CloudPassage Cloud Security Product Review

Updated:I came across a white paper published by CloudPassage, most likely in the attempt to drive interest in their cloud security product.  It worked, since it resulted in my doing a little digging into their product.  They did bring up a security threat I hadn’t thought of and it was just enticing enough to get me to investigate their offering a little further.  Their paper was focused on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environments like Amazon Web Services (AWS) (reviewed here), or Rackspace (reviewed here).  The CloudPassage paper focused on the security threats within the context of the products that they offer in order to mitigate these threats.

I will review some of the key points made by CloudPassage here, and then I’ll review their solution offering.   Hang on though -- this article assumes you understand cloud IaaS, and some general Linux and security topics.

Patch Management in the Cloud

I was on my way to a lunch appointment when I started thinking of the headache of managing patching in the cloud.  More importantly how would you ensure that your template server that is used to clone for new servers is current?  

To resolve this, I’d love to see a cloud provider offer the ability to patch the dark VM on disk and if you have a local cloud, say using vmWare, do the same thing to your VM on disk.  After all, there’s an exploit to go directly to a VM image, why not a program that will scan that disk image?