SECURING FIBRE CHANNEL FABRICS - Brocade

The Brocade SAN Security ModelChannel Authentication Protocol (FCAP) may also be used but it is notpart of the defined FC standards. FCAP is considered more securethan DH-CHAP since it uses a stronger digital certificate instead of theshared secret used in DH-CHAP.Clearly, it is not necessary to implement every one of these lines ofdefense to prevent FC device access to a fabric. The number of layersan organization decides to implement will depend on their businessrequirements, the sensitivity of the environment, and amount of riskaccepted as tolerable. In reality, very few organizations implement allof these proposed levels of security. It is up to each organization toestablish the risk and decide which features should be implemented.FC Devices Best Practices Summary• Persistently disable unused ports• Prevent switch ports from becoming E_Ports• Use the SCC and DCC policies to restrict device access by WWNand/or by a physical port on a switch• For more sensitive environments, use DH-CHAP to authenticatedevices joining a fabric• Use a strict fabric-wide consistency policy where possible• Distributed/fabric-wide consistency policies: strict vs. tolerantSeparation of DutiesThe principle of separation of duties is used to restrict individuals toperforming only the tasks necessary to perform their work-relatedactivities and nothing more. When a backup administrator is givenadmin privileges on the backup and restore system, this does notimply that he or she should also have the same privileges on other systems.In some cases, a single task requires two or more people tocomplete it (similar to co-signing a check). An extreme example of thisis nuclear missile launch codes, which must be entered by two differentindividuals to launch a nuclear missile. In a less extreme but stillpertinent case in the storage world, requiring more than one person todestroy all of the keys on a key vault would be another example of separationof duties through the use of quorum. Quorum occurs when apre-established consensus from a pool of individuals is required toaccept or perform a task. A typical quorum would be two out of threeor three out of five required persons to authorize a task.Securing Fibre Channel Fabrics 97