This is a _very_ interesting paper just published by some researchers (mainly) from RUB (Ruhr-University Bochum). Here’s the abstract:
“Cloud Computing resources are handled through control interfaces. It is through these interfaces that the new machine images can be added, existing ones can be modied, and instances can be started or ceased. Effectively, a successful attack on a Cloud control interface grants the attacker a complete power over the victim’s account, with all the stored data included.
In this paper, we provide a security analysis pertaining to the control interfaces of a large Public Cloud (Amazon) and a widely used Private Cloud software (Eucalyptus).
Our research results are alarming: in regards to the Amazon EC2 and S3 services, the control interfaces could be compromised via the novel signature wrapping and advanced XSS techniques. Similarly, the Eucalyptus control interfaces were vulnerable to classical signature wrapping attacks, and had nearly no protection against XSS. As a follow up to those discoveries, we additionally describe the countermeasures against these attacks, as well as introduce a novel ‘black box’ analysis methodology for public Cloud interfaces.”
===
While the actual described vulnerabilities have been fixed in the interim this stresses once more the point we made in this post: the overall security posture of the management (or “cloud control” as the authors of the above paper call it) interfaces is crucial for potentially all the data that’s processed by/on your cloud based machines or applications.
Great research from those guys! This will help to drive the discussion and security efforts for a reasonable use of cloud based resources in the right direction…
thanks
Enno
Continue reading