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Research Study – All Your Clouds are Be­long to us – Se­cu­ri­ty Ana­ly­sis of Cloud Ma­nage­ment In­ter­faces

All Your Clouds are Be­long to us – Se­cu­ri­ty Ana­ly­sis of Cloud Ma­nage­ment In­ter­faces – Juraj So­mo­rovs­ky, Mario Hei­de­rich, Meiko Jen­sen, Jörg Schwenk, Nils Grusch­ka, Luigi Lo Ia­co­no. In Pro­cee­dings of the ACM Cloud Com­pu­ting Se­cu­ri­ty Work­shop (CCSW), 2011.

  • “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 mo­di­fied, 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.”
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