Nowadays the next generation of Data Rooms is blurring the boundaries between physical and virtual environments, between public and private clouds, which leads to the expansion of a number of issues related to the protection of information in cloud computing and which requires continuous improvement. This article will analyze threats Virtual Data Rooms may have.
Possible threats to the Data Room infrastructure
Physical security is based on strict control of physical access to servers and network infrastructure. Network security is based on the construction of a robust threat model that takes into account intrusion protection and a firewall, in order to differentiate internal data center networks on subnets with different levels of trust.
In cloud computing, virtualization technology plays a special role and consists of:
- server virtualization – transfer of physical servers to virtual machines of one host system equipped with a hypervisor – a means of virtualization;
- virtualization of user workstations – centralized storage of workstations in the form of virtual machines on the host system with the provision of separate access over the network from physical workstations;
- terminal virtualization – for an individual terminal user in the operating system creates its own session.
The concept of data room solutions is to provide users with remote dynamic access to services, computing resources, and applications, including operating systems and infrastructure through various access channels, including the Internet. Such a large-scale infrastructure poses increased risks and rather limited ability to control its resources. This is the urgency of the problems of cloud computing – information security and trust of users to cloud providers.
The use of specialized software for the virtual environment requires a significant change in approaches to the information security of cloud systems.
The solution of security problems combines traditional and specific solutions with features that in the process of performing tasks must be optimized to save the productivity of the virtual environment with the protection of information and cloud resources. To ensure the security and integrity of the data, current threats to the virtual cloud infrastructure are investigated. They are the following:
- the lack of control of intra-network traffic, as well as the ability to listen to all traffic between virtual machines;
- compromising client terminals and attacking client browsers;
- unauthorized access to virtualization resources through a hypervisor from a virtual or real environment;
- interception of authentication data for access to the cloud through cloud APIs;
- unauthorized access to the Data Room management console;
- the absence of distributed switches in the virtual infrastructure, which allow the coordination of security policies during the migration of virtual machines;
- data interception during transmission on unprotected external communication channels.
One of the main sources of security threats is the server of centralized management of Virtual Data Room, gaining control over which the attacker gets full access to all virtual machines, virtualization hosts, virtual networks and data warehouses.
How to choose the right provider?
The following effective means of cloud protection are:
- the trusted download of virtualization servers, virtual machine, virtualization management servers;
- segmentation of the virtual infrastructure for processing personal data by a user or group of users;
- identification and authentication of access and access objects in the virtual infrastructure, including administrators of virtualization management;
- access control of access subjects to access objects in the virtual infrastructure, including inside virtual machines.
For antivirus protection of Digital Rooms, it is better to use an agent-free approach that provides comprehensive security without installing an agent module in a secure system, a security gateway that takes over antivirus functions for all Virtual Room.