Effectively and Securely Using the Cloud Computing Paradigm

Peter Mell, Tim Grance NIST, Information Technology Laboratory 10-7-2009

NIST Cloud Research Team

Peter Mell Project Lead Tim Grance Program Manager Lee Badger

Contact information is available from: http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/contact.htm

NIST Cloud Computing Resources

NIST Draft Definition of Cloud Computing Presentation on Effective and Secure Use of Cloud Computing
http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/cloud-computing/index.html

Caveats and Disclaimers

This presentation provides education on cloud technology and its benefits to set up a discussion of cloud security It is NOT intended to provide official NIST guidance and NIST does not make policy Any mention of a vendor or product is NOT an endorsement or recommendation
Citation Note: All sources for the material in this presentation are included within the Powerpoint notes field on each slide

Agenda
Part 1: Effective and Secure Use
Understanding Cloud Computing Cloud Computing Security Secure Cloud Migration Paths Cloud Publications Cloud Computing and Standards

Part 2: Cloud Resources, Case Studies, and Security Models

Thoughts on Cloud Computing Foundational Elements of Cloud Computing Cloud Computing Case Studies and Security Models
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Part I: Effective and Secure Use

Understanding Cloud Computing

Origin of the term Cloud Computing

Comes from the early days of the Internet where we drew the network as a cloud we didnt care where the messages went the cloud hid it from us Kevin Marks, Google First cloud around networking (TCP/IP abstraction) Second cloud around documents (WWW data abstraction) The emerging cloud abstracts infrastructure complexities of servers, applications, data, and heterogeneous platforms
(muck as Amazons CEO Jeff Bezos calls it)
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A Working Definition of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.
This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.

5 Essential Cloud Characteristics

On-demand self-service Broad network access Resource pooling
Location independence

Rapid elasticity Measured service

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3 Cloud Service Models

Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS)
Use providers applications over a network

Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Deploy customer-created applications to a cloud

Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Rent processing, storage, network capacity, and other fundamental computing resources

To be considered cloud they must be deployed on top of cloud infrastructure that has the key characteristics
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Service Model Architectures

Cloud Infrastructure Cloud Infrastructure PaaS SaaS SaaS Cloud Infrastructure IaaS PaaS SaaS

Software as a Service (SaaS) Architectures

Cloud Infrastructure PaaS

Cloud Infrastructure IaaS PaaS

Platform as a Service (PaaS) Architectures

Cloud Infrastructure IaaS

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Architectures

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4 Cloud Deployment Models

Private cloud
enterprise owned or leased

Community cloud
shared infrastructure for specific community

Public cloud
Sold to the public, mega-scale infrastructure

Hybrid cloud
composition of two or more clouds
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Common Cloud Characteristics

Cloud computing often leverages:
Massive scale Homogeneity Virtualization Resilient computing Low cost software Geographic distribution Service orientation Advanced security technologies
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The NIST Cloud Definition Framework

Hybrid Clouds Deployment Models Service Models Essential Characteristics Private Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS) Community Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) On Demand Self-Service Broad Network Access Resource Pooling Massive Scale Common Characteristics Homogeneity Virtualization Low Cost Software Rapid Elasticity Measured Service Resilient Computing Geographic Distribution Service Orientation Advanced Security
Based upon original chart created by Alex Dowbor - http://ornot.wordpress.com

Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

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Cloud Computing Security

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Security is the Major Issue

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Analyzing Cloud Security

Some key issues:
trust, multi-tenancy, encryption, compliance

Clouds are massively complex systems can be reduced to simple primitives that are replicated thousands of times and common functional units Cloud security is a tractable problem
There are both advantages and challenges
Former Intel CEO, Andy Grove: only the paranoid survive
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General Security Advantages

Shifting public data to a external cloud reduces the exposure of the internal sensitive data Cloud homogeneity makes security auditing/testing simpler Clouds enable automated security management Redundancy / Disaster Recovery
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General Security Challenges

Trusting vendors security model Customer inability to respond to audit findings Obtaining support for investigations Indirect administrator accountability Proprietary implementations cant be examined Loss of physical control

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Security Relevant Cloud Components

Cloud Provisioning Services Cloud Data Storage Services Cloud Processing Infrastructure Cloud Support Services Cloud Network and Perimeter Security Elastic Elements: Storage, Processing, and Virtual Networks
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Provisioning Service
Advantages
Rapid reconstitution of services Enables availability
Provision in multiple data centers / multiple instances

Advanced honey net capabilities

Challenges
Impact of compromising the provisioning service

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Data Storage Services

Advantages
Data fragmentation and dispersal Automated replication Provision of data zones (e.g., by country) Encryption at rest and in transit Automated data retention

Challenges
Isolation management / data multi-tenancy Storage controller
Single point of failure / compromise?

Exposure of data to foreign governments

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Cloud Processing Infrastructure

Advantages
Ability to secure masters and push out secure images

Challenges
Application multi-tenancy Reliance on hypervisors Process isolation / Application sandboxes

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Cloud Support Services

Advantages
On demand security controls (e.g., authentication, logging, firewalls)

Challenges
Additional risk when integrated with customer applications Needs certification and accreditation as a separate application Code updates
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Cloud Network and Perimeter Security

Advantages
Distributed denial of service protection VLAN capabilities Perimeter security (IDS, firewall, authentication)

Challenges
Virtual zoning with application mobility

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Cloud Security Advantages Part 1

Data Fragmentation and Dispersal Dedicated Security Team Greater Investment in Security Infrastructure Fault Tolerance and Reliability Greater Resiliency Hypervisor Protection Against Network Attacks Possible Reduction of C&A Activities (Access to Pre-Accredited Clouds)
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Cloud Security Advantages Part 2

Simplification of Compliance Analysis Data Held by Unbiased Party (cloud vendor assertion) Low-Cost Disaster Recovery and Data Storage Solutions On-Demand Security Controls Real-Time Detection of System Tampering Rapid Re-Constitution of Services Advanced Honeynet Capabilities
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Cloud Security Challenges Part 1

Data dispersal and international privacy laws
EU Data Protection Directive and U.S. Safe Harbor program Exposure of data to foreign government and data subpoenas Data retention issues

Need for isolation management Multi-tenancy Logging challenges Data ownership issues Quality of service guarantees
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Cloud Security Challenges Part 2

Dependence on secure hypervisors Attraction to hackers (high value target) Security of virtual OSs in the cloud Possibility for massive outages Encryption needs for cloud computing
Encrypting access to the cloud resource control interface Encrypting administrative access to OS instances Encrypting access to applications Encrypting application data at rest

Public cloud vs internal cloud security Lack of public SaaS version control
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Additional Issues
Issues with moving PII and sensitive data to the cloud
Privacy impact assessments Suggested requirements for cloud SLAs Issues with cloud forensics

Using SLAs to obtain cloud security Contingency planning and disaster recovery for cloud implementations Handling compliance
FISMA HIPAA SOX PCI SAS 70 Audits

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Secure Migration Paths for Cloud Computing

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The Why and How of Cloud Migration

There are many benefits that explain why to migrate to clouds
Cost savings, power savings, green savings, increased agility in software deployment

Cloud security issues may drive and define how we adopt and deploy cloud computing solutions

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Balancing Threat Exposure and Cost Effectiveness

Private clouds may have less threat exposure than community clouds which have less threat exposure than public clouds. Massive public clouds may be more cost effective than large community clouds which may be more cost effective than small private clouds. Doesnt strong security controls mean that I can adopt the most cost effective approach?
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Cloud Migration and Cloud Security Architectures

Clouds typically have a single security architecture but have many customers with different demands
Clouds should attempt to provide configurable security mechanisms

Organizations have more control over the security architecture of private clouds followed by community and then public
This doesnt say anything about actual security

Higher sensitivity data is likely to be processed on clouds where organizations have control over the security model
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Putting it Together
Most clouds will require very strong security controls All models of cloud may be used for differing tradeoffs between threat exposure and efficiency There is no one cloud. There are many models and architectures. How does one choose?
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Migration Paths for Cloud Adoption

Use public clouds Develop private clouds
Build a private cloud Procure an outsourced private cloud Migrate data centers to be private clouds (fully virtualized)

Build or procure community clouds

Organization wide SaaS PaaS and IaaS Disaster recovery for private clouds

Use hybrid-cloud technology

Workload portability between clouds
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Possible Effects of Cloud Computing

Small enterprises use public SaaS and public clouds and minimize growth of data centers Large enterprise data centers may evolve to act as private clouds Large enterprises may use hybrid cloud infrastructure software to leverage both internal and public clouds Public clouds may adopt standards in order to run workloads from competing hybrid cloud infrastructures
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Cloud Computing and Standards

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Cloud Standards Mission

Provide guidance to industry and government for the creation and management of relevant cloud computing standards allowing all parties to gain the maximum value from cloud computing

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NIST and Standards

NIST wants to promote cloud standards:
We want to propose roadmaps for needed standards We want to act as catalysts to help industry formulate their own standards
Opportunities for service, software, and hardware providers

We want to promote government and industry adoption of cloud standards

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Goal of NIST Cloud Standards Effort

Fungible clouds
(mutual substitution of services) Data and customer application portability Common interfaces, semantics, programming models Federated security services Vendors compete on effective implementations

Enable and foster value add on services

Advanced technology Vendors compete on innovative capabilities
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A Model for Standardization and Proprietary Implementation

Advanced features
Proprietary Value Add Functionality

Core features

Standardized Core Cloud Capabilities

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Proposed Result
Cloud customers knowingly choose the correct mix for their organization of
standard portable features proprietary advanced capabilities

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A proposal: A NIST Cloud Standards Roadmap

We need to define minimal standards
Enable secure cloud integration, application portability, and data portability Avoid over specification that will inhibit innovation Separately addresses different cloud models

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Towards the Creation of a Roadmap (I)

Thoughts on standards:
Usually more service lock-in as you move up the SPI stack (IaaS->PaaS->SaaS) IaaS is a natural transition point from traditional enterprise datacenters
Base service is typically computation, storage, and networking

The virtual machine is the best focal point for fungibility Security and data privacy concerns are the two critical barriers to adopting cloud computing
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Towards the Creation of a Roadmap (II)

Result:
Focus on an overall IaaS standards roadmap as a first major deliverable Research PaaS and SaaS roadmaps as we move forward Provide visibility, encourage collaboration in addressing these standards as soon as possible Identify common needs for security and data privacy standards across IaaS, PaaS, SaaS
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A Roadmap for IaaS

Needed standards
VM image distribution (e.g., DMTF OVF) VM provisioning and control (e.g., EC2 API) Inter-cloud VM exchange (e.g., ??) Persistent storage (e.g., Azure Storage, S3, EBS, GFS, Atmos) VM SLAs (e.g., ??) machine readable
uptime, resource guarantees, storage redundancy

Secure VM configuration (e.g., SCAP)

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A Roadmap for PaaS and SaaS

More difficult due to proprietary nature A future focus for NIST Standards for PaaS could specify
Supported programming languages APIs for cloud services

Standards for SaaS could specify

SaaS-specific authentication / authorization Formats for data import and export (e.g., XML schemas) Separate standards may be needed for each application space
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Security and Data Privacy Across IaaS, PaaS, SaaS

Many existing standards Identity and Access Management (IAM)
IdM federation (SAML, WS-Federation, Liberty ID-FF) Strong authentication standards (HOTP, OCRA, TOTP) Entitlement management (XACML)

Data Encryption (at-rest, in-flight), Key Management

PKI, PKCS, KEYPROV (CT-KIP, DSKPP), EKMI

Records and Information Management (ISO 15489) E-discovery (EDRM)

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Cloud Computing Publications

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Planned NIST Cloud Computing Publication

NIST is planning a series of publications on cloud computing NIST Special Publication to be created in FY09 What problems does cloud computing solve? What are the technical characteristics of cloud computing? How can we best leverage cloud computing and obtain security?
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Part II: Cloud Resources, Case Studies, and Security Models

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Thoughts on Cloud Computing

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Thoughts on Cloud Computing

Galen Gruman, InfoWorld Executive Editor, and Eric Knorr, InfoWorld Editor in Chief
A way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software. The idea of loosely coupled services running on an agile, scalable infrastructure should eventually make every enterprise a node in the cloud.
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Thoughts on Cloud Computing

Tim OReilly, CEO OReilly Media I think it is one of the foundations of the next generation of computing The network of networks is the platform for all computing

Everything we think of as a computer today is really just a device that connects to the big computer that we are all collectively
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Thoughts on Cloud Computing

Dan Farber, Editor in Chief CNET News We are at the beginning of the age of planetary computing. Billions of people will be wirelessly interconnected, and the only way to achieve that kind of massive scale usage is by massive scale, brutally efficient cloud-based infrastructure.

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Core objectives of Cloud Computing

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels Core objectives and principles that cloud computing must meet to be successful:
Security Scalability Availability Performance Cost-effective Acquire resources on demand Release resources when no longer needed Pay for what you use Leverage others core competencies Turn fixed cost into variable cost
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A sunny vision of the future

Sun Microsystems CTO Greg Papadopoulos
Users will trust service providers with their data like they trust banks with their money Hosting providers [will] bring brutal efficiency for utilization, power, security, service levels, and ideato-deploy time CNET article Becoming cost ineffective to build data centers Organizations will rent computing resources Envisions grid of 6 cloud infrastructure providers linked to 100 regional providers
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Foundational Elements of Cloud Computing

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Foundational Elements of Cloud Computing

Primary Technologies Other Technologies

Virtualization Grid technology Service Oriented Architectures Distributed Computing Broadband Networks Browser as a platform Free and Open Source Software

Autonomic Systems Web 2.0 Web application frameworks Service Level Agreements

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Consumer Software Revolution

Web 2.0
Is not a standard but an evolution in using the WWW Dont fight the Internet CEO Google, Eric Schmidt Web 2.0 is the trend of using the full potential of the web
Viewing the Internet as a computing platform Running interactive applications through a web browser Leveraging interconnectivity and mobility of devices The long tail (profits in selling specialized small market goods) Enhanced effectiveness with greater human participation

Tim O'Reilly: Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. 62

Enterprise Software Revolution

Software as a Service (SaaS)

SaaS is hosting applications on the Internet as a service (both consumer and enterprise) Jon Williams, CTO of Kaplan Test Prep on SaaS
I love the fact that I don't need to deal with servers, staging, version maintenance, security, performance

Eric Knorr with Computerworld says that [there is an] increasing desperation on the part of IT to minimize application deployment and maintenance hassles
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Three Features of Mature SaaS Applications

Scalable
Handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner

Multi-tenancy
One application instance may be serving hundreds of companies Opposite of multi-instance where each customer is provisioned their own server running one instance

Metadata driven configurability

Instead of customizing the application for a customer (requiring code changes), one allows the user to configure the 64 application through metadata
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SaaS Maturity Levels

Level 1: AdHoc/Custom Level 2: Configurable Level 3: Configurable, Multi-Tenant-Efficient Level 4: Scalable, Configurable, MultiTenant-Efficient
Source: Microsoft MSDN Architecture Center 65
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Utility Computing
Computing may someday be organized as a public utility - John McCarthy, MIT Centennial in 1961 Huge computational and storage capabilities available from utilities Metered billing (pay for what you use) Simple to use interface to access the capability (e.g., plugging into an outlet)
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Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Contract between customers and service providers of the level of service to be provided Contains performance metrics (e.g., uptime, throughput, response time) Problem management details Documented security capabilities Contains penalties for non-performance
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Autonomic System Computing

Complex computing systems that manage themselves Decreased need for human administrators to perform lower level tasks Autonomic properties: Purposeful, Automatic, Adaptive, Aware IBMs 4 properties: self-healing, self-configuration, self-optimization, and self-protection
IT labor costs are 18 times that of equipment costs. The number of computers is growing at 38% each year.

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Grid Computing
Distributed parallel processing across a network Key concept: the ability to negotiate resourcesharing arrangements Characteristics of grid computing
Coordinates independent resources Uses open standards and interfaces Quality of service Allows for heterogeneity of computers Distribution across large geographical boundaries Loose coupling of computers

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Platform Virtualization
[Cloud computing] relies on separating your applications from the underlying infrastructure Steve Herrod, CTO at VMware Host operating system provides an abstraction layer for running virtual guest OSs Key is the hypervisor or virtual machine monitor
Enables guest OSs to run in isolation of other OSs Run multiple types of OSs

Increases utilization of physical servers Enables portability of virtual servers between physical servers Increases security of physical host server
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Web Services
Web Services
Self-describing and stateless modules that perform discrete units of work and are available over the network Web service providers offer APIs that enable developers to exploit functionality over the Internet, rather than delivering full-blown applications. - Infoworld Standards based interfaces (WS-I Basic Profile)
e.g., SOAP, WSDL, WS-Security Enabling state: WS-Transaction, Choreography

Many loosely coupled interacting modules form a single logical system (e.g., legos)
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Service Oriented Architectures

Service Oriented Architectures
Model for using web services
service requestors, service registry, service providers

Use of web services to compose complex, customizable, distributed applications Encapsulate legacy applications Organize stovepiped applications into collective integrated services Interoperability and extensibility
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Web application frameworks

Coding frameworks for enabling dynamic web sites
Streamline web and DB related programming operations (e.g., web services support) Creation of Web 2.0 applications

Supported by most major software languages Example capabilities

Separation of business logic from the user interface (e.g., Model-view-controller architecture) Authentication, Authorization, and Role Based Access Control (RBAC) Unified APIs for SQL DB interactions Session management URL mapping

Wikipedia maintains a list of web application frameworks

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Free and Open Source Software

External mega-clouds must focus on using their massive scale to reduce costs Usually use free software
Proven adequate for cloud deployments Open source Owned by provider

Need to keep per server cost low

Simple commodity hardware
Handle failures in software
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Public Statistics on Cloud Economics

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Cost of Traditional Data Centers

11.8 million servers in data centers Servers are used at only 15% of their capacity 800 billion dollars spent yearly on purchasing and maintaining enterprise software 80% of enterprise software expenditure is on installation and maintenance of software Data centers typically consume up to 100 times more per square foot than a typical office building Average power consumption per server quadrupled from 2001 to 2006. Number of servers doubled from 2001 to 2006
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Energy Conservation and Data Centers

Standard 9000 square foot costs $21.3 million to build with $1 million in electricity costs/year Data centers consume 1.5% of our Nations electricity (EPA)
.6% worldwide in 2000 and 1% in 2005

Green technologies can reduce energy costs by 50% IT produces 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions
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Cloud Economics
Estimates vary widely on possible cost savings If you move your data centre to a cloud provider, it will cost a tenth of the cost. Brian Gammage, Gartner Fellow Use of cloud applications can reduce costs from 50% to 90% - CTO of Washington D.C. IT resource subscription pilot saw 28% cost savings Alchemy Plus cloud (backing from Microsoft) Preferred Hotel
Traditional: $210k server refresh and $10k/month Cloud: $10k implementation and $16k/month
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Cloud Economics
George Reese, founder Valtira and enStratus
Using cloud infrastructures saves 18% to 29% before considering that you no longer need to buy for peak capacity

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Cloud Computing Case Studies and Security Models

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 Vivek Kundra, CTO for the District (now OMB e-gov administrator) Migrating 38,000 employees to Google Apps Replace office software
Gmail Google Docs (word processing and spreadsheets) Google video for business Google sites (intranet sites and wikis)

Google Cloud User: City of Washington D.C.

It's a fundamental change to the way our government operates by moving to the cloud. Rather than owning the infrastructure, we can save millions., Mr. Kundra 500,000+ organizations use Google Apps GE moved 400,000 desktops from Microsoft Office to Google Apps and then migrated them to Zoho for privacy concerns 81

Are Hybrid Clouds in our Future?

OpenNebula Zimory IBM-Juniper Partnership
"demonstrate how a hybrid cloud could allow enterprises to seamlessly extend their private clouds to remote servers in a secure public cloud...

VMWare VCloud
Federate resources between internal IT and external clouds
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vCloud Initiative
Goal:
Federate resources between internal IT and external clouds Application portability Elasticity and scalability, disaster recovery, service level management

vServices provide APIs and technologies

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Microsoft Azure Services

Source: Microsoft Presentation, A Lap Around Windows Azure, Manuvir Das

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Windows Azure Applications, Storage, and Roles

n
Web Role Worker Role
LB

Cloud Storage (blob, table, queue)

Source: Microsoft Presentation, A Lap Around Windows Azure, Manuvir Das
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Case Study: Facebooks Use of Open Source and Commodity Hardware (8/08)
Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook's vice president of technical operations 80 million users + 250,000 new users per day 50,000 transactions per second, 10,000+ servers Built on open source software
Web and App tier: Apache, PHP, AJAX Middleware tier: Memcached (Open source caching) Data tier: MySQL (Open source DB)

Thousands of DB instances store data in distributed fashion (avoids collisions of many users accessing the same DB) We don't need fancy graphics chips and PCI cards," he said. We need one USB port and optimized power and airflow. Give me one CPU, a little memory and one power supply. If it fails, I don't care. We are solving the redundancy problem in software.
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Case Study: IBM-Google Cloud (8/08)

Google and IBM plan to roll out a worldwide network of servers for a cloud computing infrastructure Infoworld Initiatives for universities Architecture
Open source
Linux hosts Xen virtualization (virtual machine monitor) Apache Hadoop (file system)
open-source software for reliable, scalable, distributed computing

IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager

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Case Study: Amazon Cloud

Amazon cloud components
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Simple Storage Service (S3) SimpleDB

New Features
Availability zones
Place applications in multiple locations for failovers

Elastic IP addresses
Static IP addresses that can be dynamically remapped to point to different instances (not a DNS change)
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 New York Times

Amazon Cloud Users: New York Times and Nasdaq (4/08) Both companies used Amazons cloud offering
Didnt coordinate with Amazon, used a credit card! Used EC2 and S3 to convert 15 million scanned news articles to PDF (4TB data) Took 100 Linux computers 24 hours (would have taken months on NYT computers It was cheap experimentation, and the learning curve isn't steep. Derrick Gottfrid, Nasdaq

Nasdaq
Uses S3 to deliver historic stock and fund information Millions of files showing price changes of entities over 10 minute segments The expenses of keeping all that data online [in Nasdaq servers] was too high. Claude Courbois, Nasdaq VP Created lightweight Adobe AIR application to let users view data

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Case Study: Salesforce.com in Government

5,000+ Public Sector and Nonprofit Customers use Salesforce Cloud Computing Solutions President Obamas Citizens Briefing Book Based on Salesforce.com Ideas application
Concept to Live in Three Weeks 134,077 Registered Users 1.4 M Votes 52,015 Ideas Peak traffic of 149 hits per second

US Census Bureau Uses Salesforce.com Cloud Application

Project implemented in under 12 weeks 2,500+ partnership agents use Salesforce.com for 2010 decennial census Allows projects to scale from 200 to 2,000 users overnight to meet peak periods with no capital expenditure

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Case Study: Salesforce.com in Government

New Jersey Transit Wins InfoWorld 100 Award for its Cloud Computing Project
Use Salesforce.com to run their call center, incident management, complaint tracking, and service portal 600% More Inquiries Handled 0 New Agents Required 36% Improved Response Time

U.S. Army uses Salesforce CRM for Cloud-based Recruiting

U.S. Army needed a new tool to track potential recruits who visited its Army Experience Center. Use Salesforce.com to track all core recruitment functions and allows the Army to save time and resources.
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Questions?
Peter Mell NIST, Information Technology Laboratory Computer Security Division Tim Grance NIST, Information Technology Laboratory Computer Security Division
Contact information is available from: http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/contact.htm
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