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Mulligan Security - 21 / 01 / 2025

How safe am I from my cloud provider?

Since the 2010's VPS have become cheaper and widely available. From your local mom and pop datacenter where you can rent a baremetal Pi equivalent to highly secured Amazon datacenters and on-demand cpu/bandwidth allocation you can now find a broad range of options for your operational and security needs.

If clandestinity is a requirement, there also are cryptocurrency-based options in jurisdictions without LEO cooperation treatises with your own.

But, what if the adversary is already inside?
in this post we are going to do a threat modelling exercise:

  1. Context and assumptions: what are the capabilities of our adversary? what about our own OPSEC requirments?
  2. Threats: what the adversary might want to acomplish (their goal)
  3. Attack Scenarii: a quick list of possible attacks
  4. Mitigation measures: what we can do to make those attack uneconomical, harder

Context and assumptions

Setting up the scene

Alice wishes to start hosting a coordination platform for her activist group, but she doesn't want to host the platform herself for the following reasons:
  • Shes does not want to have incriminating data in her house
  • She is unable to provide the required level if high availability for her group's safety and operational standards
  • She has limited bandwidth/electricity to devote to her cause


She gets in touch with Bob, owner and operator of Bob's friendly datacenter, and orders from him a VPS (Virtual Private Server). Bob's pretty open-minded so Alice is free to use whatever OS she wants, gets a public IP.

Enters Leo

One day Bob's phone rings, it's Leo calling! Leo asks Bob to confirm that he indeed has Alice as a customer. Without further ado, Leo pays Bob a visit! After entering the premises and showing a government agency badge, Leo asks for complete access to Bob's infrastructure and binds him with a gag order to make sure no one hears about his investigation. Even if Bob is sympathetic to Alice or wishes to protect his customers he would now run afoul of his country's laws if he were to warn them. Leo might have been nice to him but he is not to be trifled with...

Leo sets up shop

Commandeering an office in Bob's datacenter, Leo gets to work. He has plenty of options:
  1. Network sniffing: Leo can capture and log ALL trafic related to Alice's activity inside Bob's datacenter, so he will know the IP of everyone interacting with her platform
  2. Firmware/hardware attacks: during maintenance windows, Leo could tamper with the BIOS/UEFI of Alice's server (if she had chosen a bare-metal option), or with her server's storage devices in order to deactivate encryption or exfiltrate data unnoticed
  3. Memory attacks: Leo is able to take snapshots of Alice's VPS RAM to gather information about her activities. If she had chosen a bare-metal server he could cut the power, extract and refrigerate the RAM sticks in order to retrieve the data, but such an attack would be very conspicuous

Nihilism

Until there is Nothing left.



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