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On 24 June 2015 at 09:35, Dulko, Michal <michal.dulko at intel.com> wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Sylvain Bauza [mailto:sbauza at redhat.com]
>> Sent: Wednesday, June 24, 2015 9:39 AM
>> To: OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
>> Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [nova] How to properly detect and fence a
>> compromised host (and why I dislike TrustedFilter)
>>
>> (general point, could we please try not top-posting ? It makes a little harder
>> to follow the conversation)
>>
>> Replies inline.
>>
>> Le 24/06/2015 08:15, Wei, Gang a écrit :
>> > Only if all the hosts managed by OpenStack are capable for measured boot
>> process, then let 3rd-party tool call nova fencing API might be better than
>> using TrustedFilter.
>> >
>> > But if not all the hosts support measured boot, then with TrustedFilter we
>> can schedule VM to only measured and trusted host, but in 3rd-party tool
>> case, only untrusted/compromised hosts will be fenced, the host with
>> unknown trustworthiness will still be able to run VM but the owner is not
>> willing to do it that way.
>> You don't need a specific filter for fencing one host from being scheduled.
>> Just calling the Nova os-services API to explicitly disable the service (and
>> providing a reason) just makes the hosts belonging to the service not able to
>> be elected (thanks to the ComputeFilter)
>>
>> To be clear, I would love to see the logic inverted, ie. something which would
>> call the OAT service for a specific host would then fire a service disable.
>>
>>
>> > So I would suggest using the 3rd-party tools as enhancing way to
>> supplement our TCP/trustedfilter feature. And the 3rd party tools can also
>> call attestation API for host attestation.
>>
>> I don't see much benefits of keeping such filter for the reasons I mentioned
>> below. Again, if you want to fence one host, you can just disable its service,
>> that's enough.
>
> This won't address the case in which you have heterogenic environment and you want only some important VMs to run on trusted hosts (and for the rest of the VMs you don't care).

This is an interesting one to dig into.

I had assumed in this case you put all the VMs that want the
attestation check in a subset of nodes that are setup to use that set.
You can do that using host aggregates and our existing filters.

An external system could then just disable hosts within that subset of
hosts that have the attestation check working.

Does that work for your use case?

Thanks,
John

>> > -----Original Message-----
>> > From: Bhandaru, Malini K [mailto:malini.k.bhandaru at intel.com]
>> > Sent: Wednesday, June 24, 2015 1:13 PM
>> > To: OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
>> > Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [nova] How to properly detect and fence a
>> > compromised host (and why I dislike TrustedFilter)
>> >
>> > Would like to add to Shane's points below.
>> >
>> > 1) The Trust filter can be treated as an API, with different underlying
>> implementations. Its default could even be "Not Implemented" and always
>> return false.
>> >       And Nova.conf could specify use the OAT trust implementation. This
>> would not break present day users of the functionality.
>>
>> Don't get me wrong, I'm not against OAT, I'm just saying that the
>> TrustedFilter design is wrong. Even if another alternative would come up to
>> serve the TrustedComputePool model of things, it would still be bad for the
>> reasons I mentioned below, and wouldn't cover the usecase I quoted.
>>
>>
>> > 2) The issue in the original bug is a a VM waking up after a reboot on a host
>> that has not pre-determined whether the host is still trustable.
>> >       This is essentially begging a feature to check that all constraints
>> requested by a VM during launch are confirmed to hold when it re-awakens,
>> even if it is not
>> >       going through Nova scheduler at this point.
>>
>> So I think we are in agreement that for covering that usecase, it can't be
>> done at the scheduler level.
>> Using TrustedFilter just ensures that at the instance creation time, the host is
>> checked but confuses people because they think it will be enforced for the
>> whole instance lifecyle.
>>
>>
>> >       This holds even for aggregates that might be specified by geo, or even
>> reservation such as "Coke" or "Pepsi".
>> >       What if a host, even without a reboot and certainly before a reboot was
>> assigned from Coke to Pepsi, there is cross contamination.
>> >       Perhaps we need Nova hooks that can be registered with functions that
>> check expected aggregate values.
>>
>> I don't honestly see the point of an host aggregate. Given the failure domain
>> is an host, you only need to trust that host or not. The fact that the host
>> belongs to an aggregate or not is orthogonal to our problem IMHO.
>>
>> >       Better still have  libvirt functionality that makes a call back for each VM
>> on a host to ensure its constraints are satisfied on start-up/boot, and re-start
>> when it comes out of pause.
>>
>> Hum, doesn't it sound weird to have the host being the source of truth ?
>> Also, if an host gets compromised, why couldn't we assume that the
>> instances can be compromised too and need to be resurrected (ie.
>> evacuated) ?
>>
>>
>> >       Using aggregate for trust with a cron job to check for trust is inefficient
>> in this case, trust status gets updated only on a host reboot. Intel TXT is a
>> boot
>> >       time authentication.
>>
>> Isn't that a specific implementation of OAT ? Couldn't we assume some
>> alternative implementations able to do live checks ? I mean, whatever on
>> how you trigger an host check (at boot time or periodically), you can
>> then fire an alarm which would set the necessary remediation actions :
>> fence the host and evacuate the instances
>>
>>
>> > Regards
>> > Malini
>> >
>> >
>> > -----Original Message-----
>> > From: Wang, Shane [mailto:shane.wang at intel.com]
>> > Sent: Tuesday, June 23, 2015 9:26 PM
>> > To: OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
>> > Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [nova] How to properly detect and fence a
>> compromised host (and why I dislike TrustedFilter)
>> >
>> > AFAIK, TrustedFilter is using a sort of cache to cache the trusted state,
>> which is designed to solve the performance issue mentioned here.
>>
>> Fair point, even if it can be a security flaw because we know that
>> caching can be having stale data.
>>
>> > My thoughts for deprecating it are:
>> > #1. We already have customers here in China who are using that filter. How
>> are they going to do upgrade in the future?
>>
>> I didn't said remove the filter, but rather deprecating it. It would
>> basically mean that users would get a LOG warning for the next 2 cycles
>> saying "this filter will be removed in the next future, please consider
>> using other ways".
>>
>> Also, removing a filter from in-tree doesn't prevent you to ship it in a
>> distro since out-of-tree filters can easily be added using a
>> configuration flag.
>>
>> > #2. Dependency should not be a reason to deprecate a module in
>> OpenStack, Nova is not a stand-alone module, and it depends on various
>> technologies and libraries.
>>
>> You made me wrong. The dependency issue is one of the reasons I have
>> serious concerns with that filter, but that's not the only one. From my
>> perspective, like I said, the main compelling reason is that the filter
>> makes a promise it can't sustain (make sure that Nova fences my
>> compromised hosts)
>>
>>
>> > Intel is setting up the third party CI for TCP/OAT in Liberty, which is to
>> address the concerns mentioned in the thread. And also, OAT is an open
>> source project which is being maintained as the long-term strategy.
>>
>> Again, like I said, I have strong respect for OAT. My problem is not
>> with OAT but with TrustedFilter. I'm perfectly fine keeping OAT for
>> performing host checks.
>>
>>
>> > For the situation that a host gets compromised, OAT checks trusted or
>> untrusted from the start point of boot/reboot, it is hard for OAT to detect
>> whether a host gets compromised when it is running, I don't know how to
>> detect that without the filter?
>> > Back to Michael's question, the process of the verification is done by
>> software automatically when a host boots or reboots, will that be an
>> overhead for the admin to have a separate job?
>>
>> I think the real question is : "who will trigger the detection and
>> when?". Given my original thread, I said it can't be Nova because Nova
>> is not designed that way. Please consider the link I gave about HA to
>> see how I feel it can be done (using Pacemaker or not)
>>
>> > Thanks.
>> > --
>> > Shane
>> >
>> > -----Original Message-----
>> > From: Michael Still [mailto:mikal at stillhq.com]
>> > Sent: Wednesday, June 24, 2015 7:49 AM
>> > To: OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
>> > Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [nova] How to properly detect and fence a
>> compromised host (and why I dislike TrustedFilter)
>> >
>> > I agree. I feel like this is another example of functionality which is trivially
>> implemented outside nova, and where it works much better if we don't do it.
>> Couldn't an admin just have a cron job which verifies hosts, and then adds
>> them to a compromised-hosts host aggregate if they're owned? I assume
>> without testing it that you can migrate instances _out_ of a host aggregate
>> you can't boot in?
>> Like I said, I see 3 steps there  :
>>   - periodically check status of the hosts (can be done using a cron
>> job, Nagios or whatever else even Pacemaker or HAProxy) by calling OAT
>> => that would replace TrustedFilter
>>   - if one host is marked compromised, fence the host => my proposal was
>> to disable the service, but yours is good too (move the host to a toxic
>> host aggregate, provided we're using a filter for explicitely removing
>> hosts belonging to that filter to be elected)
>>   - potentially resurrect the instances that were running on that host,
>> and here I proposed calling the evacuate API for rebuilding the instance
>>
>> HTH,
>> -Sylvain
>>
>> > Michael
>> >
>> > On Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 8:41 PM, Sylvain Bauza <sbauza at redhat.com>
>> wrote:
>> >> Hi team,
>> >>
>> >> Some discussion occurred over IRC about a bug which was publicly open
>> >> related to TrustedFilter [1] I want to take the opportunity for
>> >> raising my concerns about that specific filter, why I dislike it and
>> >> how I think we could improve the situation - and clarify everyone's
>> >> thoughts)
>> >>
>> >> The current situation is that way : Nova only checks if one host is
>> >> compromised only when the scheduler is called, ie. only when
>> >> booting/migrating/evacuating/unshelving an instance (well, not exactly
>> >> all the evacuate/live-migrate cases, but let's not discuss about that
>> >> now). When the request goes in the scheduler, all the hosts are
>> >> checked against all the enabled filters and the TrustedFilter is
>> >> making an external HTTP(S) call to the Attestation API service (not
>> >> handled by Nova) for *each host* to see if the host is valid (not
>> compromised) or not.
>> >>
>> >> To be clear, that's the only in-tree scheduler filter which explicitly
>> >> does an external call to a separate service that Nova is not managing.
>> >> I can see at least 3 reasons for thinking about why it's bad :
>> >>
>> >> #1 : that's a terrible bottleneck for performance, because we're
>> >> IO-blocking N times given N hosts (we're even not multiplexing the
>> >> HTTP requests)
>> >> #2 : all the filters are checking an internal Nova state for the host
>> >> (called HostState) but that the TrustedFilter, which means that
>> >> conceptually we defer the decision to a 3rd-party engine
>> >> #3 : that Attestation API services becomes a de facto dependency for
>> >> Nova (since it's an in-tree filter) while it's not listed as a
>> >> dependency and thus not gated.
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> All of these reasons could be acceptable if that would cover the
>> >> exposed usecase given in [1] (ie. I want to make sure that if my host
>> >> gets compromised, my instances will not be running on that host) but
>> >> that just doesn't work, due to the situation I mentioned above.
>> >>
>> >> So, given that, here are my thoughts :
>> >> a/ if a host gets compromised, we can just disable its service to
>> >> prevent its election as a valid destination host. There is no need for
>> >> a specialised filter.
>> >> b/ if a host is compromised, we can assume that the instances have to
>> >> resurrect elsewhere, ie. we can call a nova evacuate c/ checking if an
>> >> host is compromised or not is not a Nova responsibility since it's
>> >> already perfectly done by [2]
>> >>
>> >> In other words, I'm considering that "security" usecase as something
>> >> analog as the HA usecase [3] where we need a 3rd-party tool
>> >> responsible for periodically checking the state of the hosts, and if
>> >> compromised then call the Nova API for fencing the host and evacuating
>> the compromised instances.
>> >>
>> >> Given that, I'm proposing to deprecate TrustedFilter and explictly
>> >> mention to drop it from in-tree in a later cycle
>> >> https://review.openstack.org/194592
>> >>
>> >> Thoughts ?
>> >> -Sylvain
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/nova/+bug/1456228
>> >> [2] https://github.com/OpenAttestation/OpenAttestation
>> >> [3]
>> >> http://blog.russellbryant.net/2014/10/15/openstack-instance-ha-proposa
>> >> l/
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
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>> >
>> > --
>> > Rackspace Australia
>> >
>> >
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