Rational Survivability

Update: Please read the comments section.  Rather than force playing blog pong, I’ve cross-posted some of the comment thread from Lindstrom’s blog.

I believe I’ve offered up a clear present and future case that invalidates "immutable" law #1. Pete, of course, disagrees…

—

I’ve commented a couple of times about the confusingly contradictory nature of Lindstrom’s Burton’s "Five Immutable Laws of Virtualization."  I go back every once and a while and try to utilize them as suggested by their author to see what pops out the other end:

When combining the standard risk principles with an understanding of the use cases of virtualization, a set of immutable laws can be derived to assist in securing virtual environments

I’m not sure I really ever got an answer to what those "…standard risk principles" are and as such, there seems to exist a variability based upon interpretation that again makes me scratch my head when staring at the word "immutable."

So I try and overlook the word (as did the author/editor in the title of the Baseline magazine article below — it was omitted) and I find myself back where I started which sort of makes sense given the somewhat reflexive and corollary nature of these "laws."   

This is where I get stuck.  I don’t know whether to interpret each law as though it can stand on its own or the group as a whole.

Basically, I have a hard time seeing how they enable making more effective risk management decisions any easier.  I will admit, it could just be me…

Further, I’ve noticed the very careful choice of words used in these laws, and interestingly they don’t appear to be consistently referenced which would defeat the purpose of calling them "immutable," no?

Take for example the original wording of the five laws from Burton’s original minting and compare it against an article appearing in Baseline magazine from the same author(s) — Lindstrom in this case:

Original Burton Article Example:

Law 1: Attacks against the OS and applications of a physical system have the exact same damage potential against a duplicate virtual system.

Baseline Magazine Article Example:

Law 1. Attacking a virtual combination of operating systems and applications is exactly the same as attacking the physical system it replicates.

This example may seem subtle and unimportant, but I maintain it is not.  I suggest that they mean very different things indeed.  I mean, if these are "laws," they’re not something you get to reword at a whim.  I trust I don’t have to  explain why.

One could have lots of fun with the Constitution if that were the case. 😉

There are additional differences scattered throughout the two articles.  See if they appeal differently to you as they did to me.

Now, I’m sure Pete’s going to suggest I’m picking nits and that I’m missing the spirit and intent of these "laws," but before he does, I’m going to remind him that I didn’t come up with the title, he did.  I’m merely stuck on trying to assess whether these are actually "immutable" or "refutable" but I am admittedly still having trouble getting past step #1.

Help a brother out.  Explain these to me to where they make sense.  Pete tried and it didn’t stick.  Maybe you can help?

/Hoff

I was at Starbucks with my four year old.  She was laying down the Dr. Seuss
with aplomb so I was inspired to dig deep and show her how the old man can
ebb and flow.

I swear to $diety that upon hearing this she rolled her eyes and said something like "Dad, you had me at ‘virtualization.’ "  At that point she quickly pointed to my iPhone and asked if I would purchase the latest Hannah Montana song on iTunes…<sigh>

You can see more of my poetic ramblings here (scroll down after the jump.)

When debating the future of secure virtualization
It’s wise to reflect on its very creation

Some say poor code is the reason it’s here
while others use doubt and (un)certainty’s fear

Economically speaking the V-word’s a boon
operationally, though, it showed up too soon

Duties, once separate, are now all a-blended
one moat, lots of castles — the model’s up-ended

Competency and skillsets come into play
Who owns the stack?  Well, that’s hard to say

Can an admin whose mad skillz focus on the OS,
really be trusted to manage this mess?

The virtual sysadmin owns the keys to the kingdom
but it’s hard to fix hosts when you can’t even ping ‘dem!

Operational silos have now become worse
since the virtual admins control all the purse

The network and security wonks try to fudge it
but switches and firewalls just don’t get budget

Security, network, storage, and host
if you push the wrong button it all becomes toast

Our current security solutions don’t cope
but the dealers keep pushing their VirtSec straight dope

I don’t want to come off like a VirtSec despiser,
but to protect our crown jewels it’s all HYPErvisor

Don’t worry my friends, no need to be scared
your whole infrastructure will be VMware’d

…or Xen’d, or sPath’d or perhaps Hyper-V’d
virtualization, I’m told, will solve everyone’s need

Organizational issues are really what matter
there’s no real need to make our vendors much fatter

Focus first on improving your present situation
like assessing your risk and host segmentation

Get a grip on the basics and work up from there
don’t give into the hype, doubt, confusion or fear

That’s it boys and girls till I rhyme once again
Stay happy, stay secure, and now…

EOM

Another interesting example I use in my VirtSec presentations when discussing the challenges of what I describe as Phase 2 of virtualization — virtualizing critical applications and things like Internet-facing infrastructure in DMZ’s — is the notion of compliance failures based on existing and upcoming revisions to regulatory requirements.

Specifically, I use PCI/DSS to illustrate that in many cases were one to take a highly-segmented and stratified "defense-in-depth" architecture that is today "PCI compliant" and virtualize it given presently available options, you’d likely find yourself out of compliance given the current state of technology solutions and auditing standards used to assess against.

Then again, you might just pass with flying colors while being totally insecure.

Here’s a fantastic example from Eric Siebert over at the TechTarget Virtualization blog.  Check this out, it’s a doozie!

Having just survived another annual PCI compliance audit, I was again surprised that the strict standards for securing servers that must be followed contain nothing specific concerning virtual hosts and networks. Our auditor focused on guest virtual machines (VMs), ensuring they had up-to-date patches, locked-down security settings and current anti-virus definitions. But ironically, the host server that the virtual machines were running on went completely ignored. If the host server was compromised, it wouldn’t matter how secure the VMs were because they could be easily accessed. Host servers should always be securely locked down to protect the VMs which are running on them.

It seems that much of the IT industry has yet to react to the virtualization trend, having been slow in changing procedures to adjust to some of the unconventional concepts that virtualization introduces. When I told our auditor that the servers were virtual, the only thing he wanted to see was some documentation stating that the remote console sessions to the VMs were secure. It’s probably just a matter of time before specific requirements for virtual servers are introduced. In fact, a recent webinar takes up this issue of whether or not virtualized servers can be considered compliant, addressing section 2.2.1 of the PCI DSS which states, “Implement only one primary function per server”; that is to say, web servers, database servers and DNS should be implemented on separate servers. Virtual servers typically have many functions running on a single physical server, which would make them noncompliant.

So let’s assume that what Eric talks about in section 2.2.1 of PCI/DSS holds true, that basically means two things: (1) PCI/DSS intimates that virtualization cannot provide the same level of security as non-virtualized infrastructure and (2) you won’t be able to virtualize infrastructure governed by PCI/DSS if you expect to be compliant.

Now, this goes toward the stuff Mogull and I were talking about in terms of assessing risk and using the notion of "zone defense" for asset segmentation in virtualized infrastructure. 

Here’s a snippet from my VirtSec preso on the point:

Further, as I mentioned in my post titled "Risky Business — The Next Audit Cycle: Bellweather Test for Critical Production Virtualized Infrastructure," this next audit cycle is going to be interesting for many companies…

Yippeee!

/Hoff

My goal in the next couple of posts is to paint some little vignettes highlighting some of the more interesting points I raise in my presentation series "Virtualization: Floor Wax, Dessert Topping and the End Of Information Security As We Know It."

The first issue up for discussion is the need to recognize and separate two concerns which are unfortunately most often intertwined when companies are considering virtualization and its impact to their IT operations and security programs. 

My goal here is not to try and explain away every nuance of this slide or push a conclusion on anybody, but instead plant the seeds and set the premise for discussion’s sake.

The slide to the left sums up the point reasonably well, but here’s the associated scaled-down narrative that accompanies this slide:

Companies need to approach addressing each of these issues by assessing the risk associated with each separately and then juxtaposed.

Treating them as a single concern — as most do — leads to an unfortunate series of chicken-egg debates that usually do not address the things that really matter in the first place.

The point here is that while these concerns are very much related and both important, the order in which they are addressed is often critical.

Specifically, one can take an incredibly secure solution and yet still manage to deploy it in an incredibly insecure manner.  Even if the virtualization platform one chooses is (by some mythical standard) impervious to
compromise (*cough*,) given specific configuration constraints,
deviations from those constraints can lead to exposure.

If the manner in which virtualization platforms are configured, managed, monitored and secured after you’ve already deployed them are not consistent with the rigor and diligence we’ve applied to our non-virtualized infrastructure (and by observation they are not,) worrying about how secure or insecure your VMM platforms are is a waste of synaptic processes.

My experience has shown that most organizations have simply plowed ahead
and accepted or ignored the risk associated with deploying virtualization
platforms, accepting on blind faith the claims of virtualization vendors and assuming that the VMM providing the abstraction layer between
hardware and software is at least as secure (if not more so) as a non-virtualized installation of the operating system.

This is usually done because the economic benefits of virtualization which are absolutely quantifiable far outweigh the perceived risks associated with virtualization which are not (or are at least difficult to produce.)

I’m unsure how exactly most companies are assessing risk against their virtualized environments formally
since many of them admit to not having a risk assessment methodology in
place to do so.

It would seem that most folks simply look at the
known vulnerabilities associated with a vendor’s VMM and the current
threatscape and make a swag as to the resultant residual risk given any
compensating controls that might be in place.  In many cases, however, the "risk" we’re debating is based upon threats and vulnerabilities that may not even exist, so we’re academically making judgment calls based on possibility versus probability.

Yikes.

How many times have you entered into debate with *someone* in IT, security, audit or the business arguing about "securing virtualization" after someone’s seen a "Blue Pill" presentation when in all honestly the company has already deployed hundreds of VM’s and still hasn’t segmented the network or built a risk assessment framework to quantify the business impact?

See what I mean?

/Hoff

I had another post-RSA press release show up in my mailbox today from IBM again pitching their "…breakthrough research initiative from IBM X-Force and IBM Research,
code-named "Phantom", which offers businesses a new means of securing
virtualized server environments."

Besides the rumblings at RSA, I haven’t been briefed on this as of yet, but let’s explore what we have thus far, keeping it mind that this is described as an "initiative" and not a "product:"

At Phantom’s core is industry-leading network and host intrusion protection used to guard the virtual environment and the machines from the inside out. The new technology sits in a secure, isolated partition and integrates with the hypervisor – the layer of management software that coordinates calls between operating systems and computer hardware.

In this description, Phantom is confusingly framed more as a product/solution rather than an initiative and it gets a little fuzzy as to how this qualifies as integration with the hypervisor besides just sitting on top of it, but perhaps this is one of the secrets-in-stealth that defines the breakthroughs mentioned above or perhaps sadly yet another unfortunate translation from Klingon?

If one were to take a quick first-pass, it sounds like they’ve taken their software-based IBM/ISS IPS solution and turned it into a virtual appliance (that would be the "secure, isolated partition") that runs alongside the VM’s in a physical host?  This is basically what every other vendor on the planet is currently doing.  Integration with SiteProtector and interaction with the hardware-based physical appliances would make sense, too.

Playing futurist, in terms of the more broadly-reaching "initiative" angle, it might leverage some of the research IBM has already done on their secure hypervisor (sHype) or more appropriately rHype (which I believe is Xen-based) as well as the many other virtualization efforts they’ve hatched to date.

If IBM were going to commercialize this into productized offerings, besides supporting their own hypervisor(s) and virtualization platforms/operating systems first, I’d guess they would aim for supporting VMware first since that’s where the dollars are.  Or not.

IBM’s Phantom initiative aims to create virtualization security technology to efficiently monitor and disrupt malicious communications between virtual machines without being compromised. 

In addition, full visibility of virtual hardware resources would allow Phantom to monitor the execution state of virtual machines, protecting them against both known and unknown threats before they occur.

Roger.  Protect intra-vm traffic.  And because they can protect "…against both known and unknown threats before they occur" it’s psychic to boot! 😉

It is also designed to increase the security posture of the hypervisor – a critical point of vulnerability; because once an attacker gains control of the hypervisor, they gain control of all of machines running on the virtualized platform. For the first time, the hypervisor, the gateway to the virtualized world and all that lays above it, can be locked down.

I’m interested in this part because as most vendor’s pitches go, when one digs down deeper, what this really means is that *today* if one can control traffic between the VM’s which transit the vSwitch, one can potentially prevent a compromise of a VM leading to a launchpad for an attack on the hypervisor.

What’s confusing here is that despite the fact that most hypervisor platform providers consciously limit what is exposed (even in an abstracted state) by the hypervisor, vendors continue to insist that they are "integrated" with and will "lock down" the hypervisor itself.  We saw that in the dissection of the Catbird "HyperVisorShield" announcement I wrote about earlier.

Protecting the hypervisor today is really a by-product of protecting the VM’s.

Here’s another extract from additional coverage of Phantom:

Phantom is a joint effort between IBM’s X-Force threat analysis team and the company’s research division. It aims to lock down the hypervisor software that IBM systems use to manage virtual machines. "What we’re doing through Phantom is we’re implementing an IPS (intrusion prevention system)– an IPS that sits at the hypervisor layer," said Kris Lovejoy, director of strategy for IBM corporate security.
…
The researchers are also building tools that can lock down the hypervisor itself, Lovejoy added. "The hypervisor layer was built for optimum performance, not necessarily effective security," she said. "Our customers are just looking for assurance that their virtualized infrastructure is not going to be the single point of failure."

Aha!  See vendors in their press releases continue to reference THE hypervisor in a singular, monolithic manner that seems to imply that their solutions will protect and lockdown any and all hypervisors.  I know this point may not be lost on all people, but it’s become very difficult to figure out what many of these VirtSec products actually do and which platforms they support.

I think this last paragraph really intimates that in this case we’re talking about IBM’s hypervisor(s) — perhaps based upon sHype/rHype or other IBM virtualization platforms — at least at first.

I’m not knocking IBM or doubting their efforts as they’ve been at the virtualization game a long time and with the acquisition of ISS, they got a bunch of good talent and a decent product base.  I *am* just weary of claims that seem to apply research and "initiatives" in such broad strokes that it becomes difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Looking forward to learning more about Phantom.

/Hoff

[For those of you directed here for my Blackhat 2008 presentation of the same name, the slides will be posted with a narrative shortly.  This was the post that was the impetus for my preso.

If you’d like to see a "mini-me" video version of the presentation given right after my talk, check it out from Dark Reading here.  You’ll also notice this is quite different than Ellen Messmer’s version of what I presented…]

—

I’ve written and re-written this post about 10 times, trying to make it simpler and more concise.  It stems from my initial post on the matter of performance implications in virtualized security environments here.

After a convo with Ptacek today discussing the same for a related article he’s writing, I think I’ve been able to boil it down to somewhere near its essence. It’s still complex and unwieldy, but it’s the best I can do for now.

Short of the notions I’ve discussed previously regarding instantiating the vSwitches into hardware and loading physical servers with accelerators and offloaders for security functions, there aren’t a lot of people talking about this impending set of challenges or the solutions in the short or long term.

This should be cause for alarm.

These issues are nasty.  Combined with the organizational issues of who actually owns and manages "security" in the virtualized context, this stuff makes me want to curl up in a fetal position.

So here they are, the nasty little surprises awaiting us all carried forth by the four horsemen of the virtualization security apocalypse named conquest, war, famine and death:

• Virtualized Security Screws the Capacity Planning Pooch (Conquest)
• The Network Is the Compu…oh, crap.  Never mind, it’s broken. (Death)
• Episode 7: Revenge of the UTM.  Behold the vUTM! (War)
• Spinning VM straw into budgetary gold (Famine)

In order to ameliorate these shortcomings, we’re going to have to see some seriously different approaches and rapid acceleration of solution roadmaps.  There are some startups as well as established players all jockeying to solve one or more of these problems, but they’re not going to tell you about them because, quite frankly, they are difficult to describe and may cause TPOW syndrome (Temporary Purchase Order Withholding.)

So here they are in all their splendor.  The gifts of the four horsemen, just in time to pour salt in your virtualized wounds:

1. Virtualized Security Screws the Capacity Planning Pooch (Conquest)
   If we look at today’s most common implementation methodologies for deploying security in a virtualized environment, we end up recognizing that it comes down to two fundamental approaches: (a) install software/agents from the usual suspects in the VM’s or (b) deploy security functions as virtual appliances (VA) within the physical host.

   If we look at measuring performance overhead due to option (a) I wager we’d all have a reasonably easy time of measuring and calculating what the performance hit would be.  Further, monitoring is accomplished with the tools we have today. This is a per-VM impact that can be modeled across physical hosts and in response to overall system load. No real problem here.

   Now, if we look at option (b) which is the choice of almost all emerging solutions in the VirtSec space, the first horseman’s steed just took a crap on Main street. 

   For example, let’s say that we have one (or more — see #2 and #3 below) monolithic security VA whose job it is is to secure all traffic to and from external sources to any VM in the physical host as well as all intra-VM traffic.

   You see the problem, right?  Setting aside the notion of how much memory/CPU to allocate to the VA so as not to drop packets due to overload, capacity planning completely depends upon the traffic levels, the number of VM’s on the system (which can be dynamic,) the way the virtual and physical networks are configured (also dynamic) as well as the efficiency of the software/OS combo in the VA.  Lest we forget access to system buses, hardware and the tax that comes with virtualizing these solutions.

   The very real chance exists of either overrunning the VA and dropping packets which will lead to retransmissions, etc. or simply losing valuable landscape to add VM’s because the "extra" CPU/memory you thought you had is now allocated to the security VA…

   Measuring security VA performance is a crapshoot, too.  Sure there’s VMMark, but methinks that we already have enough crap floating about in how vendors measure performance of physical appliances whose resources they control.  Can you imagine the first marketing campaigns that are sure to be launched on the first 10Gb/s virtual appliance…Oh my.

2. The Network Is the Compu…oh, crap.  Never mind, it’s broken. (Death)
   Virtualization offers some fantastic benefits, not the least of which is the capability to provide for resilience and on-demand scalability/high-availability.  If a physical server is overloaded, one might automagically allow the VMotion of critical VM’s to other lighter-loaded physical hosts.  If a process/application/VM fails on one host, spin it back up somewhere else.  Great stuff.

   Except, we’ve got a real problem when we try to apply this dynamic portability to security applications running in VA’s.  Security applications are incredibly topology sensitive. For the most part, they expect the network configuration to remain static – interfaces, VLAN’s, MAC addies, routes, IP addresses of protected nodes, etc.  If you go moving security VA’s around, they may no longer be inline with the assets they protect!

   Further, the policies that define the ACL’s that govern the disposition of traffic also don’t grok.

   But wait, there’s more!

   Replicating certain operating conditions within a virtualized environment is going to be tricky when the VirtServer admins don’t have any idea of what VRRP and multicast MAC addies are (that the security applications depend upon) and how that might affect load balancing firewall cluster members within the same physical host.  Mutliwhat?

   An example might be that you want to implement high availability load balancing for a "cluster" of firewall VA’s within a single physical host so that you don’t have to VMotion an entire server’s worth of VM’s over to another if the security VA which is inline fails (we can address HA/LB across two physical hosts later.)  It’s going to be really interesting trying to replicate in a virtualized construct what we’ve spent years gluing together in the physical world: vSwitch behavior, port groups, NIC teaming, etc.

   Lastly, I’m skipping ahead a little and treading on issue #3 below, but if one were to deploy multiple security VA’s within a single physical host to provide the desired functionality across protected VM’s, how does one ensure that traffic flow is appropriately delivered to the correct VA’s at the correct time with the correct disposition reflected up and downstream?

   There are some really difficult challenges to overcome when
   attempting to "combine" security functions in-line with one another.
   In fact, this concept is what gave birth to UTM — combining multiple
   security functions into a single platform and optimize both the control
   effectiveness, simplify management and reduce cost.

   Most UTM vendors on the market either write their own security
   stacks and integrate them, take open source code and/or OEM additional
   technologies to present what is marketed as a single "engine" against
   which traffic is cracked once and inspected based upon intelligent
   classification.  Let’s just take that at face value…and with a
   healthy grain of salt.

   My last company, Crossbeam, took a different approach.  Crossbeam
   provides a network and (security) application virtualization platform (the
   X-Series security
   service switch) and allows an operator to combine a number of discrete
   third party ISV security solutions in software in specific serialized
   and parallelized processing order based upon policy. You pick the
   firewall, IPS, AV, AS, URL filter, WAF, etc. of your choosing and
   virtualize those combinations of functions across your network as a
   service layer.

   This is the same model I am trying to illustrate in the case of server virtualization with security VA’s except that the Crossbeam example utilizes an external proprietary chassis solution.

   Here’s an overly-simplified illustration of four security
   applications as deployed within an X-series: an IPS, IDS, firewall, web
   application firewall (WAF).  These applications are instantiated once
   in the system and virtualized across the network segments connected to
   them governed by policy:

   
   Note for the purpose of simplicity I’m showing a flow path from ingress
   to egress that is symmetrical.

   Technically, egress flows could
   actually take a different path through other software stacks which
   makes the notion of "state" and how you define it (via the "network" or
   the "application") pretty darn important.  I’m also leaving out the
   complexity of VLAN configurations in this example.

   What’s interesting here is that each of these applications can often
   be configured from a network perspective as a layer 2 or layer 3
   "device," so how the networking is configured and expects to be
   presented with traffic, act on it, and potentially pass it on is really
   important.  Ensuring that flows and state are appropriately directed to
   the correct security function and is presented in the correct "format"
   with low latency and high throughput is much easier said than done.

   Can you imagine trying to do this in a virtualized instance on a server across multiple security VA’s?  There’s really no control plane to effect this, no telemetry, and the vSwitch isn’t really designed as a fabric to provide much more than layer 2 connectivity.

   Fun for the entire family!  Kid tested, virtualization approved!

3. Episode 7: Revenge of the UTM.  Behold the vUTM! (War)
   "The farce is strong with this one…"  OK, so this is a dandy.  The models today that talk about VA installations position the deployment of a single security vendor’s VA solution.  What that means is combined with the issues raised in points (1) and (2) above, we’re sort of expecting to not embrace the best-of-breed approach and instead of deploying a CHKP firewall VA, an ISS IDP VA, a McAfee Anti-malware VA, etc., we’ll just deploy a single vendor’s monolithic security stack to service the entire physical host?

   Does this model sound familiar?  See #2 above.  Well, either you’re going to do that and realize that your security ultimately sucks harder than a Dyson or you’re going to do the nasty and start to deploy multiple vendor’s security VA’s in the same physical host.

   See the problem there?  Horseman #3 reminds you of the points already raised above.  You’re going to be adding security VA’s which takes away the capacity to add valuable VM’s dynamically:
   

   
   …and then you’re going to have to deal with the issues in #2 above.  Or, you’ll just settle for "good enough" and deploy what amounts to a single UTM VA and be done with it.  Until it runs out of steam or you get your butt handed to you on a plate when you’re pwned.

   You could plumb in a Crossbeam or even less complex single-vendor appliance solutions, but then you’re going to find yourself playing ping-pong with traffic in and out of each VM, through the physical NICs, and in/out of the appliances.  Latency is going to kill you.  Saturation of the pipe is going to kill you.  Your virtual server admin is going to kill you, especially since he won’t have the foggiest idea of what the hell you’re going on about.

   Further, if you’re thinking VMsafe’s going to save you trouble in either #2 or #3, it ain’t.  VMsafe sets its hooks on a per VM basis and then redirects to a VA/VM within each physical host.  It’s settings in the first release are quite coarse and you can’t make API calls outside of the physical hosts, so the "redirects" to external appliances won’t work.  Even if they did, there’s no control plane to deal with the "serialization" I demonstrate above.

4. Spinning VM straw into budgetary gold (Famine)
   By this point you probably recognize that you’re going to be deploying the same old security  software/agents to each VM and then adding at least one VA to each physical host, and probably more.  Also, you’re likely not going to do away with the hardware-based versions of these appliances on the physical networks.

   That also means you’re going to be adding additional monitoring points on the network and who is going to do that?  The network team?  The security team?  The, gulp, virtual server admin team?

   What does this mean?  With all this consolidation, you’re going to end up spending MORE on security in a virtualized world instead of less.

There is lots of effort going on to try to force-fit entire existing markets of solutions in order to squeeze a little more life out of investments made in products, but expect some serious pain in the short term because you’re going to be dealing with all of this for the next couple of years for sure.

I hope this has opened your eyes to some of the challenges we’re going to face moving forward.

Finally, let us solemnly remember that:

Joanna Rutkowska took the time to respond to my "open letter" that I wrote this weekend regarding her presentation at RSA.  I truly appreciate that.  It was a little barbed, but so was mine, but all’s fair in love and blogging.

I chortled, however, when I realized that I was deserved of a response only for the following reasons:

1) technorati.com reported the blog’s authority as above 100 which suggests it has a reasonable number of readers, and also

2) because I believe this is a good example of the social engineering techniques used by my opponents

I just about coughed my latte through my nose when I read that.

Just to be clear, Joanna, I’m not an "opponent" and despite your assertions, I don’t provide PR services for anyone.  I *do* however rather like the fact that you’ve anointed me with the madly-133t-skillz of a social engineer. 😉

Let me make it perfectly clear (because I don’t think I have) that I find your research incredibly interesting and your work compelling.  What I question is the relevancy across use cases and the way in which you choose to present it.  This is despite your bemoaning to the contrary, the way in which you surrender your words to the fates (i.e. the press) and seem powerless to be able to ensure what you said is printed in context accurately. 

Rather than continue the enthralling debate regarding the vagaries of municipal fire codes, let me get to the meat of the redress which is what I focused on in the first place: what you said and what you may have meant to say are two different things, Joanna.

To wit:

2. Type I vs. Type II hypervisors confusion.

Hoff then switches to the actual content of the presentation and writes this:
“When I spoke to you at the end of your presentation and made sure that I understood correctly that you were referring specifically to type-2 hosted virtualization on specific Intel and AMD chipsets, you conceded that this was the case.”

This simply is an incorrect statement! On the contrary, when describing the security implications of nested virtualization (which was the actual new thing I was presenting at the RSA), I explicitly gave an example of how this could be used to compromise type I hypervisors. Kindly refer to slides 85-90 of my presentation that can be downloaded here.

I said that the code we posted on bluepillproject.org indeed targets type II hypervisors and the only reason for that being that it has been built on top of our New Blue Pill code that was designed as a Windows kernel driver.

This is exactly why I and a couple of other folks came up to speak with you at the end of your talk.  It was not at all clear as to which case you were referring.  I humbly accept the responsibility for a lack of cognition here.  When I sought that clarification, you specifically answered as I mention above which confirmed my understanding.  To that end, the gentleman behind me responded "Yeah, that’s what I wanted to ask, too" and thanked you for the clarification.  Now you’re suggesting that what we heard was not what you said…

3. Shit not giving. Mr. Hoff goes even further:

“When I attempted to suggest that while really interesting and intriguing, your presentation was not only confusing to many people but also excluded somewhere north of 80% of how most adopters have deployed virtualization (type-1 "bare-metal" vs. type-2 hosted) as well as excluding the market-leading virtualization platform, your response (and I quote directly) was: I don’t give a shit, I’m a researcher.”

Now that was a hard blow! I understand that the usage of such a slang expression by an Eastern European female during an informal conversation with a native speaker must have made an impression on him! However, I couldn’t give such an answer to this very question, simply because of the reasons given in point #2 (see above).

I don’t care whether you’re an "Eastern European female" or a cross-dressing circus clown from Bolivia.  What does concern me is that first you suggest that your making that statement must have been shocking to me and then you immediately maintain you didn’t say it…and you throw in the gender card!  Nice.

Joanna, your dismissal using this exact phrasing is exactly what got me riled up.  Your dishonesty and/or confusion about what you said and what you think you said is the entire point you’re missing…except hysterically you claim you are a victim of the very issue I highlight:

So, then Hoff quotes the Forbes article that was written after my presentation and accuses me that the article (written by some Forbes reporter) was too sensationalist. I definitely agree the article was very sensationalist (but correct) and when I saw the article I even got angry and even wanted to write a blog about it (but as the article was actually correct, I had no good arguments to use against it).

And you know why I was so angry? Because I actually spent over 40 minutes with this very Forbes reporter in the RSA’s speaker’s lounge just after my speech, I spent that time on clarifying to that guy what my presentation was about and what it was not about and what was the main message of the presentation. Still, the reporter had his own vision of how to write about it (i.e. make it into a sensation) and I hardly, as it turned out, could do anything about it…

Perhaps the fault is ours, but perhaps you should accept some of the responsibility here, too?  If you continue to be misunderstood, misquoted, and misrepresented, perhaps it has something more to do with than the fact that your intellect is "…too technical for an average CISSP to understand it?"  Perhaps you are hard to understand?  Perhaps you don’t do a good job of explaining?  Perhaps the language gap is confusing things?

Look, I find the following assertion really interesting, and had you allowed me to ask the question, would have loved to have discussed it with you further:

"Keep[ing] hypervisors simple, do not put drivers there, as otherwise we would get to the same point where we are with current OSes these days, i.e. no kernel security at all!”

…but I didn’t get a chance to.  I actually resonate with your assertion.  I didn’t bring it up because that’s not what I had a problem with.

Finally, to your closing point:

Now I wonder, maybe Christofer Hoff doesn’t do PR for any VMM vendor, maybe he just didn’t listen carefully to my presentation. Maybe he’s just one of those many guys who always know in advance what they want to hear and selectively pick up only those facts that match their state of mind? Otherwise, why would he not realize that my presentation was actually a pro-virtualization one and needed no (false) counter-arguments?

Sigh.

I came to your presentation the way I do to every other I attend.  With an open mind, open ears and a closed mouth.  I listened carefully, was confused by what I thought were contradictory statements between your slides and what you were saying and sought clarification.  Upon clarification and subsequent condescending dismissal, I closed my mouth and my ears and formed my conclusion based upon your response.

Perhaps you’ll use this as an opportunity to reflect upon how you present and interact with people.  Perhaps you won’t.  I know I will.  Either way, I appreciate your research and your response to my "letter."

/Hoff

I’m going to highlight a prediction I had on a forthcoming security
offering from yet-to-be-named security solution providers for
virtualized environments as well as something I overheard at RSA.

In the next few days, I’m going to be releasing my post on the
evolution of some really concerning performance and configuration
limitations of security solutions in virtualized environments and this
will make a lot more sense, but until then, grok this…

Here’s Item #1 – Return of the Big, Honkin’ NIC Card…

Remember back when 3Com released this little beauty?

3Com® 10/100 Secure Server NIC
 

Server IPSec and 3DES Encryption at Wire Speeds
 

The 3Com® 10/100 Secure Server NIC is custom-designed for servers that
demand high performance and end-to-end security. Its onboard security
processor works with Windows 2000 or XP to offload key processing
tasks, reducing the load imposed on the CPU.

It never really took off and has long since been discontinued, but
here’s where I reckon we’re going to see a rebirth (like bellbottoms)
of something similar from security vendors, either as a NIC or an
offload card sitting in the virtual host.

In a virtualized server, most of the emerging security solutions are
going to take the form of agents/applications running in VM’s or as
virtual appliances in the host.  This is all going to be run in
software, with limitations on memory, CPU and I/O.  Imagine every flow
whether inter-host or intra-VM having to bounce back and forth across
the vSwitch and the security functions in software.

Ugh.

Despite API’s like VMsafe, which allow for hooks on a per-VM basis to
"redirect" traffic to a VM/VA for disposition in software, imagine if
instead of just having IPSec on a NIC, we also had DPI, firewall, IDP,
AV and other security functions also.

Rather than doing all of this stuff in software, the
agents/applications or virtual appliances could offload or allow the
hardware to perform them on their behalf.  This could take the form of
FPGA’s or custom silicon like Cavium’s multi-core Octeon security
processors.

This is where the argument of "hey, all we need is COTS multicore hardware to scale" simply falls apart.

It’s not at all an original idea, as we’ve had offload/acceleration cards in appliances/’servers for a long time, but when the performance and
configuration limitations of virtual hosts arise, I predict we’ll see these things crop
up as a "solution" that is "new." 😉

Here’s item #2 – Bait and (Virtual) Switch

I’ve talked previously about virtualization platform providers like VMware ultimately providing a way of modularizing/isolating the vSwitch functionality in the VMM and allowing third parties to instantiate their own vSwitch instead. 

Further, I’ve written about how I/O virtualization is likely to change the way and where the virtual networking is performed. 

Intel is rumored (was this news at RSA, I can’t tell?) to be taking
another approach which is that they intend to embed the vSwitch
functionality directly into the underlying CPU chipsets.  This makes the vSwitch not so much ‘v’ (virtual) any longer.
You’ll have the network switching fabric and functions in the CPU itself.

I’m sure that if Intel is considering this, then AMD would not be far behind.

Thus some version of an upcoming CPU would provide this capability
natively, interfacing with the NIC card (or the super NIC above) and
the VMM.  This brings up some really interesting questions, no?

More later.

/Hoff

Dear Joanna:

I attended your session at the RSA conference last week titled "Security Challenges in Virtualized Environments" and was compelled to write you given our debate which you ended somewhat abruptly at the conclusion of your presentation.

Before I start in on the meat of the topic, I’m going to do what you seem to continue NOT to do.  Specifically, I am going to make clear certain disclosures and frame the context of this note in a way that I hope everyone can understand.

Sadly, there will not be an accompanying eight-slide melange of virtual machine state transitions, mention of TLB misses, GIF0 emulation or ASID conflicts…

Back to your presentation.

As the room filled to over capacity before your talk began, you were upset and couldn’t seem to understand why the conference organizers would not let people spill over from seats and sit on the floor and in the aisles to hear you speak.  The fact that fire and safety codes prohibit packing a room beyond capacity was something you attributed to people being "…crazy in America."  Go figure.

So let me further raise your ire by introducing you to another crazy American rule of law that is somewhat related: we don’t think it’s a good idea to yell "fire!" in a crowded theater, either.

What does this have to do with your presentation?  It’s quite simple actually.   I think that the way in which you are presenting your research is intentionally designed to be sensational first and concise and accurately portrayed a distant last.

During your presentation at RSA and throughout other presentations,
you have illustrated how your research featuring Blue Pill technology affects hardware-based type-2 hosted virtualized environments rather than type-1 bare-metal installs.

In many cases, given the depth and complexity of your presentations,
less experienced audience members and members of the press have
completely confused or overlooked this distinction and left your presentation thinking that your research and your testing applies directly and unequivocally to both environments, despite the fact that you continue to highlight Microsoft’s Vista desktop operating system as your test case.

When I spoke to you at the end of your presentation and made sure
that I understood correctly that you were referring specifically to type-2 hosted virtualization on specific Intel and AMD chipsets, you conceded that this was the case.

When I attempted to suggest that while really interesting and intriguing, your presentation was not only confusing to many people but also excluded somewhere north of 80% of how most adopters have deployed virtualization (type-1 "bare-metal" vs. type-2 hosted) as well as excluding the market-leading virtualization platform, your response (and I quote directly) was:

"I don’t give a shit, I’m a researcher."

So my problem with that answer is three-fold Joanna:

• As a researcher who is also actively courting publicity for commercial gain and speaking at
  conferences like RSA which are less technical and more "executive" in
  nature, you have a responsibility to clarify and not obfuscate
  (intentionally or otherwise) the facts surrounding your research.
  Allowing the continued sensationalized coverage of your research
  without clarification is not allowing concerned people to make clearly
  informed decisions regarding risk.

• No less than five times during your presentation, you highlighted marketing material in the form of graphics from Phoenix, positioned their upcoming products and announced/credited both Phoenix and AMD as funding your research. 

  Further, there have been announcements suggesting that Phoenix is looking to commercialize Blue Pill not as a rootkit but as an "ultra-thin" hypervisor.  This makes it hard to decide where the breakpoint between your "research" versus their "commercial" begins.

• Continuing to openly and negatively disparage those who seek to challenge your assertions is unprofessional.  Certainly you can disagree with them, but regardless of their approach or attitude, the continued pejorative nature of your rebuttals is getting stale. 

I think it’s only fair to point out that given your performance, you’re not only an "independent researcher" but more so an "independent contractor."  Using the "I’m a researcher" excuse doesn’t cut it.

I know it’s subtle and lots of folks are funded by third parties, but they also do a much better job of drawing the line than you do.

Despite your position on the matter and unlike you, I do give a shit, Joanna.  I care very much that your research as presented to the press and at conferences like RSA isn’t only built to be understood by highly skilled technicians or researchers because the continued thrashing that they generate without recourse is doing more harm than good, quite frankly.

Now, I know you can’t control the press or what they print, but you certainly don’t seem to invest much in terms of ensuring accuracy or clarifying the corner cases you’re talking about.  Here’s an example from a Forbes article based upon your RSA presentation:

At the security industry’s big annual confab, the RSA Conference, going on this week in San Francisco, security researcher Joanna Rutkowska described a new type of virtualization-based malware that could be used to take control of a machine running virtualization software. Because virtualization allows companies to store many virtualized software "images" of computers on a single physical machine, an attack like the one Rutkowska envisions would allow a hacker not only to control a single machine but to siphon data from any virtual machine it contains.

Rutkowska, the founder of security research firm Invisible Things Lab, in Warsaw, Poland, isn’t the first to target virtualization as a weak point in the emerging IT landscape. In the past few months, security researchers have revealed bugs in practically every piece of virtualization software, including products from virtualization heavyweights VMware (nyse: VMW – news – people ) and Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT – news – people ).

Exploiting those bugs, attackers can use what researchers call "virtual machine escape," or "hyperjacking." By taking control of the hypervisor, the piece of software that controls all the virtual computers within a machine, an attacker can "escape" from any single virtual computer hosted on the machine and quickly multiply his or her access to a company’s data.

But the attack Rutkowska outlined goes even further: she described how an intruder could install what she calls a "blue pill," a second, malicious hypervisor that controls the original hypervisor and all of the virtual machines beneath it. Examining any PC or server hosted on the machine, it would appear that the machines were hosted normally by a hypervisor, but, she argues, it would be tough to detect another hidden hypervisor intercepting data or manipulating the virtualized computers.

"When you use virtualization to build malware, there are no hooks, nothing you can see within an operating system," she says.

So this reporter walked away from your presentation and basically represents — like every other reporter I have seen — that every virtualization platform is covered under your research and is susceptible to attack regardless of chipset, operating system or application, a fact that you already conceded during our short exchange as not being the case.  Do you not see how this can be confusing?

In this scenario, I can personally attest that Fortune 100 companies deploying VMware ESX 3i are unable to determine whether they are at risk or not.  You could certainly take the low-road and blame this on those interpreting your presentations this way, or perhaps recognize that this could be a direct result of your efforts.

Despite the fascinating research, I’m really disappointed in how you choose to continue to allow inaccurate representation of your research to continue unabated.  Instead of inflammatory, sensational and inaccurate portrayals, you could instead be really helping to educate the world in a way not dependent on fear, uncertainty and doubt.

I look forward to your next presentation.  I just hope it’s more accurately tempered next time so as not to cause the figurative stampede from the theater when there’s actually no fire.

/Hoff

Update: Joanna responded here.  I retorted playing ping to her pong here.  Enjoy.

Yes, I know it’s April, but I couldn’t get this all done in March, damnit.

Per the promise in my last driveby-post featuring Montego Networks, here’s a quick bit of insight regarding Altor Networks, another start-up recently out of stealth in the virtualization security space.

I spent some time with Amir Ben-Efraim, Altor’s CEO.  I  knew Amir from our days working together when he was at Check Point and I was at Crossbeam.

Amir has brought forward what he learned from his time served at CHKP and understands the gaps between how the current crop of security toolsets fall short in virtualized environments.

Altor’s solution called "Virtual Network Security Analyzer" is the company’s initial offering which is billed as providing the following functionality:

Altor’s Virtual Network Security Analyzer (VNSA) delivers unprecedented, granular, real-time, and historical visibility into the virtual switch traffic.

Built from the scratch for the virtual environment, VNSA’s integration with virtualization platform management like VMware Virtual Center greatly simplifies product configuration.

VNSA has two main components as shown in the diagram:

Altor Agent – The Altor Agent plugs-into the virtual switch and passively monitors the virtual switch traffic. Only one Altor Agent is needed per physical server.

Altor Center – Information from multiple Altor Agents is consolidated by the Altor Center giving administrators a centralized view of the virtualized data center.

Altor Agent and Center are delivered as virtual appliances ensuring installation and uninstallation with zero downtime.

When Amir and I first spoke, I had trouble understanding how the product differentiates itself from "legacy" competitors in the IDS/monitoring space as well as those emerging in the VirtSec space.   So we dug appropriately one layer down.

Many of the emerging VirtSec companies are hitching their ponies to the "we protect against intra-vm abuse" barn and given the current constraints around the underlying networking mechanics, there’s not a lot of differentiation therein until VMsafe arrives which ultimately levels the playing field for everyone.

So one has to ask that if the mechanics of intercepting and inspecting traffic are fairly commoditized, what’s the secret sauce that makes a solution a better mousetrap? 

With Montego — at least for the next 6 months or so until VMsafe arrives — it’s the partnering model of integrating other 3rd party security applications based upon intelligent classification; if it sees traffic that matches a particular profile, it applies some level of security "magic" natively and then ships it off to vendor A’s virtual appliance, etc…

So when looking for Altor’s secret sauce, the reality is that VNSA is actually much more of a network configuration, analytics and policy management solution; it is really focused in it’s first iteration on detection/monitoring and understanding how the virtual switches and virtual machines are configured and profiling what traffic is flowing between them via integration with VMware’s Policy Center.

The product differentiates itself by first focusing on re-capturing the lost network-based visibility inherent in the current vSwitch architectures but does so from a unique perspective. 

Rather than position VNSA as a pure "security" tool focused on prevention, it’s an operational tool meant to shed light on questions which are seldom easily answered regarding exactly what is going on in the vSwitch, the dependencies from a VM perspective, the interaction from a network perspective, and allowing operators to group applications and assets into a hierarchical management framework that allows policies to be attached to them.

Namely, VNSA provides a single pane of glass from which a server, network or security admin. can capture not only how the vSwitch and VM’s are configured from the virtual infrastructure perspective, but also regain network statistics, troubleshooting, optimization and standardization views into the vNet.

Now that the servers, networking and security are all collapsed as a function of virtualization and the network and security teams are somewhat at odds as to where the boundary and separation of duties exist and who is responsible for what, VNSA offers all a single tidy view.  The web-based UI is quite nice and easy to use.  I found the statistics and insight it provides as decent for a first-run product and I can see how operators will gain value quickly given the information one can extract.

As the product evolves, security and configuration policies will be "attached" to the VM’s based upon VM ID’s that will allow enforcement of policy regardless of which physical host houses them.   Application detection capabilities beyond port will ultimately allow for even more automated app. grouping and application of policy.

The next step is then the more prevention-focused capabilities which will allow the same profiling of traffic from VNSA to be used as the intelligent basis for selective "firewalling" of traffic between VM’s based upon historically observed behavior.  This will be accomplished via the second product coming later this year tentatively called "Virtual Network Firewall."

I do hope they drop the "firewall" moniker and use something else as I know that depending upon who they’re selling to, mentioning the "f word" could cause some to turn off to the idea before they even consider it…

I think the approach and implementation is well thought out.  I think that the solution will appeal to the server admins who need to gain as much visibility about the virtual network configuration as well as the network and security teams who have lost context and visibility.

I’ll leave the more technical review up to Scott Lowe who is promising to give us the in-depth exploration of VNSA soon.

Next up, Blue Lane’s new solutions…