wiki:GENISecurity-4Q09-status

Version 1 (modified by Stephen Schwab, 14 years ago) (diff)

--

GSAT Project Status Report

Period: Oct 2009 - Dec 2009

I. Major accomplishments

Presentation on security issues for campus operations at GEC-6 OMIS meeting.

A. Milestones achieved

Posted outline with identified POCs from various projects to coordinate with for input for the spiral 2 security architecture document. Coordinated with GMOC project for Emergency Stop review discussion.

B. Deliverables made

GENI Security Architecture Draft Outline Spiral 2 posted on November 15. This is primarily for identifying projects and POCs to coordinate with at the GEC-6 meeting in Salt Lake City.

II. Description of work performed during last quarter

A. Activities and findings

We have continued to study the various control framework prototypes, as well as some of the aggregates/components in development such as INSTOOLs (for measurement) and Enterprise GENI (for OpenFlow switch networks). At this point we are mainly seeking points-of-contact to discuss status with, and to let us know when things will reach a stable point where there are pieces of software and/or some additional design documentation to look at and comment on from a security viewpoint. As many of the projects did not have software release milestones after spiral 1 integration, or their POCs indicated that the software was in flux and so not ready for review, we found it difficult to delve into the implementation details. For several of the control frameworks, Alefiya Hussain made review passes and updated the work flow diagrams and security analysis in the draft document.

Stephen Schwab and Jon-Paul Herron of the GMOC project coordinated a review of the GMOC Emergency Stop draft in early November. At this point, Emergency Stop is more of a manual, human-intensive process, but in phone conversations we discussed many of the security issues that would crop up when we try to shift to using all electronic communications and authentication to execute distributed emergency stop.

Stephen Schwab attended GEC-6 in Salt Lake City. As part of the meeting, he presented slides on security issues for campus operations, with the goal of helping to start the discussion about what has to occur prior to the deployment of GENI aggregates on a large number of campuses. While the OMIS group presented talks on these issues, there are still not enough people focused on the security issues surrounding deployment, perhaps because everyone is still busy working on the implementations and getting software and networking equipment ready to deploy.

B. Project participants

The following SPARTA staff are participating in the GSAT project: Stephen Schwab, Alefiya Hussain. We may also consult with Sandy Murphy, although her participation is limited by available funding.

C. Publications (individual and organizational)

None.

D. Outreach activities

None.

E. Collaborations

Jim Griffioen of the INSTOOLS project described challenges with authentication inside a GENI slice in discussions with Stephen Schwab at GEC-6. The central problem is that ssh keys for individual researchers must be loaded into nodes within a slice if the INSTOOL software is required to authenticate between a node and other nodes, elements of the GENI components (via GENI APIs) or to special features of the substrate used by the measurement system. This is a fundamentally undesirable arrangement, since the private keying material (of the public-private key pair) becomes vulnerable merely by being loaded into a node that is inside the slice. We discussed possible alternate security architectures, including the possibility of using ABAC distributed authorization techniques to avoid using experimenters individual ssh keys. We also continue to collaborate with several of the control framework efforts, including DETER TIED (John Wroclawski/Ted Faber), ProtoGENI (Rob Ricci), and PlanetLab (Larry Peterson, Soner Sevinc, Andy Bavier.)

F. Other Contributions

None.