Security Manager for RBD Access Control in Containers
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Solution Overview
Problem
In multi-tenant environments using Rados Block Device (RBD) storage, existing access control methods are inefficient and pose security risks, as they require frequent authentication checks and do not effectively distinguish access rights among users, leading to potential unauthorized access to all RBD devices and lack of activity tracking.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a security manager that establishes trust based on container settings, designating privileged and non-privileged users, and using containerized utilities to reduce security checks and overhead, thereby enhancing access control and security by authenticating users once and allowing future command execution within containers without additional checks.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If frequent authentication checks are performed to ensure security, then security reliability is improved, but system overhead and processing time increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary authentication by establishing trust relationships between containers and RBD devices during container creation or mounting. The security manager pre- validates the container's access rights to the target RBD device using access control rules, and this authentication result is cached for subsequent operations. This eliminates the need for frequent authentication checks during normal operations, resolving the contradiction between security reliability and authentication time.
2Reliability
If access control rules are strictly enforced to distinguish user rights, then security is improved, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The security manager acts as an intermediary component that centralizes the implementation of access control rules. It maintains a policy store containing access control rules and automatically evaluates container credentials against these rules when mounting or accessing RBD devices. This intermediary approach simplifies the overall system architecture by consolidating complex access control logic in a dedicated component rather than distributing it across multiple system elements, thus improving security while managing complexity.
3Ease of operation
If all users are granted access to all RBD devices, then ease of operation is improved, but security risks increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements local quality by granting access rights on a per-container and per-RBD device basis rather than applying uniform access policies system-wide. Each container is evaluated against access control rules specific to its credentials and the target RBD device, allowing fine-grained control where different containers have different access rights to different devices. This enables easy operation for authorized users while preventing unauthorized access, resolving the contradiction between accessibility and security risks.
Data Source
AI summary
An access control system includes a memory, a processor, a host operating system (OS) executing on the processor, a container on the host OS, and a security manager running on the host OS. The container has a set of access control rules and includes a containerized utility. The security manager receives a request to run the utility to complete a transaction, retrieves credentials associated with the user, and determines a status of the credentials. The status of the credentials is privileged if the credentials are included in the set of access control rules and is non-privileged if the credentials are not included in the access control rules. Responsive to determining the status as privileged, the security manager executes an RBD command for the transaction to obtain a target RBD image, retrieves the target RBD image, and records the transaction.