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EGI-InSPIRE:SA1.2-QR15

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1. Task Meetings

Date (dd/mm/yyyy) Url Indico Agenda Title Outcome
02/12/2013 https://www.egi.eu/indico/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=1924 EGI CSIRT team face to face meeting (2-3 Dec 2013) in Bergen Aan Zee, NL Review activities of the previous months and plan for the remainder of EGI-InSPIRE
09/01/2014 https://www.egi.eu/indico/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=2023 EGI SVG meeting Review open vulnerabilities, discussion on Cloud issues and questionnaire for EGI federated cloud providers
30/01/2014 https://www.egi.eu/indico/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=2045 EGI CSIRT team monthly meeting Review activities of the previous month and plan for the coming month
Weekly Video conference meetings (every Monday) Minutes recorded in EGI CSIRT private wiki (not publicly accessible) IRTF weekly meeting Operational security issues are reviewed weekly

2. Main Achievements

The work of the EGI CSIRT (TSA1.2), as ever, is split into several sub-groups, each of which is reported on here. The whole team continues to meet monthly by video conference, except that the November and December meetings were combined into one two-day face to face meeting at the start of December. This meeting also involved participation by security experts from PRACE and EUDAT, continuing our growing collaboration with these infrastructures.

For the Incident Response Task Force (IRTF) two security incidents were handled during the quarter. EGI-20140113-01 is an open incident involving the unauthorized use of Biomed resources. EGI-20140121-01 involved hosts at a site which were used for NTP-based dDOS attacks on third parties. These hosts were not compromised; they were just improperly configured and this is not a Grid related incident. A couple of smaller incident reports were received but these were closed early since they were not relevant to EGI operations.

The IRTF continued to track new security vulnerabilities in operating systems and other non-Grid software, and chase sites who were vulnerable to previously announced problems.

The CSIRT has been an accredited member of the TERENA Trusted Introducer scheme since October 2012. We are now carrying out the necessary steps to achieve full certification. An on-site visit happened in January 2014 with detailed investigation of our polices and procedures. We are awaiting the report from this visit to see what changes are required for full certification.

For the Security Drills team, we were still not able to run the planned NGI Security Service Challenges (SSC) in Germany and Italy. The final technical preparations required should now happen in February allowing the national SSC campaigns to happen soon after. A challenge of the NGI security communication infrastructure has been prepared and will take place during the next quarter.

For the monitoring team, further testing of site-wide monitoring took place at the pilot site (KIT, Germany). Work also continued on improving the combination of data from Pakiti and the Nagios probes to allow better viewing of security issues in a single place. A new security Nagios server was deployed with the latest release of SAM (update 22). New Nagios probes were developed and deployed as required to monitor new critical vulnerabilities from SVG.

The Software Vulnerability Group (SVG) continues to handle reported vulnerabilities. This quarter was somewhat quieter than recent times with 6 new vulnerabilities being addressed, including one high-risk issue. The other five issues were moderate risk or below. An 'SVG fixes' area was provided in the AppDB area of the EGI UMD. https://appdb.egi.eu/store/software/software.vulnerability.group A version of Torque which did not contain any known vulnerabilities was produced and placed in this SVG fixes area. All outstanding security assessments were completed and it has been decided that the next component to be assessed will be CVMFS if volunteer effort becomes available.

Work on the deployment of Emergency Suspension continues. About half of the NGIs have now deployed a national Argus server and testing of this infrastructure continues.

Plans have been made for a number of future training and dissemination events. Plans are well advanced for a one-day training event at the ISGC 2014 event in Taipei in March 2014. A similar event is also proposed for the EGI Community Forum in May (Helsinki).

Two members of the CSIRT attended a workshop of the EGI federated cloud team in Oxford in January. Presentations were given on the importance of operational security and a questionnaire for Cloud providers has been produced. It is clear that considerable work needs to be done on security policies and procedures for the federated cloud service. New procedures for certification of cloud providers are required and we need to develop a new test suite to check basic traceability of actions and developments in security monitoring are likely to be required.

3. Issues and Mitigation

Issue Description Mitigation Description
Funding and effort for operational security in EGI Federated Clouds. Lots of work to do. We need more effort and funding. We will discuss with the EGI.eu management.


4. Plans for the next period

During the next quarter (Q16), the EGI CSIRT team will continue to work on all of its current activities in the same sub-groups. A face to face meeting of the whole team may be held in April if we can find a suitable date and location, if not it will have to happen after the end of EGI-InSPIRE. This meeting will review all our plans for security after EGI-InSPIRE, including the changes needed to cope with security in the EGI federated cloud service.

Apart from the usual ongoing regular operational duties, the following items are mentioned.

For IRTF, planning will continue for incident handling beyond the end of EGI-InSPIRE. Joint discussions on this topic with PRACE and EUDAT will continue. The full certification of the CSIRT in TERENA Trusted Introducer will continue once the report of the site visit is available.

For the Security Drills team, the German and Italian NGI SSC will be performed. Plans will be made for the next set of NGI SSC's. The challenge of the NGI security communication infrastructure will take place.

A full-blown proposal for the deployment of the site-wide monitoring system in EGI will be provided. Monitoring and probes will be developed as required by security incident and vulnerability handling.

SVG will prepare a report on the vulnerability assessments that have happened recently. If volunteer effort is available a security assessment of the CVMFS component will take place. More engagement with the EGI Federated cloud team is required, including participation in the RAT.

Work will continue on the deployment and testing of the Emergency Suspension mechanisms, using the deployed NGI Argus instances.

Various security training courses will be given. These will include ISGC 2014 in Taipei (March 2014) and the EGI Community Forum in May.

Work will continue on the changes required for security policy and procedures in federated clouds, if effort and funding for this activity can be found. A security threat risk assessment for federated clouds will happen as part of the general review of the EGI security risk assessment.