Destruction as a Service: Security Through Reanimation

And you see what says "maintain me the most"? And we're good? Two... We're good, we're going. Okay, good afternoon again. the crowd keeps getting a little thinner a little better as we go along here but this is still a great crowd and so have you guys are here uh the next speaker who's really going to get parts of his

Good afternoon everybody. It's really good to be here. I appreciate Phil and all the other folks who facilitated this. Today we're going to talk about a new means of securing virtual networks and virtual machines. John, I'm sorry to interrupt you. Make sure your mic is on. Oh, got it. Yep. Hello. There you go. Thank you, buddy. All right, today we're going to talk about a new means of securing virtual networks and virtual machines that I've been working on for the past little while here. I call it "destruction as a service," but first let's talk a little bit about me. I was born and raised in the computer science side of things. Graduated West Point in

computer science and finishing up this semester with my master's in computer science from Columbus State. I'm very lucky to have some of the faculty from that school here supporting me. But I'm currently a network engineer by trade who loves virtualization and loves security. And I'm incredibly fortunate right now that actually my work allows me to do all those things at the same time. So I could not be happier. But let's just get right into it. So I'm not going to insult anybody's intelligence here. I know a lot of you work with virtualization on a daily basis. But we're going to go over a few basic things just to make sure everybody's on the same page.

as far as server and network virtualization goes. Up here on the left you can see I have a list of some of the amazing things that virtualization has brought to the technology community in the last 15 years or so. A couple I'm just going to highlight is the management and segmentation as well as isolation of networks. This is an incredibly powerful tool that allows us to isolate important assets, isolate users from infrastructure, and manage those independently of each other in ways they've never been able to before. Obviously, what a lot of you are familiar with is the cost benefits. I can, in five minutes, turn on 30 servers in my house right now on my one server blade, whereas years ago that would have just been

inconceivable. Full disclosure here before we go in, I currently use a lot of VMware. I've worked with Zend Server on OpenStack, I've worked with Hyper-V, but I'm most familiar with VMware. So I'm trying to keep my language very vendor neutral, but I will sometimes slip into a little bit of VMware-isms and forgive me for that. So, we're going to go into a few VMisms here just to see if we're all on the same page with some of the things I'm going to be discussing. First of all, a little bit into the VM architecture. Virtual machines are so much more than just an operating system running on your system. More than just being able to run multiple operating systems on your computer. There is entire supporting architectures that can

be deployed that will run these virtual machines in a centralized fashion. So the main aspects of these are the ESXi hosts in VMware, which are your actual bare metal high providers. They're the brute force behind your VMware. Definitely not as smart as the vCenter servers, which, surprisingly enough, can actually run on a VM within ESXi, which is interesting. But the management side of things is handled by vCenter. And vCenter does all the smart stuff, does the deploying, deploying the servers, partitioning and allocating resources, as well as a lot of network management. That sort of thing is all handled at a much higher level than just an ESXi and hosts. And then the third aspect is the user access through the front-end VM systems, whether it's VirtualBox

or VMWorkstation or Play or whatever you're happy to be using. Another thing we want to talk about is Orchestrator now. The word Orchestrator is a VMware term. However, all platforms currently, all the main platforms currently support some level of automation. So you can deploy VMs, Destroy VMs, manage VMs, move networks around, all in an automated fashion. So, for example, PowerShell, you can do a lot in PowerShell, you can do a lot in Python, and some of the other scripting for some of the other VM platforms. Orchestrator is the one VMware uses. We're going to talk about scripting, and that's going to come up a little bit later. Migration. This is still mind-blowing to me, and I do this on a regular basis.