This July 4th, as we celebrate our nation's independence, it's a good time to reflect on another form of freedom – freedom from hidden vulnerabilities in your IT infrastructure. In distributed environments, internal communication channels between compute and storage nodes can be overlooked. But when these systems are compromised, the impact can cascade across your entire deployment.
In Scale Computing’s SC//HyperCore environment, this internal communication layer – referred to as the network backplane – acts as the backbone for cluster operations, including virtualization management and storage I/O. While not every IT architecture uses a dedicated ‘backplane’ in the same way, every infrastructure has a set of internal communications or control paths that, if left exposed, can represent a potential attack surface.
Damage to the network backplane doesn't just degrade performance; it can paralyze your environment. And yet, in many deployments, this critical pathway too often goes unmonitored and remains underprotected.
Because it's not exposed to the public internet or general LAN traffic, many assume the backplane is secure by default. But this assumption creates a dangerous blind spot. If left unsegmented or improperly monitored, it can be exposed as the soft underbelly in an otherwise hardened infrastructure. Neglecting this layer of your infrastructure can lead to:
- Silent data interception: A compromised backplane can allow attackers to eavesdrop on unencrypted internal traffic, including sensitive storage commands or cluster management data.
- Administrative control hijacking: Because the backplane enables control-plane functions, an attacker with access can potentially manipulate cluster behavior without detection.
- System-wide outages: As a central conduit, failure or corruption of the backplane can disrupt all inter-node communication, effectively rendering clusters non-functional. This includes scenarios where a targeted denial-of-service (DoS) attack against the backplane cripples the entire cluster’s ability to operate.
These risks escalate even more dramatically at the edge.
Why Backplane Security Is Critical at the Edge
Unlike centralized data centers, edge deployments live in the wild, often in places where physical security is limited and redundancy is minimal. In this type of uncontrolled environment, some of the following vulnerabilities can be magnified:
- Physically Exposed Hardware: Edge nodes are often located in cell towers, retail stores, or factory floors – locations that are far easier to access than a locked-down data center. If an attacker tampers with the physical device, they may be able to exploit the backplane directly via firmware or hardware interfaces. Even on hardened systems, unwanted access or code injection at the hardware level can open a path to backplane compromise.
- Bypassing Perimeter Defenses: The backplane is often seen as an internal, trusted route. Once compromised, attackers can route traffic past firewalls, encryption layers, and intrusion detection systems to gain a foothold deep inside your infrastructure. For instance, if left unsecured, a firmware exploit in an edge router can enable an attacker to silently reroute sensor data from a power grid to an external server without tripping traditional alarms.
- Single Points of Failure: To keep costs down, many edge deployments use hardware without backplane redundancy. If a ransomware payload or firmware corruption targets this layer – particularly the shared LAN/backplane hardware – it can knock out critical operations. If an attack were to disable the backplane firmware in a retail chain’s edge servers, it could potentially take down all point-of-sale systems nationwide.
How SC//HyperCore Mitigates Backplane Risk
At Scale Computing, we take backplane integrity seriously, especially in edge and distributed multi-node environments. SC//HyperCore customers benefit from built-in deployment options that offer flexibility without compromising security. Here are three key ways SC//HyperCore adds an additional critical layer of protection to the network backplane:
Want to dive deeper?
Download our Security Best Practices for SC//HyperCore Customers white paper to explore actionable strategies for hardening your hyperconverged infrastructure.