Thursday, August 21, 2008

Data Center Firewall features

What makes firewall a good data center firewall?

Before going further on what features are expected by data center IT/Security professionals, it is good to revisit the data centers. Data center providers are mainly hosting providers. They host their customer applications and machines. Some customers of data centers share a machine resource, some like to host their application in a virtual system and some like to host their applications in a dedicated machine(s)/blades. To provide availability and share the load, application servers are installed in multiple machines with "load balancers" distributing the load across the server farm. As we all know, HTTP/HTTPS servers by far the single most server application in data centers. Most of the times, services provided by hosted servers are meant for general public.

Increasingly, there is a trend by Enterprises offloading hosting of Intranet servers to external data center providers. Intranet servers are typically provide access to Employees and limited access to their partners. For example, many email services, sharepoint and wikis are being offloaded to data center providers by many small and medium Enterprises. Many of these services require user authentication. Enterprises don't like to duplicate the user databases in multiple machines/applications. So, you also see the trend of 'Central Authentication Database' across internal servers and servers hosted outside. Many web applications are providing SAML based authentication for federate identity. Since web services need to talk to outside identity providers, there can be outbound connections. Note that, traditionally, servers in data centers only see inbound connections.

Enterprise administrator also requires facilities to upload the content and do other administrative activities on hosted servers. Typically FTP, SSH are some of the services required by administrators. Some applications might have web interface running on Port 80/443 for administration. To provide added security beyond user authentication, data center providers likes to control admin access from particular network(s), typically Enterprise Networks.

With more and more services (both Intranet and Extranet) being hosted in external data centers, the need for securing them is high. Collaborative services/servers such as wikis, share point, CRMs and other work flow servers are typically used to be part of Enterprise networks and only accessible for local users. They are being hosted in external data centers for reasons such as providing access from anywhere for employees, partners, contractors etc.. and also reduce the administration headache. Since they are exposed to access from anywhere, they are open for attacks from attackers. So, need for detection and prevention of exploits becomes much more than what data centers are used to. Quick look at the vulnerabilities published by NIST indicates (nvd.nist.gov) that SQL/XSS/LFI/RFI injections are on rise. You can also see number of wikis, blogs and other collaborative applications are targets of attackers.

Intranet servers when placed in external hosting providers' network, Enterprises would like the communication channels to be secure to protect data from eaves dropping. HTTP over SSL/TLS is one common method used to achieve data confidentiality on the wire. For security devices, placed outside of these servers, to do better job of access control, intrusion detection and malicious injections, it is necessary for these devices to see the traffic in clear. To achieve this, security devices should have capability to decrypt the SSL and do traffic/data analysis and if required redo the SSL. By the way, Since security devices are expected to be kept right in front of the servers, there may not be any need for redoing SSL. But important take way is that the security device should have capability to terminate the SSL connections.

From last few years, many web applications are using SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) which is built upon XML standards. Traditional ways of plain POST requests, JSON and PHP Objects are fast becoming thing of past. Any security device doing intrusion and data analysis need to move beyond POST, JSON and PHP objects and start interpreting SOAP and XML.

Data center providers provide services to many customers. Each customer requirement from security perspective is different. One generic security policy does not fit in these environments. You could have as many firewalls as number of customers, but that is not scalable from cost, space and cooling perspective. Virtualization in firewall/security devices comes in handy. Virtualization with VMWare/Xen also does not scale well. Old traditional virtualization scales well and suites well for data center providers.

Since security device comes in the way of traffic, things like performance of security devices should be high to support traffic rate that can be processed by servers/services it is securing. Latency, stability, availability and failover capabilities are some more important factors data center providers consider while selecting the security devices.

With above background, it is very easy to map to the features expected by data center providers on security device protecting their application and server infrastructure.
  • Access Control : As you see above, access control some times need to go beyond IP addresses and TCP/UDP ports. Some web applications provide administrator and normal user access via same TCP/UDP port. Hence it is not possible to distinguish administrator and normal users from IP addresses and ports. Since many data center providers don't like admin access to be given from any IP address (for providing better security), but from some specific networks, it is required that the access control go beyond to application level information such as URL, Query parameters etc..
  • Intrusion Detection and Prevention at L3-L7: As explained above, typical traditional intrusion detection systems without web application intelligence will not be able to detect intrusions all the time. There are many evasions being employed by attackers. Some evasions are at the IP and TCP level and more evasions are at the HTTP protocol level. Hence protocol intelligence is required. In addition, with SOA based web services, intrusion detection systems need to have intelligence to extract data from SOAP/XML messages. In addition to web application intelligence, they also need to have intelligence of other common services provided by hosting providers such as DNS, FTP, SIP etc..
  • SSL Proxy: Network device should be able to terminate the SSL for further analysis on the protocol data.
  • Virtualization: One physical hardware box is expected to support multiple virtual instances to reduce number of security devices in the deployment. Each virtual instance would need to have its own security policy configuration. It should be as good as different physical firewall devices. I, personally don't prefer VMware/Xen/KVM based virtualization for these environments. I prefer Traditional virtualization where only configuration data and run time states are instantiated for every context.
  • DDOS attack detection and prevention.
  • Traffic Anomaly detection and traffic Control.
  • Performance: To achieve multi gigabit speeds, look for hardware architecture which is scalable.
  • Stateful failover and high availability
  • Logging & Auditing capabilities
  • Intuitive central Management system
Optional features: Though they are not required, some data centers might find them useful
  • Server side NAC: Provide facility for user based access control. NAC does user authentication and provides control access to the different features of an application based on the URL and other fields in the protocol. It also helps in correlating user actions and might be useful in auditing.
My intent here is not to go into many details, but provide some ideas on the features security vendors would need to think while providing security device solutions to data center market.

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