Preface

As our society moves from an analog world to a digital world, it is easier for ill-intentioned people to attack privates, companies, banks, and government for their advantage or for the other party's damage. Since the beginning of information technologies, we have seen a shift to digitalize our world, and this process has been accelerating ever since. The virtualization has concentrated more data on even less systems, making these systems very nice targets for attacks. Making the clouds secure will be one of the biggest security challenges for the next 10 years, from my point of view. The goal of this book is to prepare cloud administrators for this challenge.

The structure of this book is designed to give you a wide perspective on security. This has multiple reasons. First of all, programs change, but a secure mindset is often more important than knowing how to secure a very specific software, also because very often people specialize in a particular part of the IT sector and kind of lose track of what there is around the technology they master. This often leads to huge security problems in between the areas of expertise of the various people of the team.

OpenStack allows very powerful infrastructures, but tends to be pretty complex, being a solution to many different situations, making it, often, very interesting from a business point of view, but very hard to manage safely.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, First Things First – Creating a Safe Environment, teaches you about a lot of basic security concepts. Also, you'll see a lot of things to be kept in mind while designing a data center as well as new security policies.

Chapter 2, OpenStack Security Challenges, allows you to discover the different kinds of clouds and how this affects security and also the possible types of attacks. In the second part of the chapter, you'll see the various parts of OpenStack and what they do.

Chapter 3, Securing OpenStack Networking, shows you how the OSI networking model works from a security perspective and a lot of possible network attacks for each OSI level. In the second part of the chapter, you can see how to harden OpenStack and a few utilities OpenStack networking can provide to make your workflow more secure.

Chapter 4, Securing OpenStack Communications and Its API, explains how the encryption works in our world, and, therefore, what its strengths and weaknesses are. You'll also learn how to enable encryption for the OpenStack APIs.

Chapter 5, Securing the OpenStack Identification and Authentication System and Its Dashboard, shows you how the identification, authentication, and authorization systems work, as well as how OpenStack can be configured to meet your needs from this point of view.

Chapter 6, Securing OpenStack Storage, explains how the different kinds of storage work from a security standpoint and the options you have to implement them in OpenStack. Also, you will see some configuration to make the storage more resilient to attacks.

Chapter 7, Securing the Hypervisor, lists all the hypervisors that can be used with OpenStack. You'll find a lot of insight on how to choose the right hypervisor for you and how to secure it.

What you need for this book

To follow the examples in this book, you'll need an installation of OpenStack. This can be as big as multiple hardware machines or as little as a single virtual machine. For the goals of this book, it does not matter.

As for the operating system on the host, I suggest using CentOS/RHEL 6 or 7, because this is the configuration that is directly touched by the examples, but you can easily adapt the examples to any other Linux distribution.

Who this book is for

If you are an OpenStack administrator or developer, or wish to build solutions to protect your OpenStack environment, then this book is for you. Experience of Linux administration and familiarity with different OpenStack components is assumed.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "You can find this configuration in the /etc/nova/policy.json file."

A block of code is set as follows:

<VirtualHost <ip address>:80>
  ServerName <site FQDN>
  RedirectPermanent / https://<site FQDN>/
</VirtualHost>

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

policy_module(keystonewsgi, 1.0.0)

require {
  type httpd_t;
  type keystone_var_lib_t;
}

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$ echo "password" | md5sum
286755fad04869ca523320acce0dc6a4 -
Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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