XOS: A SERVICE FOR DEPLOYING VPNS IN THE CLOUD

Abstract

XOS is an Everything as a Service operating system designed for the modern 1 cloud that uses the OpenStack platform. XOS makes it easy to create and deploy new cloud services. For this project I developed two new services for XOS, the first a tutorial service that is used as a framework for the current tutorial documentation for XOS, and a OpenVPN service that allows operators to create new VPNs using OpenVPN. The OpenVPN service is the subject of this document, it provides an easy to use interface for creating secure VPN servers and adding clients to VPNs. The benefit of using a VPN is security. All computers connected to a VPN can communicate privately and securely in isolation2. In many situations this is useful, such as database servers that should be isolated from a larger network. Future plans for the OpenVPN service are to support replication across multiple sites, adding entire slices as clients to a VPN, and adding an entire service as a client to a VPN. The research for this thesis came primarily from understanding XOS to create the tutorial service, and from understanding OpenVPN and its security requirements including managing a Public Key Infrastructure.