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Summary April 14, 2016

Rich April 14, 2016 No Comments

Rich here. Mike, Adrian, and I are just back from a big planning session for what we are calling “Securosis 2.0”. Everything is lining up nicely, and now we mostly just need to get the website updated. We are fully gutting the current design and architecture, and moving everything into AWS. The prototyping is complete and next week I get to build out the deployment pipeline, because we are going with a completely immutable design. One nice twist is that the public side is all read-only, while we have a totally different infrastructure for the admin side. Both share a common database (MariaDB on RDS) and file store (S3). We are estimating about a 10X cost savings compared to our current high-security hosting. As we get closer I’ll start sharing more implementation tips based on our experience. This is quite different from our Trinity platform, which is completely bespoke, whereas in this case we have to work with an existing content management system and wrangle it into a cloud native deployment. If you want to subscribe directly to the Friday Summary only list, just click here. Top Posts for the Week This is a stunningly good presentation – filled with the kinds of specifics we rarely see (including naming tools). If you are serious about Rugged DevOps this is a must-read: Taking AppSec to 11 – BSides Austin 2016. Here’s another must-read from Ryan over at Slack. It describes a distributed notification and response system he built to dramatically improve response times by engaging all employees in security. It’s practical and highly effective: Distributed Security Alerting – Several People Are Coding I’m actually not convinced this next piece on Apple’s cloud creation is related directly to snooping. It’s pretty straightforward to block snooping when you host on a cloud provider and have Apple’s resources (perhaps not easy, but straightforward). To me this looks more like a mix of economics and wanting better control over a core technology. When you are as big as Apple (or heck, even little ol’ Dropbox) owning the infrastructure makes a lot of sense. Report: Apple developing at least 6 cloud infrastructure projects incl. servers to prevent snooping Amazon API Gateway Custom Authorization. We are looking hard at various auth options for Trinity, and I like the idea of building as little as possible. About two months ago I asked Adrian if we should drop dynamic masking from the cloud security training because I didn’t think anyone was doing it. Then I found out it’s built into Azure. Oops. Get started with SQL Database Dynamic Data Masking. And since I mentioned AWS and Azure, we might as well add a little Google Compute Platform into the mix. Here are some good best practices from Google themselves: Google shares data center security and design best practices. Tool of the Week Last week we set the stage with Jenkins and I hinted that this week we would start on some security-specific tools. It’s time to talk about Gauntlt, one of the best ways to integrate testing into your deployment pipeline. It is a must-have addition to any continuous deployment/delivery process. Gauntlt allows you to hook your security tools into your pipeline for automated testing. For example you can define a simple test to find all open ports using nmap, then match those ports to the approved list for that particular application component/server. If it fails the test you can fail the build and send the details back to your issue tracker for the relevant developer or admin to fix. Attacks (tests) are written in an easy-to-parse format. It’s an extremely powerful way to integrate automated security testing into the development and deployment process, using the same tools and hooks as development and operations themselves. Securosis Blog Posts this Week We were all out this week for our planning session, so no posts. Other Securosis News and Quotes David Mortman interviewed on container security: Containers and Security Q&A: Putting a Lid on Risk Training and Events We are running two classes at Black Hat USA: Black Hat USA 2016 | Cloud Security Hands-On (CCSK-Plus) Black Hat USA 2016 | Advanced Cloud Security and Applied SecDevOps (SOLD OUT! But we are considering opening more slots). Share:

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