Protecting Your Enterprise Network from Vendor App Servers?

anomaly wonders: "I work for a company with a large IT infrastructure. We have lots of applications in our environment. For a number of applications, vendors provide the apps, and provide core support to those app servers. Our vendors are notorious for demanding superuser access to the boxes that support their applications. To protect our enterprise network from attacks allowed in by well-meaning but less-than-perfectly-competent vendors, we have set up a quarantined network for each vendor. This works well when the model is ASP-like and all of the components live on a single box, but fails when the application needs to be connected to one or more enterprise applications (RDBMS, smtp, they want backup, etc) or when it needs to be connected to lots of target systems inside our environment on lots of different ports. How can I restrict a vendor/application server's access to our enterprise network while still providing platforms to make the applications productive for our user community?" "Frequently vendors can't restrict their applications to run on a limited set of ports. Most of the time they stare blankly when we want their application to run as something less than superuser.

Our biggest challenge is keeping track of all of the dependencies and managing what ports need to be allowed to which destinations. Of course, when security is tight our business-types say 'you're breaking my application.'

What can you suggest about how to provide access to applications, patch/protect the OS on the app server, and protect the enterprise network? What does your organization do?"

Comments

Layer 7 Firewall

[passthecrackpipe]

You need a Layer 7 Firewall, a.k.a. an application level firewall. Something like Zorp is a good start, but you probably need something with a bit more intelligence about the applications you are talking about though.

L7 Firewalls usually get a bad rap because they tend to be pretty fussy in setup, something you can't really avoind with this kind of stuff. Also, if I was in your shoes, I would learn to stop worrying and start loving tight-ass SLA's...

Tell them to screw off..

[Heem]

Seriously.

I built a network for vendor lab equipment that was it's own netowrk, connected to the main network via a file server with 2 nics and NO routing. Therefore, file could be transfered from the lab network to the file server, and then from there to any of the main networks, of course after they had been scanned for viruses and such, since anti virus software usually would not run on their equipment. My rules were firm and backed by higher-ups - if you couldnt get your equipment to work in the enivroment given, or with only minimal flexibility from me (for example i'd write scripts to move their files automatically to the main, backed up network or something simple like that) - then we will find another vendor to provide us a solution that fits. Period. I never had any problem with a vendor once they heard the terms. They won't make money off us if they can't make the system work in our environment.

Re:Tell them to screw off..

[Jonathan the Nerd]

"I often reflect that if 'privileges' had been called 'responsibilities' or 'duties', I would have saved thousands of hours explaining to people why they were only gonna get them over my dead body."

-- Lee K. Gleason, VMS sysadmin

Switch vendors

[31415926535897]

Our vendors are notorious for demanding superuser access to the boxes that support their applications.

There are a few things you can do in this case:
1. Get a different vendor (if the application truly does require su for vendor support).
2. Reqest different support staff from the vendor (do this if the app doesn't require su but the support staff is too lazy).
3. Learn how to support the app in-house

I am very serious on these points. You do not want to give root access to people that should not need it. If they say they need it, they have an awful application.

The place I work has a vendor area fenced off from the rest of the server room, and the vendors only have access to what they need. If they need more privileges, the IT guys watch them like a hawk until they're done.

Re:Switch vendors

[ischorr]

"If they need more privileges, the IT guys watch them like a hawk until they're done." ...And hopefully your staff *is* there for them when they need other access, questions about other pieces of the environment, etc.

I've worked escalation support for a large storage vendor for a number of years, and while I completely understand (and agree with!) limiting vendor access, I find that IT departments tend to be *very* unresponsive when the vendor support folks need their help.

It's not exactly efficient, for example, when I have to wait 7 hours for logs to be uploaded, 5 hours for the "network guy" to respond to a page and fix the duplex mismatch he created that's causing 50% of packets from our systems to clients to be dropped, weeks for the system admin to stop piddling around and get Sun on the phone when we have valid interoperability issues (Sun won't talk to most other vendors except through the common customer), etc.

In the meantime, in my experience, the CIO tends to lambast the vendors for "poor responsiveness" and "terrible support" - though the smart ones eventually realize that the IT staff is shooting themselves in the foot, and do something about it.

IT departments that are responsive to vendors, on the other hand, are a breeze to work with, and issues are typically resolved many times faster.

My suggestion

[oexeo]

Our vendors are notorious for demanding superuser access to the boxes that support their applications. To protect our enterprise network from attacks allowed in by well-meaning but less-than-perfectly-competent vendors, we have set up a quarantined network for each vendor.

What can you suggest?

Find some better vendors?

I go through this all of the time

[flying_monkies]

From the vender side.

First: It's amazing how many people haven't got a CLUE. "Don't give it to them or get another vender" isn't an option. When you're running a 24x7x365 system and expect sub 1 hour response time from your venders (our customers do) you're going to have to give some.

All of the boxes we hook up have phone lines into them. If security is an issue on dial-in access, we set it up as follows:

Modem is enabled dial-out only, no dial in access.
If the box dials home, we contact the administrator, identify who we are and which box has troubles and have them enable access to the server/hardware and reset the root password temporarily on the box. This occurs only if it's something we haven't already configured to work with sudo.
We then keep logs of the entire session, then email it to the customer when we're done.
When we're done, we have them reset the root password and disable dial-in on the modem again.
If we require access to a network resource from the machine, we're onsite with the customer shoulder surfing.

We do this at secure military sites, financial institutions, etc. and have yet to have an issue in 20 years.

heh, my experience is the opposite

[stratjakt]

As one of those vendors for governments, I have to constantly deal with some moron admins who refuse to give me any access to the machine, yet CONSTANTLY call for support.

I don't generally need superuser access on the machine, since generally the only thing that gets screwed up is the data in the RDBMS (you know, user error).

I had one propellerhead go around in my database deleting tables and columns he felt they didn't need. He told me on the phone "we don't use timestamps here". One of those slam your head on the desk conversations. These are civil servants with lifetime jobs, and maybe they knew all about VAX in 1970, but goddamn if they aren't dense.

They tend to think that RAID is a magical "never need to backup ever" solution. I just love it when they call me up after their second RAID-5 drive failed, and I ask them when they last did a backup - and they go "uhhhh we don't need to backup we gots RAID".

Then I explain how RAID has nothing to do with archival or backups, etc, etc.. And I pull out the backup I made last time they had a major upgrade and tell them they have to reenter every parking ticket for the last 8 months, and they threaten and bitch how it's my fault and I tell them I'm not their admin, and if they really want to go to their bosses and fess up how incompetent they are they can go ahead.

Frankly, I'd love for some more competent clients. Of all of them, I can think of one who has any clue what to do with a computer.

But then sometimes they call with a problem that requires fixing on the machine. I'm not going to sit on the phone talking them through shit, I'm not going to email them scripts or code, etc. More than once I've had to tell them that if they don't give me access it wont get fixed.

If it's a problem for you, give them superuser rights when they need it, when they're done doing maintainance, take it away.