Welcome Guest. | Log In | Register | Membership Benefits


Topics:   Database Security Tech Center : Security Views

DAM In The Cloud

Modifications to DAM for use with cloud infrastructure providers

Sep 07, 2011 | 11:07 PM | 

By Adrian Lane
Dark Reading

A common question people ask when considering cloud deployments is whether they can continue to use their database activity monitoring (DAM) platform. Rich Mogull gave a partial answer to that question last week when fielding questions on cloud security, but I wanted to go into a little greater detail on what you should look for. To keep it simple, I am going to keep the discussion focused on infrastructure providers such as Rackspace, Go Grid, and Amazon's EC2.

Out of the box, most DAM products need some tweaking before they work in a cloud environment. The modifications come in two specific areas: the monitoring server that stores and analyzes data, and the agent that does the data collection. Let's look at the agent requirements first.

While virtualization and the cloud are not the same things, every cloud provider relies on virtualization to provide the multitenant, self-sizing, and metered usage characteristics that differentiate cloud computing. Since the database and the operating system are contained within a virtual machine running atop a hypervisor, the features that many kernel and memory-scanning data collectors rely on need to be "ported." In essence, the agent code is altered to take advantage of APIs in the virtual machine manager (Xen, VMWare, HyperV) to maintain functionality and performance. You'll want to verify the vendor has modified their agents to work in your cloud --- most support only Amazon at this time. Added to the mix are vendor-specific idiosyncrasies in IP addressing, security zones, and certificate-based user authentication schemes. This makes it difficult for kernel-based collectors -- as well as data collection based on native tracing and auditing features -- to fully determine user identity and query source.

When considering data collection, it's worth noting, depending on the cloud provider, that network monitoring won't work. A virtual network is not the same as a physical network. The logical topology differs from the physical reality in that virtual machines can communicate through the same physical backplane, or across an undefined physical network. The virtual machine manager can provide APIs from your cloud vendor to plug a network probe in, or it might not. In simpler terms, there is no cloud equivalent to a span port for you to hook into and see all of the traffic. Further, because of multitenant environments, many providers encrypt VLAN traffic, making "promiscuous" modes of listening impossible.

For the server component, there are a couple of important considerations. Obviously, if your DAM provider does not offer software or a virtual server image, you're out of luck. Most DAM customers are served by physical appliances because this has long been the preference until the advent of server virtualization. Luckily, at this point most every DAM provider offers either software or a virtual appliance, so it should not be a problem. How well these are configured for the cloud is an issue and varies per monitoring vendor. At least one vendor offers prebundled Amazon Machine Images, with suitable initializations scripts, and deployment instructions for monitoring and blocking. Others advertise seamless operation in the cloud, but don't provide the scripts, documentation, or prebuilt images to make it easy for customers to use cloud services.

You'll need to pay attention to the virtual location of your DAM server. For example, Amazon's EC2 security model relies on security zones with strictly defined communication ports. If you want to collect data remotely, then you need to understand the communication ports the agent uses -- hopefully it's not port 80. Second, if you want to deploy DAM as a firewall, you'll need to set up your security zones to force the database connections through the DAM server and configure the network to limit database connections to the private network address space.

Finally, if you are using a virtual server image, make sure you get it directly from the vendor. Community AMIs on Amazon, as one example, are known to occasionally have malware prebundled. Vet the image and make sure you update the installer and load scripts to patch and preconfigure settings to your environment. Taking control of your initialization scripts ensures continuity when you spin up new images to support new databases.

There are a few more subtle issues, but those are the important ones to consider. If you are looking at platform-as-a-service, your issues will be different, and you will need to work with your cloud vendor to determine what is allowed.

Adrian Lane is an analyst/CTO with Securosis LLC, an independent security consulting practice. Special to Dark Reading.



Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Dark Reading encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Dark Reading moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. Dark Reading further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
Subscribe to RSS



Database Security Reports

report Securing The Data Warehouse
Many enterprises are building data warehouses to centralize the ever-increasing information flowing through their organizations into useful repositories. This makes good business sense, but it opens up a slew of concerns from a security standpoint. IT professionals can apply many of the same security best practices used with databases, but there are new lessons to be learned as well.

report Defend Your Data From Malicious Insiders
The biggest threat to your company?s most sensitive data may be the employee who has legitimate access to corporate databases but less-than-legitimate intentions. And while the incidence of insider data breaches has decreased, external attacks often imitate them--and do serious damage. Follow our advice to mitigate the risk.

report Ensuring Secure Database Access
Role-based access control based on least user privilege is one of the most effective ways to prevent the compromise of corporate data. But proper provisioning is a growing challenging, due to the proliferation of "big data," NoSQLdatabases, and cloud-based data storage.

Other reports from the Database Security Tech Center:

Related Content

Establishing a Strategy for Database Security is No Longer Optional
As databases continue to grow in size, complexity and importance, enterprises struggle to identify the most appropriate controls regarding their use and misuse. The report identifies best practices, including: Implementing database activity monitoring to mitigate the high levels of risk from database vulnerabilities, and address audit findings in areas such as database segregation of duties and change management; using data security measures, such as data masking and data encryption; and monitoring privileged-user access and access to critical data.

Database Activity Monitoring Is Evolving Into Database Audit and Protection
In this report, Gartner writes that "Database audit and protection (DAP) represents an evolutionary advance in database activity monitoring tools." DAP suites provide comprehensive, cross-platform support in heterogeneous database environments to protect sensitive data from inappropriate use. Organizations are increasingly concerned with optimizing database security and mitigating risks associated with database vulnerabilities.

Protecting Against Database Attacks and Insider Threats: Top 5 Scenarios
Data security presents a multi-dimensional challenge in today's complex IT environment. Multiple access paths and permission levels have resulted in a broad array of security threats and vulnerabilities. We invite you to read this new eBook: "Protecting against database attacks and insider threats" to learn the top five scenarios and essential best practices for preventing database attacks and insider threats.

Demo: Distributed Database Security with Real-time Monitoring and Audit Protection
Organizations across the globe continue to experience compromised data caused by malicious attacks, web application vulnerabilities or unauthorized changes. View this demo and learn how IBM InfoSphere Guardium? database activity monitoring can help protect your sensitive data in distributed DBMS environments with a holistic approach to data security and compliance.

Look Beyond Native Database Auditing To Improve Security, Audit Visibility, And Real-Time Protection
Today's attacks on enterprise databases are more sophisticated than ever, and they occur so fast that it's often difficult to stop them in real time. Despite significant efforts to protect enterprise databases, the number of records breached has grown each year - due to all types of internal and external attacks and violations of corporate policy.




Featured Webcasts
Featured Whitepapers
Featured Reports