Cloud Security

This evening I’m off to Brussels, Belgium to attend the very first Brucon - a 2 day information security conference aimed squarely at those curious about technologies from a security point of view.  I’m scheduled to talk about Cloud Security on the last slot on Saturday before the after-party.   Conscious of the timing and location, I’m employing some less-than-subtle marketing tactics to get “bums on seats” as you’ll see below.

Here’s the abstract:

In a hurry? The short version: learn about cloud security and in the process win a tasty Belgian beer by answering easy questions!

When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was photographed standing in front of a vintage 1890s electric generator, it was widely assumed he was paying homage to Nick Carr’s “electric generator” metaphor of utility computing. This was understandable, but quite wrong. Reminiscent of the Bruce Lee movie where the student is chided for failing to look “out there” instead of staring at his own hand, the cloud commentators failed to notice his surroundings. Bezos — and the electric generator — were standing in the middle of a Belgium Brewery! This will be the starting point of our journey through Cloud Security using a fuller flavour metaphor: Belgian beer.

In this presentation I will cover:

• why talking about “cloud” is akin to walking into a Belgian bar and asking for “beer”
• the common cloud architectures and their implications for you - the security dude
• what the beer brewing Trappist Monks can teach us about cloud security
• attacking clouds (aka getting free beer)
• dealing with the hangover: cloud incident response & forensics

I plan to post the presentation online when I get back.  If you will be there, do say hello.

I’m in the middle of preparing for Black Hat Europe where I’ll be speaking about Cloud Security.  Here’s the blurb:

This presentation rips apart the hype and “newfangledness” of Cloud Services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS etc) to expose the ghost in the machine. Just as the human brain has grown, built upon earlier, more primitive brain structures, so it is with the Cloud. With the advent of commercially available, pay-as-you-go public Cloud services, CFOs are casting a weary eye to the CIO in anticipation of joining the great infrastructure linedance in the sky. Meanwhile, vendors are jockeying for position to “enable” the Enterprise Cloud and Cloud brokers are trading excess compute capacity in data centers. What does all this mean from a security point of view? What are the security risks (and benefits)? Are you ready to face the ghosts in the Clouds?

I’m really looking forward to this.  If you’re going to be there, let me know!

Full details of the conference, along with paying 200 Euros less if you register by Wednesday 8th April are here

I’ve been sitting on this for a while and I’m glad I can now finally say it…

I’m delighted to announce that I have been invited to present at the World Summit of Cloud Computing, to be held in Israel on 1-2 December 2008.

The event is organised by Avner Algom from the IGT (Israeli Association of Grid Technologies). Putting my invitation to one side, I have to say its a stunning lineup of speakers. Its a who’s who of Cloud players. Avner has clearly done his homework!

Obviously I’ll be talking about the security aspects of Cloud Computing, delving into some of the areas I’ve written about here and some new material that I’m currently working on.

If you work for a company that is consdering future plans and Cloud Computing, you might want to take a look over the agenda. Compared to some other conferences, the ticket prices seem very reasonable to me.

Registration is now open.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below. I’ll do my best to get them answered. Also, if you know anyone that might benefit from 2 days in a beautiful part of Israel getting up to speed on Cloud Computing, feel free to send them this link.