Category Archives: Cloud

There are a couple military concepts that have bled into technology and in particular into IT security, a DMZ being one of them. A Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) is a concept where there is established control for what comes in and what goes out between two parties and in military terms you can establish a “line of control” by using a DMZ. In a human-based DMZ, controllers of the DMZ make ingress (incoming) and egress (outgoing) decisions based on an approved list–no one is allowed to pass unless they are on the list and have proper identification and approval.

In the technology world, the same thing is done based on traffic between computers. Decisions to allow or disallow the traffic can be made based on where the traffic came from (origination), where it is going (destination) or even dimensions of the traffic like size, length, or even time of day. The basic idea being that all traffic is analyzed and is either allowed or disallowed based on determined rules and just like in a military DMZ, there is a line of control where only approved traffic is allowed to ingress or egress. In many instances a DMZ will protect you from malicious activity like hackers and viruses but it also protects you from other configuration and developer errors and can guarantee that your production systems are not talking to test or development tiers.

Lets look at a basic web tiered architecture. In a corporation that hosts its own website they will more than likely have the following four components: incoming internet traffic, a web server, a database server and an internal network. To create a DMZ or multiple DMZ instances to handle their web traffic, they would want to make sure that someone from the internet could only talk to the web server, they would also want to verify that only the web server can only talk to the database server and they would want to make sure that their internal network is inaccessible by the the web server, database server and the internet traffic.

Using firewalls, you would need to set up at least the below three firewalls to adequately control the DMZ instances:

1. A firewall between the external internet and the web server
2. A firewall in front of the internal network
3. A firewall between your web servers and database server

Of course these firewalls need to be set so that they allow (or disallow) only certain types of traffic. Only traffic that meets certain rules based on its origination, destination, and its dimensions will be allowed.

Sounds great, right? The problem is that firewalls have become quite complicated and now sometimes aren’t even advertised as firewalls, but instead are billed as a network-device-that-does-anything-you-want-that-can-also-be-a-firewall-too. This is due in part to the hardware getting faster, IT budgets shrinking and scope creep. The “firewall” now handles VPN, traffic acceleration, IDS duties, deep packet inspection and making sure your employees aren’t watching YouTube videos when they should be working. All of those are great, but it causes firewalls to be expensive, fragile and difficult to configure.  And to have the firewall watching all ingress and egress points across your network, you usually have to buy several devices to scatter throughout your topology.

Additionally, another recurring problem is that most firewall analysis and implementation is done with an intent to secure the perimeter. Which make sense, but it often stops there and doesn’t protect the interior parts of your network. Most IT security firms that do consulting and penetration tests don’t generally come through the “front door” by that I mean, they don’t generally try to get in through the front-facing web servers but instead they will go through other channels such as dial-in, wireless, partner, third-party services, social engineering, FTP servers or that demo system that was setup back 5 years ago that no hasn’t been taken down–you know the one I am talking about. Once inside, if there are no well-defined DMZs, then it is pretty much game-over because at that point there are no additional security controls. A DMZ will not fix all your problems, but it will provide an extra layer of protection that could protect you from malicious activity. And like I mentioned earlier it can also help prevent configuration errors crossing from dev to test to prod.

In short, a DMZ is a really good idea and should be implemented for every system that you have. The most optimal DMZ would be a firewall in front of each service that applies rules to determine what traffic is allowed in and out. This, however, is expensive to set up and very rarely gets implemented. That was the old days, this is now and good news, the cloud has an answer.

I am most familiar with Amazon Web Services so we will include an example of how do this with security groups from an AWS perspective. The following code creates a web server group and a database server group and allows the web server to talk to the database on port 3306 only.

ec2-add-group web-server-sec-group -d "this is the group for web servers" #This creates the web server group with a description
ec2-add-group db-server-sec-group -d "this is the group for db server" #This creates the db server group with a description
ec2-authorize web-server-sec-group -P tcp -p 80 -s 0.0.0.0/0 #This allows external internet users to talk to the web servers on port 80 only
ec2-authorize db-server-sec-group --source-group web-server-sec-group --source-group-user AWS_ACCOUNT_NUMBER -P tcp -p 3306 #This allows only traffic from the web server group on port 3306 (mysql) to ingress

Under the above example the database server is in a DMZ and only traffic from the web servers are allowed to ingress into it. Additionally, the web server is in a DMZ in that it is protected from the internet on all other ports except for port 80. If you were to implement this for every role in your system, you would be in effect implementing a DMZ between each layer and would provide excellent security protection.

The cloud seems to get a bad rap in terms of security. But I would counter that in some ways the cloud is more secure since it lets you actually implement a DMZ for each service. Sure, they won’t do deep packet analysis or replace an intrusion detection system, but they will allow you to specifically define what ingresses and egresses are allowed on each instance.  We may not ever get a chicken in every pot, but with the cloud you can now put a DMZ on every service.