Chris McCoy - Through the Looking Glass Own the Data Center - DEF CON 27 Red Team Offensive Village
Channel: DEFCONConference
Date: 2019-12-13

The data center embodies the heart of many businesses on the Internet. It contains much of the information in a centralized location which provides a huge incentive for those who would wish harm. The data centers in the realm of Cloud may no longer contain just a single entity, but many individual tenants that attach to a common fabric. The Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) aims to meet these needs with a multi-tenant, scalable fabric that interconnects physical hosts, VMs and containers. ACI is Cisco's answer to the centrally-managed Software Defined Network (SDN). The Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) and Nexus 9000 series switches form the brains and backbone of ACI.
A member of Cisco's Advanced Security Initiatives Group (ASIG) will demonstrate their findings during an evaluation of ACI and the APIC, more than three years before the BH2019 talk "APIC's Adventures in Wonderland." Step into the mind of an attacker and scan, probe, and interact with the network fabric to progress from an unauthenticated user to administrator and root of the data center switch fabric. Once inside the system, see how the APIC can be modified in a nearly undetectable manner to provide the attacker unfettered internal access to all the interconnected hosts and VMs in the data center. The target audience for this talk includes those with a technical interest in offensive discovery and secure product development. Participants will receive an overview of how a data center product is viewed in an offensive light.

About Chris McCoy: Chris is a technical leader in Cisco's Advanced Security Initiatives Group (ASIG) and published author of Security Penetration Testing, The Art of Hacking Series LiveLessons with Cisco Press. He has over 20 years of experience in the networking and security industry. He has a passion for computer security, finding flaws in mission-critical systems, and designing mitigations to thwart motivated and resourceful adversaries. He was formerly with Spirent Communications and the U.S. Air Force. Chris is CCIE certified (Emeritus) in the Routing & Switching and Service Provider tracks, which he has held for over 10 years. Twitter: @chris_mccoy