Today I want to focus on the new feature from M16 release that enable customer to have a direct access to NSX Manager UI.

This is for me an interesting capability especially because it gives access to a more familiar interface (at least for customers that already utilise NSX-T) and it also reduces the latency involved with the CSP Portal reverse proxy.

In addition, it enables the access to NSX-T TraceFlow which will be very helpful to investigate connectivity issues.

Let’s have a look at this new Standalone UI mode.

Accessing the standalone UI

There are two ways to access the NSX Manager Standalone UI in VMC on AWS:

In order to choose between the type of access that fits our needs, we need to select it in the Settings tab of the VMC on AWS CSP console.

There are two ways to authenticate to the UI when leveraging the Private IP:

Both accounts have already been created in the backend and their user name and password are accessible below the URLs.

I have chosen the Private IP as I have established a VPN to my test SDDC.

So prior to accessing the NSX Manager, I have had to create a Management Gateway Firewall rule to allow source networks in my lab to access NSX Manager on HTTPS (the predefined group NSX Manager is used as a target).

Navigating the standalone UI

I started by clicking on the first URL here:

After a few seconds, I am presented with the NSX Manager UI:

Networking tab

This tab will give you access to configuring the Connectivity options, Network Services, Cloud Services, IP Management, or Settings.

Basically the settings can be accessed in read only or read/write mode.

Keep in mind you will not have more rights or permissions to modify settings than if you were editing it from the CSP Console.

VPN and NAT options are accessible with same capabilities as from CSP console.

The Load Balancing options is there and is usable only if you have Tanzu activated in your cluster.

For example, for the Direct Connect you can change the ASN number or enable VPN as a backup.

For Transit Connect, you can have a look at the list of Routes Learned or Advertised.

Public IPs allow for requesting new IP addresses for using them with HCX or a NAT rule.

Let see what’s possible to do from the Segments menu.

I was able to edit the settings of one of my segment DHCP configuration.

I was also able to edit my Policy Based VPN settings.

All the other options are reflecting what we can already do in the CSP Console.

Security tab

This Menu is divided into two parts:

Nothing really interesting here, it’s pretty much the same as from the CSP Console as you can see here:

On the Distributed IDS/IPS, I can review the results of my previous penetration testing that I did in my previous post.

Inventory tab

This tab is covering:

Plan and Troubleshoot tab

The tab is covering:

Traceflow option

Let’s have a look more deeply into what this brings onto the table in my next post.

Stay tune!

In my previous post, I talked about the FQDN filtering feature which is one of the new Add-Ons of the Advanced firewall.

In this Part 3 of this multi part blog series, let’s focus on the latest feature, the Distributed IDS/IPS which is part of the newly announced NSX Advanced Firewall for VMware Cloud on AWS.

Introduction to Distributed IPS/IDS

With NSX Distributed IDS/ IPS, customers gain protection against attempts to exploit vulnerabilities in workloads running on VMware Cloud on AWS.

Distributed IDS/ IPS is an application-aware deep packet inspection engine that can examine and protect traffic inside the SDDC. Customers can detect and prevent lateral threat movement within the SDDC using the intrinsic security capabilities of Distributed IDS/IPS. 

Like DFW, Distributed IDS/IPS is built into the hypervisor and inspection can be performed for all traffic coming into or leaving the VM. Since the inspection is performed on all the hypervisor hosts in a distributed manner, there is no single inspection bottleneck that chokes the traffic flow.

Enabling Distributed IDS/IPS

First thing we will do is to activate and configure the Distributed IDS/IPS feature in VMC on AWS SDDC.

If you don’t have already activated the NSX Advanced Firewall add-on, please do so otherwise you will get this message:

Remember in my first Post of this series, I already have shown you how to activate the NSX Advanced Firewall Add On for VMware Cloud on AWS.

Once you have activated the add-on feature, in the browser, Click the Networking and Security tab. Click Distributed IDS/IPS, located in the Security Section.

The IDS/IPS is disabled by default so you have to enable it for the cluster. Here I have only one cluster.

Just move the slider to enable the feature and confirm that you want to enable the cluster and you are ready to test it!

Once it’s enabled you can choose to regularly update the Signatures by selecting the Auto Update new versions button.

NSX Distributed IDS/IPS utilizes the latest threat signature sets and anomaly detection algorithms to identify attempts at exploiting vulnerabilities in applications. It is integrated with the NSX Threat Intelligence Cloud Service to always remain up to date on the latest threats identified on the Internet.

You can check the other versions that have been presents in the environment by clicking the View and change versions link.

This is launching a new window with historical details. Here we can see that the first Default Signature was installed Jun 17th, 2021 and additional signatures has been pushed Oct 20^th and Nov 12^nd.

We are gonna go ahead and be using the latest versions.

If you don’t have access to Internet from your NSX Manager, you also download the IDS/IPS signatures from the Network Threat Intelligence services page and be able to upload them manually.

Now it’s time to finish configuring the feature and launch some real test attacks by leveraging both Kali Linux and the infection Monkey tooling to simulate some attacks!

Configuring Distributed IDS/IPS profile & rule

Create a Profile for IDS/IPS

In this section, I will create a default profile to use with an IDS/IPS rule.

NB: We can configure up to 25 profiles.

Under the Profiles tab under Distributed IDS/IPS within the Security section, I have clicked ADD PROFILE and create the ChrisIDSProfile profile:

I have accepted the default settings but you can customise the profile to meet your requirements. You can for instance only select the Intrusion attack with a level of severity to Critical or High and Critical only.

One thing you can do is to tweak it by selecting specific CVSS or Attack types.

I clicked save to finish creating the Profile.

We can see that the profile has been successfully created.

After a few seconds it appears in green:

Create a Policy with rules for IDS/IPS

Now let’s create a Policy.

For that, I need to go to the Rules tab and add a specific IDS/IPS Policy called ChrisIDS-Policy.

I have selected the check box next to the name of the policy, then click Add Rule.

To finish the configuration I have to select the profile previously created.

I have also changed the source from Any to my SDDC subnets.

Please note that I leave the Sources and Services columns to Any and the Applied to field set to DFW.

I have also left the Mode to Detect Only. In Production it’s better to change this setting and switch to Detect & Prevent.

Now that I am done with the setup, I just need to click Publish.

Now it’s time to go for some tests of attacks and exploits.

Testing the IDS/IPS

In order to test the IDS/IPS feature, I have used my best security scanning tools to generate some attacks and try to exploit some vulnerabilities in one special server.

Basically I will launch the exploits on a OWASP Web Application server which is a test server with vulnerabilities that I have deployed in my SDDC. In a nutshell OWASP stands for The Open Web Application Security Project^® and it is a nonprofit foundation that works to improve the security of software. It’s a very good way to test the level of security of your environment.

This OWASP server is going to be the target for all the vulnerability scanning coming from my two different tools.

Scanning tools

First one is the Kali Linux distribution in a Virtual Machine which have a multitude of security tools preinstalled in it. I love it!

The second one is the Infection Monkey virtual appliance from Guardicore which is a platform with a graphical interface that you can leverage to launch the exploits.

Infection Monkey is an open source breach and attack simulation (BAS) platform that allows organisations to discover security gaps and fix them. You can Simply infect a random machine with the Infection Monkey and automatically discover your security risks. Test for different scenarios – credential theft, compromised machines and other security flaws.

Deploying Kali Linux

It’s a simple process as you can install it from a ISO CD or download a virtual image directly from here.

I have choose to install it with the ISO CD as it gives more flexibility to tweak your VM settings.

Once the VM is deployed there is nothing more to do.

Deploying Monkey Island VM

First I have deployed the Monkey Island VM from the OVA downloaded from the Infection Monkey website. This is an Ubuntu Linux VM with a small footprint of only 2 vCPU and 2GB of RAM.

Once it’s been installed, I have just started the VM.

My VM is up and running very quickly and I can connect to it from the web console on port 5000:

Once I am logged in with the default username: monkeyuser and password, I can setup the system.

I start by clicking on Configure Monkey.

I need to click the Network tab, and Change the Target list IP address with the IP address of the OWASP VM running in the App segment (172.11.11.115).

Then I clicked on the Run Monkey on the left and Select From Island.

At that moment the tool launches the exploits automatically.

Launching the attacks and exploits

With Kali Linux tools

In my environment, the Kali Linux server address is 172.11.11.107.

And the OWASP Broken Web Application has the following address: 172.11.11.115.

In this first stage, I started to use Kali Linux with nmap to scan the OWASP Web server.

Is this next step, I have leveraged the nikto command to scan for vulnerabilities on the server.

The result of the exploit is visible now on the CSP Console as you can see on the screen below. At the top, you can see there is representation of the attempt to compromise the server and they are spread over a time range with a slider that can be changed as needed.

The attacks have triggered a lot of Emerging Threats (ET Scan) alerts with Medium, High and Critical severity levels.

When I click on the VMs Affected, a list of the VM that have been affected by the vulnerabilities displays:

In addition, clicking the purple bar allow for displaying a detail window:

With Monkey Island tools

As I said before the scanner starts automatically after finishing the setup. Once it has finished its scanning operations, Monkey Island shows a map with all the results accessible through a web page.

It also displays a map of the devices that have been scanned by the tool.

On the right of the page, there is a tab called ATT&CK report that helps understand the exploits that have successfully been used or tried.

On the VMC on AWS Console, the results are displayed the same way as before with the Kali Linux tool:

Conclusion

This new Advanced Firewall Add-on IDS/IPS feature is really interesting as today it’s the only way to prevent attacker from exploiting vulnerabilities from inside the SDDC.

That’s conclude the post, I hope this has given you a better understanding on how this feature is powerful.

In my previous post, I have introduced you to the new Advanced Firewall Add-on in VMWare Cloud on AWS.

I also covered the Context Aware Firewall feature to filter connection based on the App id and not only the protocol number.

In this post, I am going to cover Distributed FW FQDN filtering to allow applications that communicate outside the SDDC gain layer 7 protection.

Introducing the FQDN Filtering feature

This feature can allow users to only access specific domains by whitelisting and/or blacklisting FQDNs. In many high-security environments, outgoing traffic is filtered using the Distributed firewall. When you want to access an external service, you usually create IP-based firewall rules. In some cases, you don’t know which IP addresses hide behind a domain. This is where domain filters come in handy.

Because NSX-T Data Center uses DNS Snooping to obtain a mapping between the IP address and the FQDN, you must set up a DNS rule first, and then the FQDN allowlist or denylist rule below it.

SpoofGuard should be enabled across the switch on all logical ports to protect against the risk of DNS spoofing attacks. A DNS spoofing attack is when a malicious VM can inject spoofed DNS responses to redirect traffic to malicious endpoints or bypass the firewall

You can define specific FQDNs that are allowed and apply them to DFW policies. Conversely, you can define specific FQDNs that are denied access to applications in the SDDC. The DFW maintains the context of VMs when they migrate. You can then increasingly rely on application profiling and FQDN filtering to reduce the attack surface of their applications to designated protocols and destinations.

Configuring DFW with FQDN filtering

In this section, I will show you how to setup a FQDN Context Profile, and a Firewall policy to limit access to specific URLs from VMs.

Creating a FQDN Context Profile.

First thing first ! Let’s create the context Profile.

Under Networking and Security, in the Inventory section, click Context Profile.

Click FQDNs Tab

Click ACTIONS –> Add FQDN

Enter the Domain: *.yahoo.com, and then Click SAVE.

Create a second FQDN with *.google.com.

Click the Context Profile Tab, and Click ADD CONTEXT PROFILE

Give it a Name: Allowed FQDNs, Click Set

Click ADD ATTRIBUTE –> Domain(FQDN) Name

Select the following domains: *.yahoo.com, *.office.com, *.google.com and Click ADD.

Click APPLY, Click SAVE. We now have a Context Profile setup.

Creating a Firewall rule and a Policy

I have created a Group called MyDesktops which includes a segment with my Windows VMs.

Now I am going to setup a Firewall Policy including this Context Profile. I will limit my VM in the MyDesktops group to access to the Allowed FQDNs. Also I limit access from this Group of VMs to specific DNS servers (8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4).

I also add a Drop rule at the end to limit access to only the FQDNs that were whitelisted.

Now I am allowed to access google.com and Yahoo.com but I can’t connect anymore to the vmware.com site.

This concludes the post on FQDN Filtering. In my final post, I will cover the Distributed IDS/IPS feature.

VMware Cloud on AWS already offers a robust sets of networking and security capabilities that enable customers to run production applications securely in the cloud.

The release of the M16 version is introducing new Advanced Firewall Features as an Add-on.

This includes the following new security capabilities:

Let’s try them to see how it works!

Enabling the NSX Advanced Firewall Add-On

The NSX Advanced Firewall Add-on adds Layer-7 Firewall protection, Identity Firewalling, Distributed IDS/IPS and FQDN Filtering to the VMC on AWS SDDC. This Feature is an Add-on featured and priced in addition to the Standard VMC on AWS subscription.

Before any of these features can be used, you must first enable the add-on onto your SDDC. In the following section, I am going to walk you through the steps of enabling the NSX Advanced Firewall functionality onto your SDDC.

Click Activate

Click OPEN NSX ADVANCED FIREWALL (This will take you to the Networking & Security Tab)

At this step, the NSX Advanced Firewall Add–on has been enabled. To make use of the functionality it provides, you must configure them individually.

In the upcoming sections, we will configure and test each of these features.

Configuring L7 Distributed Context Aware Firewall

With L7 (Context-aware) firewall, it’s possible to go beyond simple IP/ port level layer 4 security to complete stateful layer 7 controls and filtering. This will avoid for instance someone from changing Port number to bypass a firewall rule.

Extremely powerful !

Deep packet inspection (DPI) built into the Distributed Firewall enables you to allow only the intended application / protocols to run, while denying all other traffic at the source. This enables you to isolate sensitive applications by creating virtual zones within the SDDC.

Distributed Firewall (DFW) layer 7 policies are enforced at the hypervisor (vNIC) level and can migrate with the VM when they move from host to host in the SDDC, ensuring there are no gaps in enforcement.

Let’s see how to configure and use the feature.

Configuring a standard L4 FW rule

In my example, I have two VMs (webserver01, webserver02) running in my SDDC which are part of a group called Web Tier.

Here are the IPs of the VMS:

They can communicate together over any protocol as this is the default settings in the Distributed Firewall as we can see here:

First let’s create a traditional L4 firewall rule to block SSH traffic between the two VMS.

Now if I want to ssh from webserver01 to webserver02 it’s blocked:

What if SSH was listening on another port, however? What if some nefarious person (knowing SSH on port 22 is being blocked) changed the port the server listens on and attempts to SSH to the server against this new port, what happens then? 

To do that I have edited the sshd_config on the webserver02 VM and changed the port to 2222:

I have then restarted the ssh service on the VM:

We can see the ssh server is now running on port 2222:

Let see what happens when we apply context awareness to the firewall rule.

now if I try to connect back but on port 2222, it works!

Unfortunately, the L4 DFW doesn’t block it. As mentioned earlier the firewall is looking for SSH on port 22, not port 2222, so I was able to bypass the firewall policy.

Configuring Context Aware Firewall rule

NSX Context-Aware Firewall  Rule (L7) enhances visibility at the application level and helps to override the problem of application permeability. Visibility at the application layer helps you to monitor the workloads better from a resource, compliance, and security point of view.

In order to switch to the Context Aware firewall, I just have to remove the SSH in the Service field from the DFW rule and need to add SSH in the Context Profile field:

The rule is now changed:

Let’s try to connect again to port 2222:

Now the attempt to connect to the modified port is block. That’s much better! This is because the DFW now assesses the packet at layer 7 and identifies the heuristics of the packet to be ssh and does not allow the traffic through.

With Context-Aware Firewalling you can enable enforcement of security protocol versions/ciphers reduce attacks by only allowing traffic matching APP Fingerprint, and enforce port-independent rules.

In the next post I will introduce you to the L7 Distributed Firewall with FQDN Filtering. Stay tune!

The latest M12 release of SDDC (version 1.12) came with a lot of interesting storage features including vSAN compression for i3en, TRIM/UNMap (I will cover it in a future post) as well as new networking features like SDDC Groups, VMWare Transit Connect, Time-based Scheduling of DFW rules and many more.

One that typically stands out for me is the Multi-Edge SDDC capabilities.

Multi-Edge SDDC (or Edge Scaleout)

By default, any SDDC is deployed with a single default Edge (actually this a pair of VMs) which size is based on the SDDC sizing (Medium size by default). This edge can be resized to Large when needed.

Each Edge has three logical connections to the outside world: Internet (IGW), Intranet (TGW or DX Private VIF), Provider (Connected VPC). These connections share the same host Elastic Network Adapter – ENA and it’s limits.

In the latest M12 version of VMC on AWS, VMC is adding Multi-Edge capability to the SDDC. This gives the customer the ability to add additional capacity for North-South network trafic by simply adding additional Edges.

The goal of this feature is to allow multiple Edge appliances to be deployed, therefore removing some of the scale limitations by:

In order to be able to enable the feature, additional network interfaces (ENA) are going to be provisioned in the AWS network and additional compute capacity are created.

It’s important to mention that you do need additional hosts in the management clusters of the SDDC to be able to support it. So this feature is coming with an additional cost.

Multi-Edge SDDC – Use Cases

The deployment of additional Edges allow for an higher network bandwidth for the following use cases:

Keep in mind that for the first three, VMWare Transit Connect is mandatory to allow the increased network capacity by deploying those multiple Edges. As a reminder, Transit Connect is a high-bandwidth, low latency and resilient connectivity option for SDDC to SDDC communication in an SDDC groups. It also enables an high bandwidth connectivity to SDDCs from natives VPCs. If you need more information on it, my colleague Gilles Chekroun has an excellent blog post here.

Multiple Edges permits to steer certain traffic sets by leveraging Traffic Groups.

Traffic Groups

Traffic Groups is a new concept which is similar in a way to the source Based Routing. Source based routing allow to select which route (next hop) to follow based on the source IP addresses. This can be an individual IP or complete subnet.

With this new capability customer can now choose to steer certain traffic sets to a specific Edge.

At the time you will create a traffic group, an additional active edge (with a standby edge) is going to be deployed on a separate host. All Edge appliances are deployed with an anti-affinity rule to ensure only one Edge per host. So there need to be 2N+2 hosts in the cluster (where N=number of traffic groups).

Each additional Edge will then handles traffic for its associated network prefixes. All remaining traffic is going to be handled by the Default Edge.

Source base routing is configured with prefixes defined in prefix lists than can be setup directly in the VMC on AWS Console.

To ensure proper ingress routing from AWS VPC to the right Edge, the shadow VPC route tables are also updated with the prefixes.

Multi-Edge SDDC requirements

The following requirements must be met in order to leverage the feature:

A Large SDDC means that management appliances and Edge are scaled out from Medium to Large. This is now a customer driven option that doesn’t involve technical Support anymore as it’s possible to upsize an SDDC directly from the Cloud Console.

Large SDDC means an higher number of vCPUs and memory for management components (vCenter, NSX Manager and Edges) and there is a minimal 1 hour downtime for the upscaling operations to finish, so it has to be planned during a Maintenance Window.

Enabling a Multi-Edge SDDC

This follow a three step process.

First of all, we must define a Traffic Group that is going to create the new Edges (in pair). Each Traffic group creates an additional active/standby edge. Remember also the “Traffic Group” Edges are always Large form-factor.

Immediately you will see that 2 additional edge Nodes are going to be deployed. The New Edges have a suffix name with tg in it.

Next step you have to define a prefix list with specific prefixes and associate a Prefix List. It will contain the source IP adresses of SDDC virtual machines that will use the newly deployed Edge.

After some minutes, you can confirm that the Traffic groups is ready:

NB: NSX-T configures source based Routing with the prefix you define in the prefix list on the CGW as well as the Edge routers to ensure symmetric routing within the SDDC.

You just need to click on Set to enter the prefix list. Enter the CIDR range, it could a /32 if you just want to use a single VM as a source IP.

NB: Up to 64 prefixes can be created in a Prefix List.

When you done entering the subnets in the prefix list, Click Apply and Save the Prefix List to create it.

Last step is to associate the Prefix List to the Traffic Group with Association Map. To do so click on Edit.

Basically we now need to tell what prefix list to use for the traffic group. Click on ADD IP PREFIX ASSOCIATION MAP:

Then we need to enter the Prefix List and give a name to the Association Map.

Going forward any traffic that matches that prefix list will be utilising the newly deployed Edge.

Monitoring a Multi-Edge SDDC

Edge nodes cannot be monitored on VMC Console but you can always visualise the Network Rate and consumption through the vCenter web console.

When we look at the vCenter list of Edges, the default Edge has no “-tg” in its name. So basically the NSX-Edge-0 is the default. As long as we add the new traffic group, the traffic is going to manage the additional traffic and liberate the load on this default Edge.

The NSX-Edge-0-tg-xxx is the new one and we can see an increase on this new Edge in the traffic consumption on it now because of the new traffic going to flow over it:

What happened also after the new scale edge is deployed, is that the prefix list is using the new Edge as its next-hop going forward. This is also propagated to the internal route tables from Default Edge as well as CGW route table.

All of these feature is exposed over the API Explorer, for the traffic Groups definition in the NSX AWS VMC integration API. Over the NSX VMC Policy API for the prefix list definition perspective.

In conclusion, remember that Multi Edge SDDC doesn’t increase Internet capacity nor VPN or NAT capacity. Also that there is a cost associated to it because of the additional hardware requirements.