Security

Enhanced vCenter Server Audit Event & Logging in vSphere 6.7 Update 2

04/08/2019 by William Lam 1 Comment

A couple of years back I had published a detailed analysis on vCenter Server's Authentication (AuthN) and Authorization (AuthZ) from an auditing and logging standpoint. This has been the go to reference for many of our customers and the posts also includes a number of log samples which I have documented in the following Github repository.

In addition to serving as a reference for our customers, it has also helped our Product and Engineering teams understand where we still had some gaps and how we could improve the overall user experience. As hinted in the recently announced vSphere 6.7 Update 2 release, which will be available soon, there are number of new auditing enhancements that have been made to both vCenter Server and the vCenter Single Sign-On (SSO) service that I think customers will really appreciate.

"Real" client IP address in Events

When you look at a login or logout Event in vCenter Server today, you may have noticed the user's client IP Address is actually of the vCenter Server rather than the actual remote client's address and the reason for this is explained here. In vSphere 6.7 Update 2, the real client IP Address is now captured and is included in all successful login/logout and failed logins. This information can now enable administrators to easily identify unauthorized access and be able to quickly track down the systems initiating the connections.

Automatically retrieve CVE CVSS score for all ESXi security bulletins

07/20/2018 by William Lam 9 Comments

I always enjoying learning new things, especially when it is outside of my immediate domain expertise and if I can thrown in some Automation to help solve a solution, it is a win for everyone. I bring this up because, yesterday I had noticed an interesting question from one of our field folks where their customer is looking to implement a process for applying ESXi security patches to help determine compliance timeline (e.g. when a specific security update will be applied to infrastructure).

To do this, the customer would like to use the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score which ranges from 0-10, 0 being low and 10 being high. The CVSS score is part of the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) which is also referenced for every ESXi security patch (bulletin) that is published by VMware. The question that came up was how easily it would be to determine the CVSS score for a given ESXi security patch. First, I will outline the "manual" process and once that is understood, I will demonstrate an automated solution which customers can take advantage of to easily retrieve this information for all ESXi security patches.

New SDDC Certificate Replacement Fling

07/11/2018 by William Lam 9 Comments

Certificate lifecycle management is not something anyone looks forward to, it is time consuming and usually not automated. However, it is a necessity for many of our customers. The process gets even more challenging when needing replace certificates across multiple VMware products, not only careful orchestration but also properly reestablishing trust between product just adds another layer of operational complexity. Within the Integrated System Business Unit (ISBU) at VMware, which produces both the VMware Validated Design (VVD) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), the team has been working on a way to simplify certificate management, not only for individual products (working with product teams) but also holistically at the VMware SDDC level.

This initially started with the development of a tool called Certificate Generation Utility (CertGen), which helps customers generate new certificates for various products within the VMware SDDC. Although it was developed for the VVD, any VMware customer who consumed products within the VVD, could also leverage this tool. We all know certificate generation can be a pain, but it is not as challenging or as complex as the actual certificate replacement process itself which is also fully documented by the VVD team here.

This is where the new Fling comes in, the SDDC Certificate Tool, which automates the manual steps outlined by the VVD and helps customers easily replace certificates that they have created (CertGen or another process) and automatically orchestrates this across the different products within the SDDC. The tool is command-line driven and uses a JSON configuration file which can contain all or a subset of the VMware SDDC products, which is great for supporting different environments and allows for easy source control. Extensive pre-checks are also built into the tool to validate the certificates themselves (e.g. expiry, chain validation, etc) also also preventing miss-match of information (e.g. SAN entries, number of nodes, etc) which then get compared against your actual environment before any changes are applied. The JSON also contains a section referred to as Service Accounts, which is merely other VMware product accounts that the tool supports to reestablish trust after replacing the certificate for given product.

Auditing detailed operations within VMware Cloud on AWS using the Activity Log API

06/29/2018 by William Lam Leave a Comment

All operations (UI or API) that occurs within VMware Cloud AWS (VMC), including but not limited to SDDC creation, deletion, updates, network configurations, user authorization/access, etc. is all captured as part of the Activity Log in the VMC Console. Within the Activity Log, customers will be able view the type of operation, the time the operation occurred, the applicable SDDC as well the user of the operation and all of these fields can be filtered out further.

The UI is great for quickly looking up quick changes, however for customers who require auditing level logging, this may not be sufficient. This was actually a question that I had received from a customer who was interested in getting more details but also a way to send this information back to their on-premises environment for auditing purposes. Luckily, the Activity Log actually stores a lot more information than what is shown in the UI and all of this data is available through the VMC API.

All entries are scoped within a VMC Organization and you can use the following APIs to retrieve all activities or a specific activity given the VMC Task Id:

GET /orgs/{org}/tasks - List all tasks for organization
GET /orgs/{org}/tasks/{task} - Get task details

Using ESXi Kickstart %firstboot with Secure Boot

06/26/2018 by William Lam 5 Comments

If you install ESXi via a Kickstart script and make use of the %firstboot option to execute commands on the first boot of the ESXi host after installation, you should be aware of its incompatibility with the Secure Boot feature. If you install ESXi where Secure Boot is enabled, the Kickstart will install ESXi normally only execute up to the %post section. However, it will not execute the %firstboot scripts and if you look at the /var/log/kickstart.log after the host boots, you should see the following message:

INFO UEFI Secure Boot Enabled, skipping execution of /var/lib/vmware/firstboot/001.firstboot_001

If you have Secure Boot enabled, %firstboot is not supported. The reason for this is Secure Boot mandates only known tardisks which can hold executable scripts, and a kickstart script is an unknown source so it can not run when Secure Boot is enabled. If you wish to continue using %firstboot scripts, the only option is to disable Secure Boot and then re-enable it after the installation. A preferred alternative is to convert your %firstboot logic into an external script which can then be applied using the vSphere API (recommended method) and this way you can still customize your ESXi host after the initial installations. I have already filed an internal documentation bug to add a note regarding Secure Boot and %firstboot, hopefully that will roll out with the net documentation refresh.

Quick Tip – What hashing algorithm is supported for ESXi Kickstart password?

05/21/2018 by William Lam 2 Comments

I had a question the other day asking whether the encrypted password which can be specified within an ESXi Kickstart file (denoted by the --isencrypted flag) can use a different hashing algorithm other than MD5? The answer is absolutely yes. In fact, MD5 as a default hashing algorithm has NOT been used for a number of releases, probably dating back to classic ESX (you know, the version that had the Service Console).

For all recent releases of ESXi including 5.5 to 6.7, the default hashing algorithm has been SHA512 for quite some time now. Below are two ways in which you can check which default hashing algorithm is currently being used:

Option 1 - SSH to ESXi host and take a look at /etc/pam.d/passwd

Option 2 - SSH to ESXi host and take a look at /etc/shadow and look at the field prior to the salt.

As a reference:

$1$ - MD5
$5$ - SHA256
$6$ - SHA512