Save Your Cloud: Gain Root Access to VMs in OpenNebula 4.6.1

In this post, we show a proof-of-concept attack that gives us root access to a victim's VM in the Cloud Management Platform OpenNebula, which means that we can read and write all its data, install software, etc. The interesting thing about the attack is, that it allows an attacker to bridge the gap between the cloud's high-level web interface and the low-level shell-access to a virtual machine.

Save Your Cloud: Exploiting Eucalyptus 4.0.0 and 4.0.1

In a previous post of this series, we showed why a private cloud is not necessarily more secure than a public one and presented a vulnerability in OpenStack. This post focuses on XSS vulnerabilities we found in Eucalyptus, a well-known Cloud Management Platform. We also demonstrate an exploit for these vulnerabilities.

The Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform Eucalyptus emerged from a research project at the University of Santa Barbara and was commercialized in 2009 by Eucalyptus Systems Inc. Eucalyptus mimics Amazon Web Services (AWS), therefore Eucalyptus can manage either Amazon or Eucalyptus VMs.

Save Your Cloud: XSS in OpenStack Dashboard

Maximizing the effectiveness of compute power using an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud service is a common technique nowadays. Private (IaaS) clouds are often advertised as being more secure as public ones, simply because they are "provisioned for exclusive use by a single organization" (source). However, private and public clouds share the same technology; there is no fundamental difference in the techniques employed.