism, agility and elasticity of cloud computing is, in all its glory, still predicated upon protocols and functions that were never intended to deal with these essential characteristics of cloud.

Without re-engineering these models and implementing secure protocols and the infrastructure needed to support them, we run the risk of cloud computing simply obfuscating the fragility of the supporting layers until the stack of turtles topples as something catastrophic occurs.

There are many challenges associated with the unique derivative security issues surrounding cloud computing, but we have the ability to remedy them should we so desire.

Cloud computing is a canary in the coal mine and it’s chirping wildly for now but that won’t last.  It’s time to solve the problems, not the symptoms.

/Hoff

[Edited the last sentence for clarity]

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