RE: SAN Vulnerabilities

[Dan Lynch <DLynch () placer ca gov>]

Great topic :-)

> SAN Zoning has been compared to the concept of VLANs.  
<snip>
> When I was presented this argument I was asked to explain how this is
> any different than using our firewall to segment our trusted and
> untrusted networks.

A vlan is not a security construct. Neither is a SAN. But a firewall is.

A firewall is designed and implemented specifically to permit certain traffic flows between more trusted and less 
trusted network segments. Configurable rules allow you to restrict traffic to specific protocols, source IP addresses, 
destination IP addresses, and can allow for some forms of authentication. Often, application-layer protections exist to 
assure against protocol violations, and mischief like SQL injection. Logging enables auditing of violations. 

SANs aren't built for this purpose, and don't generally have these capabilities. (I'm no SAN expert, but this is how I 
presented it here. This also applies to vlans and to segregating high risk and high value guests on VMWare hosts.)

> Cost.  Does the risk justify the cost of purchasing a 
> whole new SAN unit for our Web segment?
<snip>
> But when it comes to enumerating active
> exploits, we couldn't find anything other than the proof of concept
> document presented at Black Hat.

Exactly. And what was determined here is that even though the risk is quite low, the cost of recovery (specifically, 
the political cost) approaches infinity. Therefore, nearly any expense is justified (well, at least justified to those 
exposed to political risk; I'm not). We built an entirely separate VM cluster to accommodate a half-dozen or so 
little-used web servers in order to fully segregate them from our high-value internal servers.



Dan Lynch, CISSP
Information Technology Analyst
County of Placer
Auburn, CA

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