d308a6262d
1. Minor editorial changes to the compliance chapter 2. Also creates new 'case studies' folder and moves case studies into the folder for appropriate reviews. Change-Id: I3035510a6d66348fdd8ad3e6fce8f2133db7c744 Implements: blueprint sec-guide-overhaul
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Case studies
Earlier in ../introduction/introduction-to-case-studies we
introduced the Alice and Bob case studies where Alice is deploying a
private government cloud and Bob is deploying a public cloud each with
different security requirements. Here we discuss how Alice and Bob would
address security concerns around the messaging service.
The message queue is a critical piece of infrastructure that supports a number of OpenStack services but is most strongly associated with the Compute service. Due to the nature of the message queue service, Alice and Bob have similar security concerns. One of the larger concerns that remains is that many systems have access to this queue and there is no way for a consumer of the queue messages to verify which host or service placed the messages on the queue. An attacker who is able to successfully place messages on the queue is able to create and delete VM instances, attach the block storage of any tenant and a myriad of other malicious actions. There are a number of solutions anticipated in the near future, with several proposals for message signing and encryption making their way through the OpenStack development process.
Alice's private cloud
In this case, Alice's controls are the same as Bob's controls, which are described below.
Bob's public cloud
Bob assumes the infrastructure or networks underpinning the Compute service could become compromised, therefore he recognizes the importance of hardening the system by restricting access to the message queue. In order to accomplish this task Bob deploys his RabbitMQ servers with TLS and X.509 client auth for access control. Hardening activities assists in limiting the capabilities of a malicious user that has compromised the system by disallowing queue access, provided that this user does not have valid credentials to override the controls.
Additionally, Bob adds strong network ACL rulesets to enforce which endpoints can communicate with the message servers. This second control provides some additional assurance should the other protections fail.