Files
openstack-manuals/doc/security-guide/ch051_vss-intro.xml
Andreas Jaeger aceec15371 Edits on Security Guide
Better follow conventions, especially:
* remove Latinism like via and i.e.
* use variable lists
* Add missing <filename>
* wrap long lines

Change-Id: I2a537df78ddf4fbeb127b058bf05caaf42441d5f
2014-05-12 23:22:48 -04:00

698 lines
32 KiB
XML

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE chapter [
<!ENTITY % openstack SYSTEM "../common/entities/openstack.ent">
%openstack;
]>
<chapter xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"
xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"
xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook" version="5.0"
xml:id="ch051_vss-intro">
<?dbhtml stop-chunking?>
<title>Hypervisor selection</title>
<para>Virtualization provides flexibility and other key benefits
that enable cloud building. However, a virtualization stack must
also be secured appropriately to reduce the risks associated with
hypervisor breakout attacks. That is, while a virtualization stack
can provide isolation between instances, or guest virtual
machines, that isolation can be less than perfect in some
situations. Making intelligent selections for virtualization stack
as well as following the best practices outlined in this chapter
can be included in a layered approach to cloud security. Finally,
securing your virtualization stack is critical to deliver on the
promise of multi-tenant, either between customers in a public
cloud, between business units in a private cloud, or some mixture
of the two in a hybrid cloud.</para>
<para>This chapter discusses the hypervisor selection process. The
chapters that follow provide foundational information needed for
securing a virtualization stack.</para>
<section xml:id="ch051_vss-intro-idp236592">
<title>Hypervisors in OpenStack</title>
<para>Whether OpenStack is deployed within private data centers or
as a public cloud service, the underlying virtualization
technology provides enterprise-level capabilities in the realms
of scalability, resource efficiency, and uptime. While such
high-level benefits are generally available across many
OpenStack-supported hypervisor technologies, there are
significant differences in the security architecture and
features for each hypervisor, particularly when considering the
security threat vectors which are unique to elastic OpenStack
environments. As applications consolidate into single
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platforms, instance isolation
at the hypervisor level becomes paramount. The requirement for
secure isolation holds true across commercial, government, and
military communities.</para>
<para>Within the OpenStack framework, you can choose among many
hypervisor platforms and corresponding OpenStack plug-ins to
optimize your cloud environment. In the context of this guide,
hypervisor selection considerations are highlighted as they
pertain to feature sets that are critical to security. However,
these considerations are not meant to be an exhaustive
investigation into the pros and cons of particular hypervisors.
NIST provides additional guidance in Special Publication
800-125, "<emphasis>Guide to Security for Full Virtualization
Technologies</emphasis>".</para>
</section>
<section xml:id="ch051_vss-intro-idp242144">
<title>Selection criteria</title>
<para>As part of your hypervisor selection process, you must
consider a number of important factors to help increase your
security posture. Specifically, you must become familiar with
these areas:</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>Team expertise</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Product or project maturity</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Common criteria</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Certifications and attestations</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Hardware concerns</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Hypervisor vs. baremetal</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Additional security features</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<para>Additionally, the following security-related criteria are
highly encouraged to be evaluated when selecting a hypervisor
for OpenStack deployments:</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>Has the hypervisor undergone Common Criteria
certification? If so, to what levels?</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Is the underlying cryptography certified by a
third-party?</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<section xml:id="team_expertise">
<title>Team expertise</title>
<para>Most likely, the most important aspect in hypervisor
selection is the expertise of your staff in managing and
maintaining a particular hypervisor platform. The more
familiar your team is with a given product, its configuration,
and its eccentricities, the fewer the configuration mistakes.
Additionally, having staff expertise spread across an
organization on a given hypervisor increases availability of
your systems, allows segregation of duties, and mitigates
problems in the event that a team member is
unavailable.</para>
</section>
<section xml:id="ch051_vss-intro-idp252752">
<title>Product or project maturity</title>
<para>The maturity of a given hypervisor product or project is
critical to your security posture as well. Product maturity
has a number of effects once you have deployed your
cloud:</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>Availability of expertise</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Active developer and user communities</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Timeliness and availability of updates</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Incidence response</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<para>One of the biggest indicators of a hypervisor's maturity
is the size and vibrancy of the community that surrounds it.
As this concerns security, the quality of the community
affects the availability of expertise if you need additional
cloud operators. It is also a sign of how widely deployed the
hypervisor is, in turn leading to the battle readiness of any
reference architectures and best practices.</para>
<para>Further, the quality of community, as it surrounds an open
source hypervisor like KVM or Xen, has a direct impact on the
timeliness of bug fixes and security updates. When
investigating both commercial and open source hypervisors, you
must look into their release and support cycles as well as the
time delta between the announcement of a bug or security issue
and a patch or response. Lastly, the supported capabilities of
OpenStack compute vary depending on the hypervisor chosen. See
the <link
xlink:href="https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/HypervisorSupportMatrix"
>OpenStack Hypervisor Support Matrix</link> for OpenStack
compute feature support by hypervisor.</para>
</section>
<section xml:id="ch051_vss-intro-idp260720">
<title>Certifications and attestations</title>
<para>One additional consideration when selecting a hypervisor
is the availability of various formal certifications and
attestations. While they may not be requirements for your
specific organization, these certifications and attestations
speak to the maturity, production readiness, and thoroughness
of the testing a particular hypervisor platform has been
subjected to.</para>
</section>
<section xml:id="ch051_vss-intro-idp262672">
<title>Common criteria</title>
<para>Common Criteria is an internationally standardized
software evaluation process, used by governments and
commercial companies to validate software technologies perform
as advertised. In the government sector, NSTISSP No. 11
mandates that U.S. Government agencies only procure software
which has been Common Criteria certified, a policy which has
been in place since July 2002. It should be specifically noted
that OpenStack has not undergone Common Criteria
certification, however many of the available hypervisors
have.</para>
<para>In addition to validating a technologies capabilities, the
Common Criteria process evaluates <emphasis>how</emphasis>
technologies are developed.</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>How is source code management performed?</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>How are users granted access to build systems?</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Is the technology cryptographically signed before
distribution?</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<para>The KVM hypervisor has been Common Criteria certified
through the U.S. Government and commercial distributions,
which have been validated to separate the runtime environment
of virtual machines from each other, providing foundational
technology to enforce instance isolation. In addition to
virtual machine isolation, KVM has been Common Criteria
certified to</para>
<blockquote>
<para>"<emphasis>provide system-inherent separation mechanisms
to the resources of virtual machines. This separation
ensures that large software component used for
virtualizing and simulating devices executing for each
virtual machine cannot interfere with each other. Using
the SELinux multi-category mechanism, the virtualization
and simulation software instances are isolated. The
virtual machine management framework configures SELinux
multi-category settings transparently to the
administrator</emphasis>"</para>
</blockquote>
<para>While many hypervisor vendors, such as Red Hat, Microsoft,
and VMWare have achieved Common Criteria Certification their
underlying certified feature set differs. It is recommended to
evaluate vendor claims to ensure they minimally satisfy the
following requirements:</para>
<informaltable rules="all" width="80%">
<colgroup>
<col/>
<col/>
</colgroup>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><para>Identification and Authentication</para></td>
<td><para>Identification and authentication using
pluggable authentication modules (PAM) based upon user
passwords. The quality of the passwords used can be
enforced through configuration options.</para></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><para>Audit</para></td>
<td><para>The system provides the capability to audit a
large number of events including individual system
calls as well as events generated by trusted
processes. Audit data is collected in regular files in
ASCII format. The system provides a program for the
purpose of searching the audit
records.</para><para>The system administrator can
define a rule base to restrict auditing to the events
they are interested in. This includes the ability to
restrict auditing to specific events, specific users,
specific objects or a combination of all of
this.</para><para>Audit records can be transferred to
a remote audit daemon.</para></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><para>Discretionary Access Control</para></td>
<td>
<para>Discretionary Access Control
(<glossterm>DAC</glossterm>) restricts access to
file system objects based on <glossterm
baseform="access control list">Access Control
Lists</glossterm> (ACLs) that include the standard
UNIX permissions for user, group and others. Access
control mechanisms also protect IPC objects from
unauthorized access.</para>
<para>The system includes the ext4 file system, which
supports POSIX ACLs. This allows defining access
rights to files within this type of file system down
to the granularity of a single user.</para>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><para>Mandatory Access Control</para></td>
<td><para>Mandatory Access Control (MAC) restricts access
to objects based on labels assigned to subjects and
objects. Sensitivity labels are automatically attached
to processes and objects. The access control policy
enforced using these labels is derived from the
BellLaPadula access control model.</para><para>SELinux
categories are attached to virtual machines and its
resources. The access control policy enforced using
these categories grant virtual machines access to
resources if the category of the virtual machine is
identical to the category of the accessed
resource.</para><para>The TOE implements
non-hierarchical categories to control access to
virtual machines.</para></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><para>Role-Based Access Control</para></td>
<td><para>Role-based access control (RBAC) allows
separation of roles to eliminate the need for an
all-powerful system administrator.</para></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><para>Object Reuse</para></td>
<td><para>File system objects and memory and IPC objects
are cleared before they can be reused by a process
belonging to a different user.</para></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><para>Security Management</para></td>
<td><para>The management of the security critical
parameters of the system is performed by
administrative users. A set of commands that require
root privileges (or specific roles when RBAC is used)
are used for system management. Security parameters
are stored in specific files that are protected by the
access control mechanisms of the system against
unauthorized access by users that are not
administrative users.</para></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><para>Secure Communication</para></td>
<td><para>The system supports the definition of trusted
channels using SSH. Password based authentication is
supported. Only a restricted number of cipher suites
are supported for those protocols in the evaluated
configuration.</para></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><para>Storage Encryption</para></td>
<td><para>The system supports encrypted block devices to
provide storage confidentiality via
dm_crypt.</para></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><para>TSF Protection</para></td>
<td><para>While in operation, the kernel software and data
are protected by the hardware memory protection
mechanisms. The memory and process management
components of the kernel ensure a user process cannot
access kernel storage or storage belonging to other
processes.</para><para>Non-kernel TSF software and
data are protected by DAC and process isolation
mechanisms. In the evaluated configuration, the
reserved user ID root owns the directories and files
that define the TSF configuration. In general, files
and directories containing internal TSF data, such as
configuration files and batch job queues, are also
protected from reading by DAC
permissions.</para><para>The system and the hardware
and firmware components are required to be physically
protected from unauthorized access. The system kernel
mediates all access to the hardware mechanisms
themselves, other than program visible CPU instruction
functions.</para><para>In addition, mechanisms for
protection against stack overflow attacks are
provided.</para></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</informaltable>
</section>
<section xml:id="ch051_vss-intro-idp324896">
<title>Cryptography standards</title>
<para>Several cryptography algorithms are available within
OpenStack for identification and authorization, data transfer
and protection of data at rest. When selecting a hypervisor,
the following are recommended algorithms and implementation
standards to ensure the virtualization layer supports:</para>
<informaltable rules="all" width="80%">
<colgroup>
<col/>
<col/>
<col/>
<col/>
<col/>
</colgroup>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Algorithm</th>
<th>Key length</th>
<th>Intended purpose</th>
<th>Security function</th>
<th>Implementation standard</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>AES</td>
<td>128, 192, or 256 bits</td>
<td>Encryption / decryption</td>
<td>Protected data transfer, protection for data at
rest</td>
<td>RFC 4253</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>TDES</td>
<td>168 bits</td>
<td>Encryption / decryption</td>
<td>Protected data transfer</td>
<td>RFC 4253</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>RSA</td>
<td>1024, 2048, or 3072 bits</td>
<td>Authentication, key exchange</td>
<td>Identification and authentication, protected
data transfer</td>
<td>U.S. NIST FIPS PUB 186-3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>DSA</td>
<td>L=1024, N=160 bits</td>
<td>Authentication, key exchange</td>
<td>Identification and authentication, protected
data transfer</td>
<td>U.S. NIST FIPS PUB 186-3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Serpent</td>
<td>128, 192, or 256 bits</td>
<td>Encryption / decryption</td>
<td>Protection of data at rest</td>
<td><link
xlink:href="http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/serpent.pdf"
>http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/serpent.pdf</link></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Twofish</td>
<td>128, 192, or 256 bit</td>
<td>Encryption / decryption</td>
<td>Protection of data at rest</td>
<td><link
xlink:href="http://www.schneier.com/paper-twofish-paper.html"
>http://www.schneier.com/paper-twofish-paper.html</link></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>SHA-1</td>
<td>-</td>
<td>Message Digest</td>
<td>Protection of data at rest, protected data
transfer</td>
<td>U.S. NIST FIPS 180-3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>SHA-2 (224, 256, 384, or 512 bits)</td>
<td>-</td>
<td>Message Digest</td>
<td>Protection for data at rest, identification and
authentication</td>
<td>U.S. NIST FIPS 180-3</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</informaltable>
<section xml:id="ch051_vss-intro-idp362768">
<title>FIPS 140-2</title>
<para>In the United States the National Institute of Science
and Technology (NIST) certifies cryptographic algorithms
through a process known the Cryptographic Module Validation
Program. NIST certifies algorithms for conformance against
Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2 (FIPS 140-2),
which ensures:</para>
<blockquote>
<para><emphasis>Products validated as conforming to FIPS
140-2 are accepted by the Federal agencies of both
countries [United States and Canada] for the protection
of sensitive information (United States) or Designated
Information (Canada). The goal of the CMVP is to promote
the use of validated cryptographic modules and provide
Federal agencies with a security metric to use in
procuring equipment containing validated cryptographic
modules.</emphasis></para>
</blockquote>
<para>When evaluating base hypervisor technologies, consider
if the hypervisor has been certified against FIPS 140-2. Not
only is conformance against FIPS 140-2 mandated per U.S.
Government policy, formal certification indicates that a
given implementation of a cryptographic algorithm has been
reviewed for conformance against module specification,
cryptographic module ports and interfaces; roles, services,
and authentication; finite state model; physical security;
operational environment; cryptographic key management;
electromagnetic interference/electromagnetic compatibility
(EMI/EMC); self-tests; design assurance; and mitigation of
other attacks.</para>
</section>
</section>
<section xml:id="ch051_vss-intro-idp367552">
<title>Hardware concerns</title>
<para>Further, when you evaluate a hypervisor platform, consider
the supportability of the hardware on which the hypervisor
will run. Additionally, consider the additional features
available in the hardware and how those features are supported
by the hypervisor you chose as part of the OpenStack
deployment. To that end, hypervisors each have their own
hardware compatibility lists (HCLs). When selecting compatible
hardware it is important to know in advance which
hardware-based virtualization technologies are important from
a security perspective.</para>
<informaltable rules="all" width="80%">
<colgroup>
<col/>
<col/>
<col/>
</colgroup>
<thead>
<tr>
<td>Description</td>
<td>Technology</td>
<td>Explanation</td>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>I/O MMU</td>
<td>VT-d / AMD-Vi</td>
<td>Required for protecting
PCI-passthrough</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Intel Trusted Execution Technology</td>
<td>Intel TXT / SEM</td>
<td>Required for dynamic attestation
services</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><anchor
xml:id="PCI-SIG_I.2FO_virtualization_.28IOV.29"
/>PCI-SIG I/O virtualization</td>
<td>SR-IOV, MR-IOV, ATS</td>
<td>Required to allow secure sharing of PCI Express
devices</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Network virtualization</td>
<td>VT-c</td>
<td>Improves performance of network I/O on
hypervisors</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</informaltable>
</section>
<section xml:id="ch051_vss-intro-idp396976">
<title>Hypervisor vs. baremetal</title>
<para>It is important to recognise the difference between using
LXC (Linux Containers) or Baremetal systems vs using a
hypervisor like KVM. Specifically, the focus of this security
guide is largely based on having a hypervisor and
virtualization platform. However, should your implementation
require the use of a baremetal or LXC environment, you must
pay attention to the particular differences in regard to
deployment of that environment.</para>
<para>In particular, you must assure your end users that the
node has been properly sanitized of their data prior to
re-provisioning. Additionally, prior to reusing a node, you
must provide assurances that the hardware has not been
tampered or otherwise compromised.</para>
<note>
<para>While OpenStack has a baremetal project, a discussion of
the particular security implications of running baremetal is
beyond the scope of this book.</para>
</note>
<para>Finally, due to the time constraints around a book sprint,
the team chose to use KVM as the hypervisor in our example
implementations and architectures.</para>
<note>
<para>There is an OpenStack Security Note pertaining to the
<link
xlink:href="https://bugs.launchpad.net/ossn/+bug/1098582"
>use of LXC in Compute</link>.</para>
</note>
</section>
<section xml:id="ch051_vss-intro-idpKMSTPS">
<title>Hypervisor memory optimization</title>
<para>Many hypervisors use memory optimization techniques to
overcommit memory to guest virtual machines. This is a useful
feature that allows you to deploy very dense compute clusters.
One way to achieve this is through de-duplication or “sharing”
of memory pages. When two virtual machines have identical data
in memory, there are advantages to having them reference the
same memory.</para>
<para>Typically this is achieved through Copy-On-Write (COW)
mechanisms. These mechanisms have been shown to be vulnerable
to side-channel attacks where one VM can infer something about
the state of another and might not be appropriate for
multi-tenant environments where not all tenants are trusted or
share the same levels of trust.</para>
</section>
<section xml:id="ch051_vss-intro-idpKMS">
<title>KVM Kernel Samepage Merging</title>
<para>Introduced into the Linux kernel in version 2.6.32, Kernel
Samepage Merging (KSM) consolidates identical memory pages
between Linux processes. As each guest VM under the KVM
hypervisor runs in its own process, KSM can be used to
optimize memory use between VMs.</para>
</section>
<section xml:id="ch051_vss-intro-idpTPS">
<title>XEN transparent page sharing</title>
<para>XenServer 5.6 includes a memory overcommitment feature
named Transparent Page Sharing (TPS). TPS scans memory in 4 KB
chunks for any duplicates. When found, the Xen Virtual Machine
Monitor (VMM) discards one of the duplicates and records the
reference of the second one.</para>
</section>
<section xml:id="ch051_vss-intro-idpKMSTPSCons">
<title>Security considerations for memory optimization</title>
<para>Traditionally, memory de-duplication systems are
vulnerable to side channel attacks. Both KSM and TPS have
demonstrated to be vulnerable to some form of attack. In
academic studies<footnote>
<para>Fine grain Cross-VM Attacks on Xen and VMware are
possible - Apecechea and others. <link
xlink:href="https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/248.pdf"
>https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/248.pdf</link></para>
</footnote><footnote>
<para>Memory Deduplication as a Threat to the Guest OS -
Suzaki and others. <link
xlink:href="https://staff.aist.go.jp/c.artho/papers/EuroSec2011-suzaki.pdf"
>https://staff.aist.go.jp/c.artho/papers/EuroSec2011-suzaki.pdf</link></para>
</footnote>attackers were able to identify software packages
and versions running on neighboring virtual machines as well
as software downloads and other sensitive information through
analyzing memory access times on the attacker VM.</para>
<para>If a cloud deployment requires strong separation of
tenants, as is the situation with public clouds and some
private clouds, deployers should consider disabling TPS and
KSM memory optimizations.</para>
</section>
<section xml:id="ch051_vss-intro-idp401408">
<title>Additional security features</title>
<para>Another thing to look into when selecting a hypervisor
platform is the availability of specific security features. In
particular, we are referring to features like Xen Server's XSM
or Xen Security Modules, sVirt, Intel TXT, and AppArmor. The
presence of these features increase your security profile as
well as provide a good foundation.</para>
<para>The following table calls out these features by common
hypervisor platforms.</para>
<informaltable rules="all" width="80%">
<colgroup>
<col/>
<col/>
<col/>
<col/>
<col/>
<col/>
<col/>
</colgroup>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><para/></td>
<td><para>XSM</para></td>
<td><para>sVirt</para></td>
<td><para>TXT</para></td>
<td><para>AppArmor</para></td>
<td><para>cgroups</para></td>
<td><para>MAC Policy</para></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><para>KVM</para></td>
<td><para/></td>
<td><para>&CHECK;</para></td>
<td><para>&CHECK;</para></td>
<td><para>&CHECK;</para></td>
<td><para>&CHECK;</para></td>
<td><para>&CHECK;</para></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><para>Xen</para></td>
<td><para>&CHECK;</para></td>
<td><para/></td>
<td><para>&CHECK;</para></td>
<td><para/></td>
<td><para/></td>
<td><para>&CHECK;</para></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><para>ESXi</para></td>
<td><para/></td>
<td><para/></td>
<td><para>&CHECK;</para></td>
<td><para/></td>
<td><para/></td>
<td><para/></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><para>Hyper-V</para></td>
<td><para/></td>
<td><para/></td>
<td><para/></td>
<td><para/></td>
<td><para/></td>
<td><para/></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</informaltable>
<para><link xlink:href="http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/KSM">KVM:
Kernel Samepage Merging</link></para>
<para><link
xlink:href="http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_Security_Modules_:_XSM-FLASK"
>XSM: Xen Security Modules</link></para>
<para><link xlink:href="http://selinuxproject.org/page/SVirt"
>xVirt: Mandatory Access Control for Linux-based
virtualization</link></para>
<para><link xlink:href="http://www.intel.com/txt">TXT: Intel
Trusted Execution Technology</link></para>
<para><link
xlink:href="http://wiki.apparmor.net/index.php/Main_Page"
>AppArmor: Linux security module implementing
MAC</link></para>
<para><link
xlink:href="https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cgroups/cgroups.txt"
>cgroups: Linux kernel feature to control resource
usage</link></para>
<para>MAC Policy: Mandatory Access Control; may be implemented
with SELinux or other operating systems</para>
<para>* Features in this table might not be applicable to all
hypervisors or directly mappable between hypervisors.</para>
</section>
</section>
</chapter>