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Assembling A Container Security Program

Adrian Lane January 4, 2017 No Comments

Our paper, Assembling a Container Security Program, covers a broad range of topics around how to securely build, manage, and deploy containers. During our research we learned that issues often arise early in the software development or container assembly portion of the build process, so we cover much more than merely runtime security – the focus of most container security research. We also discovered that operations teams struggle with getting control over containers, so we also cover a number of questions regarding monitoring, auditing, and management. To give you a flavor for the content, we cover the following: IT and Security teams lack visibility into containers and have trouble validating them – both before placing them into production, and when running in production. Their peers on the development team are often disinterested in security, and cannot be bothered to provide reports and metrics. This is essentially the same problem we have for application security in general: the people responsible for the code are not incentivized to make security their problem, and the people who need to know what’s going on lack visibility. Containers are scaring the hell out of security pros because of their lack of transparency. The burden of securing containers falls across Development, Operations, and Security teams – but these groups are not always certain how to tackle the issues. This research is intended to aid security practitioners, developers, and IT operations teams in selecting container security tools and approaches. We will not go into great detail on how to secure apps in general here – we are limiting ourselves to build, container management, deployment, platform, and runtime security issues that arise with the use of containers. We will focus on Docker as the dominant container model, but the vast majority of our security recommendations also apply to Cloud Foundry, Rocket, Google Pods, and the like. If you worry about container security this is a good primer on all aspects of how code is built, bundled, containerized, and deployed. We would like to thank Aqua Security for licensing this research and participating in some of our initial discussions. As always, we welcome comments and suggestions. If you have questions, please feel free to email us, info at securosis.com. Download a copy of the paper here Share:

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Building Security Into DevOps

Adrian Lane December 10, 2015 No Comments

We are excited about this research paper, because we are excited about what the DevOps approach has delivered to many organizations, both small and large, already. And even firms who have only recently started down the path toward a full DevOps process already enjoy the advantages of streamlined testing and build processing with continuous integration. Our focus for this research was on how to embed security and security testing into DevOps, leveraging automated workflows to implement security testing, and providing fast feedback to developers when something is amiss. We offer a basic overview of DevOps, followed by several perspectives on how security folks and developers can work together to engineer security into a DevOps pipeline. From the paper: Some folks who suggest moving to DevOps meet internal resistance, fresh off the failures to implement Agile processes. When development teams of the past decade tried to go ‘Agile’ they often ran smack into the other groups within their own firms who remained steadfastly un-Agile. This resulted in more of the same in inter-group friction and further compounded communication and organizational issues. This dysfunction can have a paralytic effect, dropping productivity to nil. Most people are so entrenched in traditional software development approaches that it’s hard to see development ever getting better. And when firms who have adopted DevOps talk about deploying code every day instead of every year, or being fully patched within hours, or detection and recovery from a bug within minutes, most developers scoff at these notion as pure utopian fantasy. That is, until they see DevOps in action – then their jaws drop. We know plenty of you are already tired of hearing the term ‘DevOps’, and think this is just the newest overhyped flavor of Agile. Heck, even one of our associate analysts has scoffed at the claim that DevOps will have a pronounced effect on development and operations. But you don’t need to look far to see incredible success stories. When it comes down to it, DevOps is merely a way to reduce friction and leverage the full potential of your infrastructure. You can – and we know some organizations have and will – screw it up. But part of the beauty of this approach is that you quickly learn from mistakes – you can back them out and continue move forward. And it’s not magic fairy dust – it requires a radical change in organization, months of hard work to automate basic daily chores, and years to mature the pipeline. The benefits are not felt overnight – you only make small improvements on any given day, but they snowball over time. Especially paired with cloud computing, which provides granular API-level control over infrastructure, DevOps enables dramatic improvement. Our thanks to Veracode for licensing this content so we can bring it to you free of charge! Here is the paper: Building Security Into DevOps (PDF). Share:

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Secure Agile Development

Adrian Lane November 6, 2014 No Comments

If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, you know we have talked about the troubles of integrating security testing and secure code development practices into and Agile development process. Security is trying to manage risks to the organization, including risks introduced by new technologies such as code. Development teams try to deliver quality code faster, which means jettisoning things that slow them down. Both want customers to be happy and deliver new products and services, but underlying goals of risk reduction and maximized efficiency do not inherently mesh, causing friction. This research paper was conceived as a way to help security people understand and better work with development. We explain what development teams are trying to do, how they want to work, and offer pragmatic advice to help mesh the goals of both organizations into a unified process. And on this topic, we really wanted to give back to the community! We’ve included much of what we have learned with secure code development over the last two decades, as well as things we’ve learned from other development teams, CISOs and security vendors, to provide a simple guide on how to promote security in Agile software development teams. We are also proud to announce that Vercode has licensed this content. It’s not every day that a vendor will back a research paper that does not promote or demystify a product category, but it’s an area we felt security — and developers — could use information on. As this research is geared toward helping CISOs and others build a process, it’s decidedly non-product focused, so we are grateful for Veracode’s help in supporting our efforts to bring this research to you. As always, if you have questions or comments, please contact us at info at Securosis with the ‘dot com’ extension, or simply comment on the blog. You can download the paper here Share:

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