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Access over Ethernet: Insecurities in AoE
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SUMMARY
ATA over Ethernet (AoE) is an open standards based protocol which allows
direct network access to disk drives by client hosts. AoE has been
incorporated into the mainstream Linux kernel, recently been the subject
of a Slashdot article, and it appears that it is a SAN technology which is
here to stay. This paper investigates the insecurities present in the AoE
protocol and suggests how you can deploy AoE infrastructure without
worrying about a wide scale compromise.
DETAILS
What is AoE?
ATA over Ethernet (AoE) is an open standards based protocol that allows
direct network access to disk drives by client hosts. It has been
developed by Coraid ( The Linux Storage People ) as a SAN technology and
it has been adopted for use by many Universities and US Government
agencies. Coraid provides a hardware AoE cluster implementation called
EtherDrive . The Coraid website has downloadable case studies from NASA
and the University of Alaska. The claim is that AoE delivers a simple,
high performance, low cost alternative to iSCSI and FibreChannel for
networked block storage by eliminating the processing overhead of TCP/IP.
Support for AoE is native in the linux kernel as of version 2.6.11.
AoE is a stateless protocol which consists of request messages sent to the
AoE server and reply messages returned to the client host. Some messages
contain ATA commands, and any data associated with the transaction. Other
messages relate to the Config/Query feature of the protocol, to set and
query a small amount of out of band data. The formats of these messages
are simple and have two forms: ATA messages, and Config/Query messages.
Both share a common header format that facilitates network delivery. AoE
utilizes the standard Ethernet MAC header for IEEE 802.3 Ethernet frames.
AoE has a registered Ethernet type of 0x88A2.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
The information has been provided by
<mailto:morgan@security-assessment.com> Morgan Marquis-Boire.
The complete paper can be downloaded from:
<http://www.security-assessment.com/files/whitepapers/Insecurities_in_AoE.pdf>
http://www.security-assessment.com/files/whitepapers/Insecurities_in_AoE.pdf
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