Cloud Penetration Testing

TL;DR

This paper reports on penetration testing of OpenStack Essex, revealing vulnerabilities that could allow unauthorized access or control, and provides security recommendations to mitigate these risks.

Contribution

It systematically evaluates security flaws in OpenStack Essex and offers specific, actionable security improvements to enhance cloud infrastructure safety.

Findings

Vulnerabilities enabling unauthorized access were identified.

Use of insecure protocols like HTTP can compromise security.

A software bug in the Cinder typedelete command was found.

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a series of penetration tests performed on the OpenStack Essex Cloud Management Software. Several different types of penetration tests were performed including network protocol and command line fuzzing, session hijacking and credential theft. Using these techniques exploitable vulnerabilities were discovered that could enable an attacker to gain access to restricted information contained on the OpenStack server, or to gain full administrative privileges on the server. Key recommendations to address these vulnerabilities are to use a secure protocol, such as HTTPS, for communications between a cloud user and the OpenStack Horizon Dashboard, to encrypt all files that store user or administrative login credentials, and to correct a software bug found in the OpenStack Cinder typedelete command.