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New Paper: Understanding and Selecting RASP

Adrian Lane August 29, 2016 No Comments

We are pleased to announce the availability of our Understanding RASP (Runtime Application Self-Protection) research paper. We would like to heartily thank Immunio for licensing this content. Without this type of support we could not bring this level of research to you, both free of charge and without requiring registration. We think this research paper will help developers and security professionals who are tackling application security from within. Our initial motivation for this paper was questions we got from development teams during our Agile Development and DevOps research efforts. During each interview we received questions about how to embed security into the application and the development lifecycle. The people asking us wanted security, but they needed it to work within their development and QA frameworks. Tools that don’t offer RESTful APIs, or cannot deploy within the application stack, need not apply. During these discussions we were asked about RASP, which prompted us to dive in. As usual, during this research project we learned several new things. One surprise was how much RASP vendors have advanced the application security model. Initial discussions with vendors showed several used a plug-in for Tomcat or a similar web server, which allows developers to embed security as part of their application stack. Unfortunately that falls a bit short on protection. The state of the art in RASP is to take control of the runtime environment – perhaps using a full custom JVM, or the Java JVM’s instrumentation API – to enable granular and internal inspection of how applications work. This model can provide assessments of supporting code, monitoring of activity, and blocking of malicious events. As some of our blog commenters noted, the plug-in model offers a good view of the “front door”. But full access to the JVM’s internal workings additionally enables you to deploy very targeted protection policies where attacks are likely to occur, and to see attacks which are simply not visible at the network or gateway layer. This in turn caused us to re-evaluate how we describe RASP technology. We started this research in response to developers looking for something suitable for their automated build environments, so we spent quite a bit of time contrasting RASP with WAF because to spotlight the constraints WAF imposes on development processes. But for threat detection, these comparisons are less than helpful. Discussions of heuristics, black and white lists, and other detection approaches fail to capture some of RASP’s contextual advantages when running as part of an application. Compared to a sandbox or firewall, RASP’s position inside an application alleviates some of WAF’s threat detection constraints. In this research paper we removed those comparisons; we offer some contrasts with WAF, but do not constrain RASP’s value to WAF replacement. We believe this technological approach will yield better results and provide the hooks developers need to better control application security. You can download the research paper, or get a copy from our Research Library. Share:

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