Background

While the need for security and integrity is well-recognized, it is less often well-implemented and maintained. Security assessments and industry reports regularly show how sporadic and inconsistent security configurations become for organizations both large and small. Published recommended security practices and settings remain unrecognized or unused in many environments and existing, once secured, deployments suffer from atrophy due to neglect.

Why is this? There is no one answer. Some organizations are simply unaware of the security recommendations, tools, and techniques available to them. Others lack the necessary skill and experience to implement the guidance and maintain secured configurations. It is not uncommon for these organizations to feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of recommendations, settings and options. Still others may feel that security is not an issue in their environment. The list goes on and on, yet the need for security and integrity has never been more important.

Interestingly, the evolution and convergence of technology is cultivating new ideas and solutions to help organizations better protect their services and data. One such idea is being demonstrated by the Immutable Service Container (ISC) project.

Immutable Service Containers

Immutable Service Containers are an architectural deployment pattern used to describe a platform for highly secure service delivery. Building upon concepts and functionality enabled by operating systems, hypervisors, virtualization, and networking, ISCs provide a security-reinforced container into which a service or set of services is deployed.  By expressing core design principles, such as those embodied in the Sun Systemic Security strategy, along with functional and non-functional requirements, ISCs are not constrained to a particular product or technology, but rather can be implemented using a variety of ways.  As part of a more holistic view, it is expected that Immutable Service Containers will form the most basic architectural building block for more complex, highly adaptive and autonomic security architectures. The goal of this project is is to more fully describe the architecture and attributes of ISCs, their inherent benefits, their construction as well as to document practical examples using various web-scale software applications. 

Benefits

By designing service delivery platforms using the Immutable Service Containers model, a number of significant security benefits:

• For application owners:
  • ISCs help to protect applications and services from tampering
  • ISCs provide a consistent set of security interfaces and resources for applications and services to use or rely on
• For system administrators:
  • ISCs isolate services from one another to avoid contamination
  • ISCs separate service delivery from security enforcement and monitoring
  • ISCs can be (mostly) pre-configured by security experts
• For IT managers:
  • ISCs creation can be automated, pre-integrating security functionality making them faster and easier to build and deploy
  • ISCs leverage industry accepted security practices making them easier to audit and support

Detailed Information

• Architectural models and principles
• Private Virtual Networking models
• Autonomic Security use cases

Implementations

OpenSolaris

An OpenSolaris Immutable Service Container "preview" implementation exists and is available including source code, examples, and other content.

Additional Reading

Presentations

• Immutable Service Containers Technical Overview (01-DEC-2009, v1.3)
• Immutable Service Containers Technical Overview (07-AUG-2009, v0.4)
• Immutable Service Containers Technical Overview (CEC 2008, v0.2)

Other Media

• Innovation@Sun: Immutable Service Containers - Addressing Security in a World of Changing Deployment (24-AUG-2009, BlogTalkRadio)

• HELDENFunk: Immutable Service Containers (03-APR-2009, .mp3)