Project Skylab, founded by Craig Balding, aims to address cloud security by promoting hands-on experience through on-demand test labs. Balding challenges fellow security professionals to engage with cloud technology actively rather than ignoring it, emphasizing that cloud is an essential part of the future. The initiative focuses on creating practical solutions and providing resources to overcome the challenges associated with infrastructure friction and cloud adoption.

1. Project Skylab:
Helping You Get Your Cloud On
Craig Balding
Founder, cloudsecurity.org
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2. Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed here are
those of Craig Balding only and in no way
represent the views, positions or opinions -
expressed or implied - of my employer or
anyone else.
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Last year at Brucon, I talked about Cloud Security and broke new ground through using the
Beer and Brewing as an analogy for cloud computing. The climax of that talk was significant
after-cloud.

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But as I sat there in the speaker room as the make-up crew and hairstylists did the best they
could in the circumstances, I made myself a promise. If I got selected to talk in 2010 I would
take things more seriously.

5. No More Gimmicks
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Cloud Security is not a laughing matter.

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No more clowning around.

7. Sorry
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But my apology is two-fold. My blatant lies about gimmicks to one side...

8. The Cloud Security Broken Record
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I was starting to feel like a stuck record, going on about high level cloud security issues.

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I became an “expert source” on all things cloud security and strangely enough: cloud.

10. Again, sorry...
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I promise to mend my ways. Hence, the birth of my Skylab project. Rather than just talking
about it, lets do something with it. Something useful, something that might just draw you
into my cloud...

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But I wasn’t just challenging myself with Skylab. I’m challenging you, my fellow infosec pros.
Perhaps you’re ignoring cloud, hoping it will just ‘blow over’. Or maybe, you’re convinced
yourself you’re so busy, you just don’t have time to ‘get into it’. Or perhaps, you just haven’t
seen the writing on the wall or believe its another dot com bust in the making.

12. s/LUKE/CLOUD?
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We tend to take apply a ‘DEFAULT DENY’ rule to new tech. In the case of cloud, its been
DEFAULT DROP. As a community it sometimes seems like our reactions sometimes cloud our
vision. Why do we feel the need to be anti-something and thus not examine it critically and
carefully? I think we do a dis-service to our employers when we do that.

13. Cloud Is Coming
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I’m not here to make predictions about cloud. Personally, I see writing on the wall, but I’m
not trying to convince you of that. Rather, I want to ask you a question.

14. What
Are
You
Doing
To
Keep
Up?
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What are you doing to keep up? Cloud is just the latest big thing. But before that we had
virtualization, we had VoIP, we had converged networking. I think we all need to challenge
ourselves a little more. Seek our own truths as it were. Stop paying attention and reacting to
the endless media sound bites by people that clearly don’t get security. Do original research.
Apply the new technologies for ourselves before the people that pay our wages do...

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This boils down to something really simple. We have to find our Droids. Each of have droids
to seek out. What Droids are you looking for? How hard are you looking? What are you
waiting for? Don’t wait til you feel you’re ‘good enough’ or until ‘you have more free time’. I
hope to offer you something that may make you change your mind.

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For me, I wanted to commit a little more to building something. I wanted to find out what
cloud technology I could use right now to do something useful for my own R&D purposes.
There are many things that can get in your way, but one big one is....

17. F r i c t i o n
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Friction is the enemy of your imagination. I don’t know about you, but for me its not having
the right set up at the right time. I’m always trading one resource for another. My free disk
space is *always* on the wrong machine. I can never run enough virtual machines... Not only
that, I have whims. I also have a Wim (looks at Wim), but they are mostly 2 different things...
I have kites I want to fly. I have ideas I want to quickly test. But most of them never see the
light of day, which makes me feel sad and deprives me of valuable learning lessons. Why?
Because of friction. Infrastructure friction. Changing my test network setup is a pain. I’ll
have to shuffle resources around and make compromises as I don’t have an army of machines
to play with. I’ll have to “make do” and collapse multiple workloads onto single machines.
Virtual machines have certainly helped - they’ve given me more options than I had before.
But at the same time virtual compute has highlighted that I can never own enough hardware
(“I just want to run one more”). Plus I’ve got the virtual headache of managing an ever
increasing stable of virtual machine images. I want my infrastructure to be malleable like
code and my operations to be automated. Or to put it another way, I need some serious
lubrication.

18. Prior Art
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Along came project Skylab. This is my meta-idea. The idea that can help bring my other
ideas to life. Skylab will help me fail faster and cheaper than I can today. This isn’t
pessimism, this is how great ideas come to be - you just have to let all the bad ones get
themselves out of you first.

19. Motives
Learn
Get Practical
Home Server RIP
Geekin’ Out
Open Source
Community Project
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20. # whoami
Tech Security Lead @F500
UNIX Background
Pen-Test
Incident Response
EuroTrash Security
Podcast
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21. 3 Questions For You
Do you use cloud storage?
Have you booted a machine
in a public cloud?
Have you played with cloud
network overlays?
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22. Wannabe Cloudtroopers
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Come to the darkside my friends. Embrace the cloud. Or at least dip your toe in it so you
can backup whatever opinion you profer. If that doesn’t convince you, I’m offering free sea-
shell hats for cloud converts.

23. On Demand Test Labs
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So Skylabs is about on demand test labs. I’m sure you can think of times when you having an
inflatable test lab that you can spin up and shutdown when you want could be pretty darn
handy

24. Target practice Testing new/updated too
NIDS/NIPS testing
Exploit testing
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On the offense side of security, there is target practice. Don’t be a dummy and ride exploits
bareback. Tut tut. Always practice in a lab. For every action there is a reaction. Observe,
learn, practice, profit. For your career with not be cut-short... But its not just pen-test
labs...Capture the Flag, Hands-on Practicals when hiring so-called experienced pen-testers
etc.

25. Assurance Testing
Package Golden
Image as AMI
Upload, launch [1...n]
Apply patches,
workarounds
& run tests
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Then on the defensive side of the house, what about someone to test your mitigating
controls...or heaven forbid, patches! Deploying new security tools? Again, good to have a
lab. Or 3. Or 7.

26. During a
Pen-Test?
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Need a disposable IP?
Need to run a phishing scam?
The latest svn update from the Social Engineer Toolkit burning a hole in your toolkit?

27. What’s your use case?
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28. It’s a Commodity
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The key to remember when thinking about cloud is that its a commodity. You get what you
pay for. But sometimes, commodity is just what you want.

29. Infrastructure as a
Service
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So what are we talking about? We’re talking about using infrastructure as a service to create
on-demand test labs. We’re intentionally confining ourselves to just 1 layer of the cloud
services model: we’re ignoring Platform as a Service and Software as a Service. In fact, Skylab
itself will have attributes of platform and software as a service in terms of doing some of the
heavy lifting for you.

30. Design
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Lets touch on some design principles

31. Design Principles
Hit common use cases
On demand
Infrastructure as code
("agility")
Cost-conscious
Hardware reuse: bring
your own lab, or not
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Need a disposable IP?
Need to run a phishing scam?
The latest svn update from the Social Engineer Toolkit burning a hole in your toolkit?

32. Design Principles
Hypervisor agnostic: Xen,
kvm, VMware
Security test lab "features"
Freedom: open source
Pragmatic: don't reinvent
infrastructure wheels
Scriptable & Fun
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Need a disposable IP?
Need to run a phishing scam?
The latest svn update from the Social Engineer Toolkit burning a hole in your toolkit?

33. Shopping for a Cloud
Platform
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34. OPEN?
API
Core
Source
Development
Decision Making
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35. Private/Public/Hybrid
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36. Private
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37. Hybrid
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38. RH Delta-cloud
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Turbo charge your hybrid cloud with RedHats Delta Cloud...access more cloud providers

39. Don’t Forget
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Leaving cloud compute instances running at the cloud provider does actually cost money. It
is surprisingly easy to do though. Do it once and you’ll feel stupid, do it twice and you’ll find
yourself writing a script to remind you not to feel stupid :)

40. Terms of Service
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Know the terms of service of your hosting and/or cloud provider. Check clauses about
introduction of malware in particular.

41. Cloud Networking
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42. Public Cloud
Networking 101
One NIC Per VM
Limited Routing
Basic Firewalls
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Use cases

43. Overlay Networks
An overlay network is a computer network
which is built on top of another network.
Nodes in the overlay can be thought of as
being connected by virtual or logical links,
each of which corresponds to a path,
perhaps through many physical links, in the
underlying network
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Use cases

44. Amazon VPC
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Amazon recently opened up their Virtual Private Cloud, currently beta
This is a cloud provider specific network overlay
Hook up your existing network. Software VPN on your side, Hardware on their side.
All traffic traverses the customer gateway - no Internet access from within VPC
Can use existing AMIs and Elastic Block Storage
Amazon rapidly innovating - keep up with release details!

45. VPNCubed
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The first overlay network service for the cloud market.
Based on OpenVPN, uses CohesiveFT created VMs as cloud VPN endpoints
Supports multicast.
Cross connect clouds, extend your home/business network
Supports Amazon EC2 and gogrid

46. Config Management
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47. Chef from Opscode
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48. The
Practical
Bit
(wakey, wakey)
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49. DEMO: Sneak Peek
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50. TO DO
Establish Amazon VPC Connection
Build Visibility VM (Splunk + extras)
Chef Recipes for Security Extras & CM
Build Range of Victim/Enterprise VMs
Create easy “DC Creator” front-end script
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51. Futures
Beyond x86
Multi-provider
Documentation
VMware Support
Enhanced routing
Explore ecosystem
Improved Automation
Define more Use Cases
More Security Related AMIs
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52. cloudsecurity.org
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Check out cloudsecurity.org/resources for recommended reading on cloud security.

53. Project Updates
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Recently created the cloud security forum (cloudsecurity.org/forum)- an independent hang
out for IT and IT security people to discuss cloud security issues
Topic areas out as per CSA security domains
There’s a dedicated forum for Skylab which I’ll be posting to with progress updates.
If you have suggestions for Skylab, please share with me there.

54. Credits
Stormtroopers: Stefan
http://stormtroopers365.com/
Creators of KVM, Xen, Qemu,
libvirt, OpenNebula,
DeltaCloud, Chef, libcloud
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Stefan made some great images and all credit is due to him.
I’m also extremely grateful for all the open source software I’m gluing together for this
project. Skylab would have been very difficult, it not impossible, for a sole person to piece
together without all the effort from numerous developers.

55. Questions?
craig@cloudsecurity.org / @craigbalding
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