Want to get involved?

[Craig Balding]

If you want to get involved in the Skylab project, please reply to this thread, indicating your experience with cloud services and scripting abilities.  If you haven't already, you'll want to get signed up for an Amazon AWS account and then apply to take part in the Amazon VPC program [beta] - you'll get an answer back straight away.

[Tomasz Miklas]

With very little time left for experiments (if any) maybe there will be something I can help with from time to time.

Cloud experience:
I've started playing with EC2 about a year ago but didn't have much time to do anything useful. Over the last few weeks I've picked up my old project (let's say DIY Boinc - kind of), one of the project plans was to port it to EC2 to solve power/cooling issues and get more flexibility/scalability when running bigger tasks. This way I've built my first AMI Scripting - yes (Perl), VPC - no, not yet.

Nearest plans:
Find some more time and rewrite my 'grid' to scale better, use cloud solutions to run workers - possibly with some extra logic to get the lowest cost per cycle.

I'm sure some of that stuff can feed back to Skylab

[Craig Balding]

Sounds like an interesting project.  Saw your tweets on it the other day.  Look forward to hear more!

And yes, for sure, there will be crossover into stuff useful for Skylab...so welcome along for the ride

[Bart Zolnowski]

I would like to devote some of my time to the Skylab Project. I am fairly new to the Cloud Computing but I am very interested in the subject from the security, regulatory, and compliance point of view.

Cloud Experience:
As mentioned above, I am fairly new to the cloud computing. However, I have been using Linux for about 3 - 4 years, used bash scripting extensively, and wrote some awk scripts etc. I am looking into playing with the Apache Hadoop Project on my own custom built sever. It's a little bit out of date but good enough to run Linux I have used BacTrack, Metasploit, and various vulnerability scanners.

On daily basis I am security fanatic researching and reading whatever I can get my hands on the subject of Security.

Looking forward to working with you on the project.

[Craig Balding]

Great - thanks Bart.  Look forward to collaborating with you.  I plan to organise some tasks in the next week or so that different people can choose to take on.

[clbrooks97]

Hi, Craig. I'm a security teacher, course developer and trainer. My experience with the Cloud so far is minimal: I've looked into EC2 and created and stored some files in S3, and I've written up a couple of training modules on securing storage in the Cloud, as well as doing data forensics in the cloud. As far as scripting goes, I was very adept at Perl and Tcl/Tk at one time, as well as shell scripting, and I can read Ruby and Python code. Skills are quite rusty at this point. I'd like to contribute what I can as time and my day job allow.

[Craig Balding]

All good - thanks for dropping by and welcome to Skylab

[jack]

Hey,
I talked to you a little bit this morning on Twitter. I've been working on something similar to this for the last couple of weeks. I watched the video and it definitely seems like we're on the same track. I've been working on a Backtrack 4 AMI for EC2, which I'm actually planning on uploading today. I'm not totally certain it will work, but I'm hopeful!

One thing I was curious about, were you able to get anything going with the Amazon VPC? You talked about it a bit in the introductory video, but when I looked into it, it seemed like it required too much infrastructure to be very portable/cheap/easy. The route I was taking was more geared towards creating a bastion host and using security groups to restrict access and keep everything contained.

To answer your specific questions, I have a fair bit of experience with the amazon cloud. Mostly for quickly getting up POC systems and the like - somewhat similar to this project it sounds like. I'm pretty good with PHP, Ruby, bash scripting, but haven't scripted a lot with amazon.

Thanks!
JK

[amwinckles]

Hi Craig

At present I'm building a cloud computing security test bed for my research projects so would be very interested in collaborating with your initiative.

Kind regards

Adrian

[Rayj]

Is the Skylab project still alive?   Not much activity in these forums.

Ray

[jimkaskade]

Craig,

I'm curious on your and the communities' view on what other opportunities are being pursued in public cloud security (specifically in IDS/IPS)...outside of the Skylab concept?

Interesting to see the recent Google Android Malware problem...makes one ponder the need for cloud security BI, IDS, IPS for enterprises who all consistently rank "security" as the #1 issue gating their adoption of cloud (translation..."public cloud").

My background....founded, grew, and sold my own SaaS company; worked in private cloud technology for over two years; been a serial entrepreneur and CEO for over 10 years. Sorry, my experience in scripting is not going to help...my focus is on the business-side of things ;-)

Best, Jim

[Craig Balding]

Hi Jim

This topic is focused on Skylab, feel free to start a topic in another forum here.  The quick answer is that Skylab isn't really dealing with cloud security - its about a security "use case"; i.e. on-demand test labs.  I'd suggest taking a look at http://cloudaudit.org and http://cloudsecurityalliance.org for more information around your question.

Cheers
Craig

[ade]

Hi Craig,
just watched the video and done some reading and this seems very interesting.
I am doing a PhD in cloud security but its veyr early days, so know very little about
cloud computing in anger (I'm sure there's a cloud pun in there somewhere!)

I have written a lot in Perl and www scripting languages, but about to get started
in Python and Ruby.

Can I contribute in any way?

Cheers
Adrian

[samcrosoft]

Hi ade,

Please I have recently concluded my masters degree in IT Security and I have been active active user of some cloud technologies. Hosting with EC2, cloud storage with rackspace and Amazon s3. However. I want to take a phd in cloud security and I need some help on how to go about this. I do not know which university to apply to and how to go about it.

Please, I will appreciate your help and your response will go a long way.

Regards

[ade]

Hi, feel free to email me at adrianjduncan at hotmail dot com and I will tell you what I know