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DevOps strategies to boost your security
DevOps provides an environment with great potential to enhance security. Practices such as collaboration, continuous testing, automation better feedback loops, provides an opportunity to integrate security as a component of the DevOps processes.
Mostly, a wide range of security flaws and risks exist in the cloud environment, containers, and other resources developers rely on when making applications. This includes the third-party code, tools, networks, and other components of the development systems. Without proper tools, control, and protection, these areas can lead to unstable and insecure applications.
Some factors that increase vulnerabilities include:
- Wrong configurations and weakness in containers
- Insecure in-house and third-party code, privilege exposures, etc.
- Security flaws in the scripts or CI/CD tools
- Malicious insiders
- Insecure infrastructure and employee behavior.
Many common DevOps practices inherently lend themselves to providing a development and delivery pipeline that can improve your overall security posture.
Three biggest risks to IT security are as follows:
- Human error
- Lack of process
- External threats
DevOps can positively impact all three of these major risk factors, without negatively impacting the stability or reliability of the core business network.
Best DevOps practices to boost your security
Here, is a list of the top five DevOps practices and tooling that can help boost overall security when incorporated directly into your end-to-end continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline:
- Collaboration
- Security test automation
- Configuration and patch management
- Continuous monitoring
- Identity management
Collaboration and understanding your security requirements
Many of us are required to adopt a security policy. It may be in the form of a corporate security policy, a customer security policy, or a set of compliance standards (ex. SOX, HIPAA, etc). Even if you are not mandated to use a specific policy or regulating standard, we all still want to ensure we follow the best practices in securing our systems and applications. The key is to identify your sources of security requirements information and, collaborate early so they can be incorporated into the overall solution.
Security test automation
Whether you are building a brand new solution or upgrading an existing solution, there likely are several security considerations to integrate. Due to iterative agile development, handling all security at once in a “big bang” approach likely will result in project delays. To be certain that projects keep moving, a layered approach often can be helpful to ensure you are continuously building additional security layers into your pipeline as you progress from development to a live product. Security test automation can ensure you have quality gates throughout your deployment pipeline giving immediate feedback to stakeholders on a security standpoint and allowing for quick remediation early in the pipeline.
Configuration management
In traditional development, servers/instances are equipped and developers are able to work on the systems. To make sure servers are equipped and managed using consistent, repeatable, and reliable patterns it’s critical to ensure you have a strategy for configuration management. The key is to be certain you can reliably guarantee and manage consistent settings across your environments.
Patch management
Similar to the concerns with configuration management, you need to make sure you have a method to quickly and reliably patch your systems. Missing patches are a common cause of exploited vulnerabilities including malware attacks. Being able to swiftly deliver a patch across a large number of systems can drastically reduce your overall security exposures.
Continuous monitoring
Make certain you have monitoring in place across all environments with transparent feedback is important so it can alert you quickly of potential breaches or security issues. It is important to identify your monitoring needs across the infrastructure and application and then take benefits of some of the tooling that exists to quickly identify, isolate, and remediate potential issues before they become vulnerable. Most of your monitoring strategy also should include the ability to automatically collect and analyze logs. The analysis of running logs can help identify exposures quickly and compliance activities can become extremely expensive if they are not automated early.
Identity management
DevOps strategies allow us to integrate early with security experts which increase the level of security tests and automation to enforce quality gates for security and provide better mechanisms for ongoing security management and compliance activities.
Conclusion
Incorporating security practices into your DevOps processes boosts in creating an effective security layer for the environment and applications. This, in the future, ensures security and compliance in a more proactive and efficient way.
Is CNSP the future of software development?
Application development methodologies or say SDLC are moving away from the traditional “waterfall” or “V” model towards more agile continuous integration delivery (CI/CD) processes with the end-to-end automation. This new approach brings a multitude of benefits, such as quick release time to market and faster delivery, but it also introduces security challenges since traditional security methodologies weren’t designed to address these modern application workflows.
As developer teams adopt cloud-native technologies, security teams find themselves scrambling to keep up. Minimal prevention controls, lack of visibility, and tools that lack automation yield incomplete security analytics. All of these things increase the risk of compromise and the likelihood of successful breaches in cloud environments. Meanwhile, the demand for an entirely new approach to security emerges. Enter cloud-native security platforms.
Before we dive into what is a cloud-native security platform CNSP, let’s first understand what “cloud-native” actually means.
What Does ‘Cloud-Native’ Mean?
The term “cloud-native” refers to an approach to building and running applications that takes full advantage of a cloud computing delivery model instead of an on-premises data center.
This process takes the best of what cloud has to offer
- Scalability
- Deployability
- Manageability
- Limitless on-demand compute power
and applies these principles to software development, combined with CI/CD automation, to radically increase productivity, business agility, and cost savings.
Cloud-native architectures are made up of cloud services, such as containers, serverless security, platform as a service (PaaS), and microservices. These services are loosely coupled, meaning they are not hardwired to any infrastructure components, allowing developers to make changes frequently without affecting other pieces of the application or other team member’s projects – all across technology boundaries, such as public, private and multi-cloud deployments.
In short, “cloud-native security” refers to a methodology of software development that is essentially designed for cloud delivery and epitomizes all the benefits of the cloud by nature.
The 4C’s of Cloud-Native Security
Let’s start with a diagram that may help you understand how you can think about security in layers.
Note: This layered approach augments the defense-in-depth approach to security, which is widely regarded as a best practice for securing software systems. The 4C’s are Cloud, Clusters, Containers, and Code.
As you can see from the above figure, each one of the 4C’s depend on the security of the squares in which they fit. It is nearly impossible to safeguard against poor security standards in Cloud, Containers, and Code by only addressing security at the code level. However, when these areas are dealt with appropriately, then adding security to your code augments an already strong base.
The Beginnings of Cloud-Native Security
As more organizations have embraced DevOps and developer teams have begun to update their application development pipelines, Security teams quickly realized their tools were ill-suited for the developer-driven, API-centric, infrastructure-agnostic patterns of cloud-native security. As a result, cloud-native security platform products began to hit the market. These products on their own, they could not collect enough information to accurately understand or report on the risks across cloud-native environments. They were each engineered to address one part of the problem or one segment of the software stack. This forced security teams to juggle multiple tools and vendors, which increased cost, complexity, and risk in addition to creating blind spots where the tools overlapped but didn’t integrate.
Enter Cloud-Native Security Platforms
Solving this problem requires a unified platform approach that can envelop the entire CI/CD lifecycle and integrate with the DevOps workflow. Just as cloud-native approaches have fundamentally changed how cloud is used, CNSP is fundamentally restructuring how the cloud is secured.
Cloud-native security platform shares context about infrastructure, PaaS, users, development platforms, data, and application workloads across platform components to enhance security. They also:
- Provide unified visibility for SecOps and DevOps teams.
- Dispatch an integrated set of capabilities to respond to threats and protect cloud-native applications.
- Automate the remediation of misconfigurations and vulnerabilities consistently across the entire build deploy run lifecycle.
Cloud-Native Security Platform Future
In the past, organizations that wanted to embrace new compute options were unendurable by the need to buy more security products to support those options. Stitching together disparate solutions in an attempt to enforce consistent policies across technology boundaries became more of a problem than a solution.
Cloud-Native security platform, however, provides coverage across the continuum of compute options, multi-cloud, and the application development lifecycle. This allows organizations to choose the right to compute options for any given workload, granting them freedom without worry over how to integrate solutions for security. CNSP epitomizes the benefits of a cloud-native strategy, enabling agility, flexibility, and digital transformation.
The role of Identity Access Management(IAM) in Cloud Security
Most of the organizations are advancing towards the cloud-based environment. They are transferring their work either on the private or public cloud platforms through various vendors. But sometimes it is a challenging task for all the companies to keep the data safe and secure in the cloud. In the current scenario, the customer needs to face each program anywhere either on-premises or in the cloud.
What is Identity Access Management in Cloud Computing
The concept of identity in the cloud can refer to many things, but for the purpose of this discussion, we will focus on two main entities:
- users
- cloud resources.
IAM policies are sets of permission policies that can be attached to either users or cloud resources to authorize what they access and what they can do with it.
Roles of Identity Access Management in Cloud Security
IAM is crucial to protecting sensitive enterprise systems, assets, and information from unauthorized access or use. This represents the systematic management of any single identity and provides authentication, authorization, privileges, and roles of the enterprise boundaries.
The primary goal is to upgrade security and productivity by decreasing the total cost, repetitive tasks, and system downtime. Identity access management in cloud computing covers all types of users who can work with defined devices under unlike circumstances.
In a cloud system, the storage and processing of data are performed by organizations or with the help of third-party vendors. The service provider has to ensure that data and applications stored in the cloud are protected as well as the infrastructure is an insecure environment. Further, users need to verify that their credentials for authentication are secure.
There are many security issues that compromise data in the process of data access and storage in the cloud environment, especially in the case of data storage with the help of third-party vendors who themselves may be a malicious attacker. Though standards and best practices are available for overcoming such security problems, cloud service providers are reluctant in securing their network with the updated set of security standards.
Identity and access management is one of the best practices to measure cloud services. Presently, Identity and Access Management (IAM) provides effective security for cloud systems. IAM systems perform different operations for providing security in the cloud environment that includes authentication, authorization, and provisioning of storage and verification. IAM system guarantees the security of identities and attributes of cloud users by ensuring that the right persons are allowed in the cloud systems. IAM systems also help to manage access rights by checking if the right person with the right privileges is accessing information that is stored in cloud systems.
Currently, many organizations use Identity and Access Management systems to provide more security for sensitive information that is stored in the cloud environment.
How Identity Access Management can control Interactions with Data and Systems
IAM can move beyond simply allowing or blocking access to data and systems.
For example, IAM can:
- Restrict access to data: Specific roles can access only necessary parts of systems, databases, and information.
- Only allow view access: Users with such roles can only view data, they cannot add, update, or amend it.
- Only permit access on certain platforms: Users may have access to operational systems, but not on development, testing, or PROD platforms.
- Only allow access to create, amend, or delete data, not to transmit it: Some roles may not be able to send or receive data outside the system, meaning it cannot be exposed to other third parties and applications.
Based on a company’s specific requirements, there are many ways to implement IAM policies to define and enforce exactly how individual roles can access systems and data.
Why Identity Access Management is a Vital IT Enablement & Security Layer
IAM offers several advantages over all other traditional products. Below is the list to understand the few benefits of identity management in cloud computing:
- Enhanced Network Abilities: Identity access management (IAM) makes it simple in sharing the network capabilities with a complete grid of users who were connected with it.
- Support On-demand improvement: 24*7 hours support and monitoring can be provided based on need.
- Increase Overall Productivity: Cloud-based services are configured and hosted by service providers. As a result, many organizations can improve their overall productivity instead of worrying about the infrastructure.
- Centralized Management System: Clients can be able to manage all their services and programs at one place with the cloud-based services. Identity access management can be done with one click on a single dashboard.
Conclusion
IAM in the cloud security controls access to resources within that enterprise system by incorporating user policies and restrictions with the verified identity. This is undoubtedly a great way of controlling information about users on the network. It is possible to identify, manage, and control user identities across the entire system by setting up policies, roles, and access. This is definitely a highly intelligent way of handling the security of the uniqueness of an enterprise.
AWS CIS Compliance Test: A Cloud Security Requirement
What is CIS Benchmarks ?
Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmark for AWS is the best practices & recommendations for the secure configuration of AWS Accounts. CIS Benchmarks are the only consensus-based, best-practice security configuration guides both developed and accepted by the government, industry, academia, and business. The Benchmark recommendation document provides prescriptive guidance for configuring security options for a subset of Amazon Web Services with an emphasis on foundational, testable, and architecture agnostic settings. Specific Amazon Web Services in scope for this document include:
- AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
- AWS Config
- AWS CloudTrail
- AWS CloudWatch
- AWS Simple Notification Service (SNS)
- AWS Simple Storage Service (S3)
- AWS VPC (Default)
The CIS AWS Foundation document v1.2.0 enlist 49 recommendations categorized across features into
- IAM
- Logging
- Monitoring
- Networking
How does one test for compliance with the Benchmarks ?
Manually validating each recommendation across your AWS account can be cumbersome and exhaustive. This approach may be prone to human errors and with the growing number of resources across your AWS account, it would be nearly impossible to timely test the compliance.
Automated compliance check is the only option that can timely deliver the compliance checks on your AWS account. With AWS SDKs, CLI and API’s available, any approach can be used to automate the compliance checks for CIS Benchmarks.
An Example –
Recommendation 2.3 – Ensure the S3 bucket used to store CloudTrail logs is not publicly accessible (Scored)
Description: CloudTrail logs a record of every API call made in your AWS account. These log files are stored in an S3 bucket. It is recommended that the bucket policy, or access control list (ACL), applied to the S3 bucket that CloudTrail logs to prevent public access to the CloudTrail logs.
Manual Steps via the Management Console
1. Go to the Amazon CloudTrail console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudtrail/home
2. In the API activity history pane on the left, click Trails
3. In the Trails pane, note the bucket names in the S3 bucket column
4. Go to Amazon S3 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/s3/home
5. For each bucket noted in step 3, right-click on the bucket and click Properties
6. In the Properties pane, click the Permissions tab.
7. The tab shows a list of grants, one row per grant, in the bucket ACL. Each row identifies the grantee and the permissions granted.
8. Ensure no rows exist that have the Grantee set to Everyone or the Grantee set to Any Authenticated User.
9. If the Edit bucket policy button is present, click it to review the bucket policy.
10. Ensure the policy does not contain a Statement having an Effect set to Allow and a Principal set to “*” or {“AWS” : “*”}
Automated Approach using CLI –
1. Get the name of the S3 bucket that CloudTrail is logging to:
aws cloudtrail describe-trails --query 'trailList[*].S3BucketName'
2. Ensure the AllUsers principal is not granted privileges to that <bucket>:
aws s3api get-bucket-acl --bucket <s3_bucket_for_cloudtrail> --query 'Grants[?Grantee.URI== `http://acs.amazonaws.com/groups/global/AllUsers` ]'
3. Ensure the AuthenticatedUsers principal is not granted privileges to that <bucket>:
aws s3api get-bucket-acl --bucket <s3_bucket_for_cloudtrail> --query 'Grants[?Grantee.URI== `http://acs.amazonaws.com/groups/global/Authenticated Users` ]'
4. Get the S3 Bucket Policy
aws s3api get-bucket-policy --bucket <s3_bucket_for_cloudtrail>
AWS CloudTrail Security Checklist: Improve AWS Cloud Security
What Is AWS CloudTrail?
AWS CloudTrail is an AWS service that lets you identify activities across your AWS account. It records actions taken by a user, role, or an AWS service as events. These events include actions in the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, SDKs and APIs.
CloudTrail is by default enabled on your AWS account when you create it and store data for 90 days. In addition, you can create a CloudTrail trail to analyze, archive and respond to changes in AWS resources. A trail is a configuration that stores and delivers events to Amazon S3 bucket.
Checklist to secure AWS CloudTrail:
- Enable CloudTrail across all AWS regions: This will enable CloudTrail logging across all regions of your AWS environment, thus monitoring every configured activity.
- Enable MFA for CloudTrail S3 bucket access: With MFA turned on for accessing CloudTrail designated S3 buckets, chances of infiltrators deleting logs are almost zero.
- Enable S3 bucket logging: Enabling S3 logging ensures all the S3 actions are tracked, thus helping in forensic and audits.
- Create an S3 Lifecycle: You can define an S3 lifecycle rules to archive CloudTrail log files automatically.
- Access Controls for CloudTrail S3 buckets: Create a bucket policy that allows only required resources to have access to these logs.
- Encrypt logs at rest: CloudTrail event log files are encrypted using Amazon S3 server-side encryption (SSE). One can choose to encrypt using AWS KMS as well.
- Cloudwatch Alarm for CloudTrail: Create a metric and an alarm, for events like CloudTrail S3 logs deleted.
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