MIGRATING & MANAGING SECURITY POLICIES IN A SEGMENTED DATA CENTER

AVISHAI WOOL, CTO

TOPICS COVERED

Defining and enforce security policies for East-West traffic

Managing micro-segmented data center alongside traditional devices

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Migrating applications to a micro-segmented data center

Identify risk and manage compliance04

Q&A and Summary05

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THE BASICS

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LEGACY DATA CENTER ARCHITECTURE

Users Servers

Outside World,

Business partners,

Perimeter

Firewall

East-West traffic North-South traffic

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WHY THIS IS RISKY

• No filtering capabilities controlling east-west traffic

• Allows unrestricted traffic:• Between internal users’ desktops/laptops and servers

• Between servers in different segments

• Once attackers gain a foothold – free lateral movement

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SEGMENTED DATA CENTER ARCHITECTURE

Users

Zone

Server

Zone 2 Outside World,

Business partners,

Perimeter

FirewallServer

Zone 1

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SEGMENTED = MORE SECURE

• Introduce filtering choke-points between zones

• Allows control of east-west traffic

• Lets organizations restrict lateral movement between zones

• How can we make this a reality?

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Which Platform Do You Use To Manage Your Private Cloud / Virtualized Data Center?• Vmware NSX• Cisco ACI• Microsoft Hyper-V• Other• We Don't Have A Virtualized Data Center

POLL

Please vote using the “votes from audience” tab in your BrightTALK panel

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SEGMENTATION CHALLENGES

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CHALLENGE #1: INTRODUCING CHOKE POINTS

• In the traditional data center: a major effort• Hardware, cabling, reconfigure switching and routing

• In a virtualized, software-defined, data center:• Built-in firewalls as part of the infrastructure

• No extra hardware needed

• Software-Defined Networking ✓

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CHALLENGE #2: ZONING

• How many zones to define?

• Which subnets should reside in each zone?

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A ZONING TRADE-OFF

• Traffic inside each zone remains unrestricted• For better security, define many small zones

• “Micro-segmentation”

• But: need policy (rules) between every pair of zones • “Allow service X from zone 1 to zone 2”

• N zones ==> N*N traffic directions

• For better manageability, define a few large zones

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CHALLENGE #3: FILTERING POLICY BETWEEN ZONES

• Traffic inside each zone is unfiltered: allowed

• … traffic between zones must be explicitly allowed by policy

• Goal: write policy to allow legitimate zone-crossing traffic

• Challenge: discover and characterize this traffic

• Did you know: VMware NSX’s default policy is “allow all” • Works around the challenge• … But is completely insecure

✓

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APPLICATION-AWARE SEGMENTATION

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THE BUSINESS-APPLICATION PERSPECTIVE

• East-West traffic is generated by business applications

• Each business application has:• Servers supporting it

• Clients accessing it

• Business application connectivity requirements:• Server-to-server traffic flows

• Client-to-server traffic flows

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SEGMENTATION FOR BUSINESS APPLICATIONS

• Human-accessible systems: in a separate zone from servers:• Desktops / Laptops / Smartphones

• Servers belonging to an application, that communicate with each other:• in same zone

• Infrastructure servers, that support multiple applications: • in a dedicated zone

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PLANNING NETWORK SEGMENTATION: BLUEPRINT

• Discover business applications’ connectivity requirements

• Select number of zones, and their characterization

• Based on applications’ flows, assign subnets to zones

• Write filtering policy (rules) allowing zone-crossing flows• Avoid breaking business applications’ connectivity

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DISCOVERY

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IS YOUR ORGANIZATION WELL-DISCIPLINED?

If:

• All applications are documented

• Applications’ connectivity requirements are documented

• Documentation is machine readable

Then “discovery” is easy!

• What if documentation is missing / outdated ?

✓✓✓

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DISCOVERY FROM TRAFFIC

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DISCOVERY RESULTS: ANALYTICS ON SNIFFED TRAFFIC

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ZONE-CROSSING TRAFFIC: HIGH LEVEL POLICY

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DOCUMENT: THE CONNECTIVITY MATRIX

Allowed traffic between every pair of zones

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ZOOM IN: FROM/TO THE PEER DMZ

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DEMONSTRATION OF MICRO-SEGMENTATION WITH ALGOSEC

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IMPORT INTO BUSINESSFLOW

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VISIBILITY

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Enforcing Micro Segmentation

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MAINTENANCE OF THE SEGMENTATION

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MAINTENANCE OF THE SEGMENTATION

• Zoning remains stable over time

• … but application connectivity requirements evolve

• … so filtering policies need to change over time

• Need application-aware and segmentation-aware change management processes

• Need visibility that filtering policies comply with zoning

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CONNECTIVITY SPREADSHEET

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SEGMENTATION-AWARE CHANGE PROCESS

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NORTH-SOUTH TRAFFIC

• Hybrid network: • Software-defined data center

• traditional networking outside data center

• Application connectivity is also north-south

• Goal: Single change workflow for all filtering technologies

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• Identical for North-South and East-West• Indifferent to network technology• Abstracts away filtering device details

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• Outside data center (traditional)

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• Inside data center (virtualized)

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• AlgoSec Standard risks +• User-defined risks +• Connectivity spreadsheet violations

• What-if risk check, before changes are implemented

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What are your plans for filtering east-west traffic?• Already implemented• Planning to implement over the next 6 months• Planning to implement over the next 6-12

months• No plans

POLL

Please vote using the “votes from audience” tab in your BrightTALK panel

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SUMMARY

Plan

• Discover business applications’ connectivity requirements

• Design zoning, write policy for zone-crossing flows

• Document in connectivity matrix

Maintain

• Visibility, automated comparison to connectivity matrix

• Segmentation-aware change process

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MORE RESOURCES

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THANK YOU!

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