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> We have started rolling out automatic encryption for the WAN traversal hop of customer VM to VM traffic. ... all control plane WAN traffic within the infrastr

> We have started rolling out automatic encryption for the WAN traversal hop of customer VM to VM traffic. ... all control plane WAN traffic within the infrastructure is already encrypted. In the future we plan to ... also encrypt inter-VM LAN traffic within the data center. It would be nice if this was more explicit. For example, is traffic that is TLS-terminated at their LB reencrypted all the way to the back end VM? At what point is it decrypted again? Are those keys unique to us or are they used for whatever traffic happens to traverse the same network paths? (I assume shared but with software-defined networking maybe it's practical for them to be unique.) What does the "control plane" encompass? In any case, I'm curious what people think about trusting the service provider for inter-service and inter-VM encryption. Do you use the LB's TLS termination? Do you still enable encryption for your DB connections even if it is (or will soon be) redundant with their network encryption?

mentat 10y ago
Anyone with access to the hypervisor at the service provider will have access to plaintext. TLS protects you from service provider network compromise within whatever scopes that covers. If you're in the cloud, you do have to have some basic trust in your service provider as compute is always in plaintext (barring homomorphic encryption).
- blazespin 10y ago
  It's not really an issue of trust but rather defense in depth. You want to protect against rogue employees who can tap into the network, for example.
- xyzzyz 10y ago
  Anyone with access to the hypervisor at the service provider will have access to plaintext. This is mostly true with today's state of the industry, but with upcoming technologies like Intel SGX[1], the hypervisor will not be able to access the plaintext anymore. [1] - https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2013/09/26/protecting-application-secrets-with-intel-sgx https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2013/09/26/protecting...

mentat 10y ago

Anyone with access to the hypervisor at the service provider will have access to plaintext. TLS protects you from service provider network compromise within whatever scopes that covers. If you're in the cloud, you do have to have some basic trust in your service provider as compute is always in plaintext (barring homomorphic encryption).

blazespin 10y ago
It's not really an issue of trust but rather defense in depth. You want to protect against rogue employees who can tap into the network, for example.
xyzzyz 10y ago
Anyone with access to the hypervisor at the service provider will have access to plaintext. This is mostly true with today's state of the industry, but with upcoming technologies like Intel SGX[1], the hypervisor will not be able to access the plaintext anymore. [1] - https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2013/09/26/protecting-application-secrets-with-intel-sgx https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2013/09/26/protecting...