Architecture – RedThunder.Blog

Guest Blog: Five considerations for OCI IAM in IDCS-migrated tenancies

This is a guest IAM blog written by OCI Security expert Paul Toal.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) comes with its own, enterprise-class Identity and Access Management (IAM) service, which is used to manage users and their permissions within OCI. It can also be used for managing access to resources, applications, and services outside OCI, including on-premises. If you have been using OCI for some time, you may be familiar with Identity Cloud Service (IDCS) and how it was used to layer additional IAM capabilities over the core OCI IAM service. The capabilities from IDCS have now been merged into OCI through the introduction of OCI IAM Identity Domains, meaning IDCS no longer exists as a separate service. There is a great FAQ posted to answer many common questions about this change, including why Oracle has made the change and the benefits of this change.

Oracle has recently undergone the process of automatically migrating all existing OCI customer tenancies from IDCS to identity domains. In this article, we will examine the implications of the migration and the best practices following a tenancy IAM migration.

Advanced Protection : OIC generation 2 & File Server

The below public documentation will give you step by step instructions what needs to be done to protect OIC from malicious and unwanted internet traffic with OCI WAF (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Web Application Firewall).

Configure and protect an Oracle Integration (Process) custom endpoint with OCI WAF

Well that works very well if you just have to protect OIC gen 2 from internet traffic.

Hashicorp’s cidrsubnet function

A while back I witnessed a Terraform presentation where a subnet’s IPv4 CIDR block was constructed from a parent VCN by invoking a Hashicorp function called cidrsubnet. This function is very useful because it can save time when you have multiple VCNs in your Terraform code. And it is universal, it can be used when there are several concurrent Terraform providers in the same code.

The function’s format is like this: cidrsubnet(prefix, newbits, netnum).

The prefix field is for the VCN CIDR. You can enter a variable in the prefix field. For example cidrsubnet(var.vcn_cidr, 8,1). Let’s say that the VCN CIDR is 10.0.0.0/16, then the value of var.vcn_cidr is 10.0.0.0/16. So, the function looks like this: cidersubnet(“10.0.0.0/16”,8,1).

The newbits value is the number of digits that you will be adding to the actual CIDR value. 16 + 8 = 24, so the subnet will be a /24 subnet.

The netnum value is for completing the actual subnet, and it depicts the “raw” decimal number of the binary portion of the subnet side of the CIDR, in this case is the third octet. The result for the subnet is 10.0.1.0/24.

This example illustrates it better:

cidrsubnet(“10.1.2.0/24”, 4, 15). 24+4 = 28, so the subnet will be a x.x.x.x/28 subnet.

The value in the netnum field will help us identify which of the 16 possible /28 subnets we’re creating. On a /28 subnet, in the fourth octet, the four left bits are the subnetwork bits. Convert 15 (the netnum value) to binary and you will get 1111. Place it on the subnetwork side of the fourth octet and you will get 1111|0000. The decimal value of the whole octet is 240, therefore the subnet is 10.1.2.240/28.

This is optimal, isn’t it?

Virus & Malware Scanning Object Storage in OCI

If you’re like me, then working in IT means you also assume Tech Support duties for friends, family, and those distant relatives that only seem to call when they’ve got a problem.

I just clicked on this link, and my computer is doing something weird. I think my PC has a virus, what do I do?

When it’s just a single computer, the answer is simple, contain and validate the rouge software is removed, install an AV solution, change their passwords, enable MFA, and provide some education on what to look out for next time.

But now imagine you’re an organisation building a new application, or are moving applications to the cloud. Are you simply performing a lift-and-shift or are you planning to make use of cloud native services? Where are you going to store your data, specifically user uploaded files? Object Storage was built specifically to solve the challenges of how to store unstructured data in the cloud.

However, there is a catch. If you were previously storing files on a server file system, then it’s likely you were also running an anti-virus / anti-malware solution to identify malicious files. With Object Storage the underlying file system is transparent, so you can’t install AV, yet many compliance requirements still state “Uploaded files must be scanned for viruses and malware”.

Bastion Access For Minecraft

In the previous post, I did some work in managing Security Lists to protect the Minecraft Server. To read about that, head (here). Another method of connecting to the Minecraft Server is through a Bastion Host. As part of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, it is free to create a session through the Bastion Service (service limits do apply). Here’s a brief encounter of getting this up and going.

Using OCI Bastions with PuTTY

Recently, Oracle rolled out the OCI Bastions service, which is designed to simplify the process of accessing instances which do not have a public IP address. They are really easy to use, with simple commands to allow access to these internal hosts… if you are using a Unix shell. Unfortunately I suffer from being quite wedded to various tools, and as a Windows user, I tend to use PuTTY to access hosts via SSH, so this blog post will detail both the OCI Bastion service in a little more detail, as well as how I continued to resist changing my old habits, and set up connections using the OCI Bastion service using a number of components of the PuTTY suite of tools.

Get OCI Arcade Free on Arm

There’s been numerous announcements about Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) adding Arm-based Compute to the list of Virtual Machine (VM) Shapes. Check some of the announcements (here) and (here).

You can also watch it (here) too with Clay Magouyrk, Executive Vice President, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Note: The link above has more content and videos.

Have you seen the OCI Arcade? We have built the architecture deployable on OCI Always Free Tier.

Recently in the OCI Always Free Tier, an additional services has been added to include 4 cores and 24 GB of RAM of Ampere A1 Compute. With this additional capacity, it made sense for OCI Arcade to be ported to this A1 Compute Shape. Here is what we did and why.

Secure Inter-Service Communication in OCI

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides a ton of useful services for automating and orchestrating behaviours in your cloud environment, and while they are often pretty handy on their own, leveraging them together gives almost complete flexibility on what you can achieve. Want to trigger a backup using a command in slack, then have a message get sent back when it completes? Sure! Want to periodically poll a log API and archive the results? Easy. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides a number of inbuilt capabilities, as well as the ability to jump into arbitrary code to build elaborate automation flows, and this blog post will focus upon the security constructs around this, looking at how services can be authorised to invoke one another, as well as how they authenticate themselves, while avoiding storing sensitive data in insecure ways. This post is intended as an overview of the concepts, and will be referenced in more concrete ways in future.

Enhance the security of your website with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s Web Application Firewall

Oracle recently introduced a Web Application Firewall (WAF) to further enhance and secure Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offerings. The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure WAF is based on Oracle Zenedge and Oracle Dyn technologies. It inspects all traffic destined to your web application origin and identifies and blocks all malicious traffic. The WAF offers the following tools, which can be used on any website, regardless of where it is being hosted:

Origin management
Bot management
Access control
Over 250 robust protection rules that include the OWASP rulesets to protect against SQL injection, cross-site scripting, HTML injection, and more

In this post, I configure a set of access control WAF policies to a website. Access control defines explicit actions for requests that meet conditions based on URI, request headers, client IP address, or countries and regions.

Continue reading “Enhance the security of your website with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s Web Application Firewall”

Getting started with OCI Traffic Management

Over the past week, Oracle has soft-launched a range of new services that leverage the capabilities of our Dyn investment to offer a significant enhancement to the native Edge management capabilities of our second generation cloud. These services include:

Traffic Management Steering Policies
Health Checks (Edge)
Web Application Firewall

I’ll reserve my discussion on the Web Application Firewall for a later post, but what I’d like to discuss today is Traffic Management, and how it can be leveraged to deploy, control and optimise globally dispersed application services for your Enterprise.

Continue reading “Getting started with OCI Traffic Management”