The New Network as a Sensor

Before we get into this, we need to talk about what the network as a sensor was before it was new. Conceptually, instead of having to install a bunch of sensors to generate telemetry, the network itself (routers, switches, wireless devices, etc.) would deliver the necessary and sufficient telemetry to describe the changes occurring on the network to a collector and then Stealthwatch would make sense of it.

The nice thing about the network as a sensor is that the network itself is the most pervasive. So, in terms of an observable domain and the changes within that domain, it is a complete map. This was incredibly powerful. If we go back to when NetFlow was announced, let’s say a later version like V9 or IPfix, we had a very rich set of telemetry coming from the routers and switches that described all the network activity. Who’s talking to whom, for how long, all the things that we needed to detect insider threats and global threats. The interesting thing about this telemetry model is that threat actors can’t hide in it. They need to generate this stuff or it’s not actually going to traverse the network. It’s a source of telemetry that’s true for both the defender and the adversary.

The Changing Network

Networks are changing. The data centers we built in the 90’s and 2000’s and the enterprise networking we did back then is different from what we’re seeing today. Certainly, there is a continuum here by which you as the customer happen to fall into. You may have fully embraced the cloud, held fast to legacy systems, or still have a foot in both to some degree. When we look at this continuum we see the origins back when compute was very physical – so called bare metal, imaging from optical drives was the norm, and rack units were a very real unit of measure within your datacenter. We then saw a lot of hypervisors when the age of VMware and KVM came into being. The network topology changed because the guest to guest traffic didn’t really touch any optical or copper wire but essentially traversed what was memory inside that host to cross the hypervisor. So, Stealthwatch had to adapt and make sure something was there to observe behavior and generate telemetry.

Moving closer to the present we had things like cloud native services, where people could just get their guest virtual machines from their private hypervisors and run them on the service providers networked infrastructure. This was the birth of the public cloud and where the concept of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) began. This was also how a lot of people, including Cisco Services and many of the services you use today, are run to this day. Recently, we’ve seen the rise of Docker containers, which in turn gave rise to the orchestration of Kubernetes. Now, a lot of people have systems running in Kubernetes with containers that run at incredible scale that can adapt to the changing workload demand. Finally, we have serverless. When you think of the network as a sensor, you have to think of the network in these contexts and how it can actually generate telemetry. Stealthwatch is always there to make sense of that telemetry and deliver the analytic outcome of discovering insider threats and global threats. Think of Stealthwatch as the general ledger of all of the activity that takes place across your digital business.

Now that we’ve looked at how networks have evolved, we’re going to slice the new network as a sensor into three different stories. In this blog, we’ll look at two of these three transformative trends that are in everyone’s life to some degree. Typically, when we talk about innovation, we’re talking about threat actors and the kinds of threats we face. When threats evolve, defenders are forced to innovate to counter. Here however, I’m talking about transformative changes that are important to your digital business in varying ways. We’re going to take them one by one and explain what they are and how they change what the network is and how it can be a sensor to you.

Cloud Native Architecture

Now we’re seeing the dawn of serverless via things like AWS: Lambda. For those that aren’t familiar, think of serverless as something like Uber for code. You don’t want to own a car or learn how to drive but just want to get to your destination. The same concept applies to serverless. You just want your code to run and you want the output. Everything else, the machine, the supporting applications, and everything that runs your code is owned and operated by the service provider. In this particular situation, things change a lot. In this instance, you don’t own the network or the machines. Serverless computing is a cloud computing execution model in which cloud solution providers dynamically manage the allocation of machine resources (i.e. the servers).

So how do you secure a server when there’s no server?

Stealthwatch Cloud does it by dynamically modeling the server (that does not exist) and holds that state overtime as it analyzes changes being described by the cloud-native telemetry.  We take in a lot of metadata and we build a model for in this case a server and overtime s everything changes around this model, we’re holding state as if there really was a server. We perform the same type of analytics trying to detect potential anomalies that would be of interest to you.

In this image you can see that the modeled device has, in a 24-hour period, changed IP address and even its virtual interfaces whereby IP addresses can be assigned. Stealthwatch Cloud creates a model of a server to solve the serverless problem and treats it like any other endpoint on your digital business that you manage.

This “entity modeling” that Stealthwatch Cloud performs is critical to the analytics of the future because even in this chart, you would think you are just managing that bare metal or virtual server over long periods of time. But believe it or not, these traffic trends represent a server that was never really there! Entity modeling allows us to perform threat analytics within cloud native serverless environments like these. Entity modeling is one of the fundamental technologies in Stealthwatch and you can find out more about it here.

We’re not looking at blacklists of things like IP addresses of threat actors or fully qualified domain names. There’s not a list of bad things, but rather telling you an event of interest that has not yet made its way to a list. It catches things that you did not know to even put on a list – things in potential gray areas that really should be brought to your attention.

If you currently have serverless workloads, or if your developers are starting to play with them, take Stealthwatch Cloud for a spin! There is a 60-day free trial that takes less time to setup than getting a coffee.

Software Defined Networks: Underlay & Overlay Networks

When we look at overlay networks we’re really talking about software defined networks and the encapsulation that happens on top of them. The oldest of which I think would be Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) but today you have techniques like VXLAN and TrustSec. The appeal is that instead of having to renumber your network to represent your segmentation, you use encapsulation to express the desired segmentation policy of the business.  The overlay network uses encapsulation to define policy that’s not based on destination-based routing but labels. When we look at something like SDWAN, you basically see what in traditional network architectural models changing.  You still have the access-layer or edge for your network but everything else in the middle is now a programmable mesh whereby you can just concentrate on your access policy and not the complexity of the underlay’s IP addressing scheme.

For businesses that have fully embraced software defined networking or any type, the underlay is a lie!  The underlay is still an observational domain for change and the telemetry is still valid, but it does not represent what is going on with the overlay network and for this there is either a way to access the native telemetry of the overlay or you will need sensors that can generate telemetry that include the overlay labeling.

Enterprise networking becomes about as easy to setup as a home network which is an incredibly exciting prospect. Whether your edge is a regular branch office, a hypervisor on a private cloud, an IAS in a public cloud, etc. as it enters the world or the rest of the Internet it crosses an overlay network that describes where things should go and provisions the necessary virtual circuits. When we look at how this relates to Stealthwatch there are a few key things to consider. Stealthwatch is getting the underlay information from NetFlow or IPfix. If it has virtual sensors that are sitting on hypervisors or things of that nature, it can interpret the overlay labels (or tags) faithfully representing the overlay.  Lastly, Stealthwatch is looking to interface with the actual software define networking (SDN) controller so it can then make sense of the overlay. The job of Stealthwatch is to put together the entire story of who is talking to whom and for how long by taking into account not just the underlay but also the overlay.

Conclusion

This concludes the first part of our look at the new network as a sensor.  Hopefully we have described the changes over the years that separate the old from new and how the Stealthwatch product has had to adapt to continue to deliver high fidelity threat analytics.  Threat actors get excited about these changes too because it’s a new place for them to hide and persist in your network. Today’s digital businesses must embrace these changes but to remain secure you must not allow the threat actors anywhere to hide making visibility key.  Stealthwatch understands this and is ready when you are.  In part two, we’ll look at the role of another transformative trends that are shaping the way we look at modern networking.