Security considerations in data center configuration management

Data centers need to manage a large amount of configuration information for a variety of computational, storage and networking assets at multiple levels (e.g., individual devices to entire data center). The increasingly sophisticated configuration management required to support virtualization significantly enhances chances of misconfigurations and exploitation by hackers that could impact data center operations. In this paper, we expose a number of attack/misconfiguration scenarios for data center resources. We also propose a mechanism, called Sentry, for securing this data by exploiting the hierarchical setup and redundancy in the server and network configurations. We show that the scheme can secure configuration data with only a small overhead.