Watching the watchmen
Guyue Liu, Ao Li, Christopher Canel, Vyas Sekar · 2021
Many enterprises outsource network management (e.g., troubleshooting failures, monitoring performance) to third-party managed service providers (MSPs) to reduce cost. Unfortunately, recent incidents show that MSPs themselves have become an attractive launchpad to gain access to customer networks. In this work, we argue that such incidents arise due to a violation of the least privilege principle. We revisit the MSP outsourcing problem through this least-privilege view, identify key challenges in realizing this framework, and present initial ideas toward this goal. In particular, we propose providing the MSP provider an isolated "digital twin" environment to resolve problems and prevent providers from directly accessing the customer production network. Changes are verified before importing them into the production network, ensuring there are no privilege violations. Our preliminary experiments show that our approach can resolve practical problems (e.g., misconfigurations) and is effective in reducing the attack surfaces for MSP customers.