A practical approach
Product security is more than running code scanning tools and facilitating pentests. Yet that’s what many security teams focus on. Secure coding is not a standalone discipline, it’s about developing systems that are safe. It starts with organisational culture, embedding the right behaviours and building on existing code quality practices.
In the DevSecOps paradigm, the need for manual testing and review is minimised in favour of speed and agility. Security input should be provided as early as possible, and at every stage of the process. Automation, therefore, becomes key. Responsibility for quality and security as well as decision-making power should also shift to the local teams delivering working software. Appropriate security training must be provided to these teams to reduce the reliance on dedicated security resources.
I created a diagram illustrating a simplified software development lifecycle to show where security-enhancing practices, input and tests are useful. The process should be understood as a continuous cycle but is represented in a straight line for the ease of reading.
There will, of course, be variations in this process – the one used in your organisation might be different. The principles presented here, however, can be applied to any development lifecycle, your specific pipeline and tooling.
I deliberately kept this representation tool and vendor agnostic. For some example tools and techniques at every stage, feel free to check out the DevSecOps tag on this site.
There is a strong correlation between code quality and security: more bugs lead to more security vulnerabilities. Simple coding mistakes can cause serious security problems, like in the case of Apple’s ‘goto fail’ and OpenSSL’s ‘Heartbleed‘, highlighting the need for disciplined engineering and testing culture.
I touched upon embedding security in modern software development practices in my previous blogs on agile security and DevSecOps culture and recommended some tools to help automate managing vulnerabilities in open source libraries, help preventing committing secrets in code and integrating application security testing in the CI/CD pipeline. In this blog I would like to touch upon the connection between code quality and security and explore static code analysis.
An open source tool that is gaining a lot of momentum in this space is Semgrep. It supports multiple languages and integrates well in the CI/CD pipeline. You can run Semgrep out of a Docker container and the test results are conveniently displayed in the command line interface.
The rule set is still relatively limited compared to other established players and it might find fewer issues. You can write your own rules, however, and things are bound to improve as the tool continues to develop with contributions from the community.
A more well-known tool in this space is SonarQube. You can still use a free Community Edition for basic testing but advanced enterprise-level features would require a paid subscription. CI/CD integration is possible, inter plugins (like the one for ESLint) are also available.
SonarQube has a dashboard view which scores your code across reliability, security, maintainability and other metrics.
As with any tool of this type, to get the best use out of it, some initial configuration is required to reduce the number of false positives, so don’t be discouraged by the high number of bugs or “code smells” being discovered initially.
Keeping in mind the fact that no amount of automation can guarantee finding all the vulnerabilities, I found SonarQube’s analysis around Security Hotspots particularly interesting. It also estimates a time required to pay down the tech debt which can serve as a good indicator of maintainability of your codebase.
It is important to remember that static code analysis tools are not a substitute for the testing culture, code reviews, threat modelling and secure software engineering. They can, however, be a useful set of guardrails for engineers and act as an additional layer in your defence in depth strategy. Although these tools are unlikely to catch all the issues, they can certainly help raise awareness among software developers about quality and security improvements, alert about potential vulnerabilities before they become a problem and prevent the accumulation of tech and security debt in your company.
Drawing on my experience in securing technology startups and software companies, I wrote a guest blog for ISACA on how to embed security in the modern product development. You can check it out here.
Bug bounty programmes are becoming the norm in larger software organisations but it doesn’t mean you have to be Google or Facebook to run one for continuous security testing and engaging with the security community..
Setting it up can be easier than you might think as there are multiple platforms like HackerOne, BugCrowd or similar out there that can help with centralised management. They also offer an option to introduce it gradually through private participation first before opening it to the whole world.
At a minimum, you can have a dedicated email address (e.g. security@yourexamplecompanyname) that security researchers can use to report security issues. Having a page transparently explaining the participation terms, scope and payout rate also helps. Additionally, it’s good to have appropriate tooling to track issues and verify fixes.
Even if you don’t have any of the above, security researchers can still find vulnerabilities in your product and report them to you responsibly, so you effectively get free testing but can exercise limited control over it. Therefore, it’s a good idea to have a process in place to keep them happy enough to avoid them disclosing issues publicly.
There is probably nothing more frustrating for a security researcher than receiving no response (apart perhaps from being threatened legal action), so communication is key. At the very least, thank them and request more information to help verify their finding while you kick off the investigation internally. Bonus points for keeping them in the loop when it comes to plans for remediation, if appropriate.
There are some prerequisites for setting up the bug bounty programme though. Beyond the obvious budget requirement for paying researchers for the vulnerabilities they discover, there is a broader need for engineering resources being available to analyse reported issues and work on improving the security of your products and services. What’s the point of setting up a bug bounty programme if no one is looking at the findings?
Many companies, therefore, might feel they are not ready for a bug bounty programme. They may have too many known issues already and fear they will be overwhelmed with duplicate submissions. These might indeed be problematic to manage, so such organisations are better off focusing their efforts on remediating known vulnerabilities and implementing measures to prevent them (e.g. setting up a Content Security Policy).
They could also consider introducing security tests in the pipeline as this will help catch potential vulnerabilities much earlier in the process, so the bug bounty programme can be used as a fall back mechanism, not the primary way for identifying security issues.
In the past year I had the opportunity to help a tech startup shape its culture and make security a brand differentiator. As the Head of Information Security, I was responsible for driving the resilience, governance and compliance agenda, adjusting to the needs of a dynamic and growing business.
If you are following my blog, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been focusing on security-specific AWS services in my previous several posts. It’s time to bring them all together into one consolidated view. I’m talking, of course, about the AWS Security Hub.
Security Hub allows you to aggregate and centrally analyse security alerts and findings from Config, GuardDuty, IAM, Inspector, Firewall Manager and more.
You can group, filter and prioritise findings from these services in many different ways. And, of course, you can visualise and make dashboards out of them.
Apart from consolidating findings from other services, it also assesses your overall AWS configuration against PCI DSS and/or the CIS Amazon Web Services Foundations Benchmark, which covers identity and access management, logging, monitoring and networking, giving you the overall score (example below) and actionable steps to improve your security posture.
Similar to the many other AWS services, Security Hub is regional, so it will need to be configured in every active region your organisation operates. I also recommend setting up your security operations account as a Security Hub master account and then inviting all other accounts in your organisation as members for centralised management (as described in this guidance or using a script).
If you are not a big fan of the Security Hub’s interface or don’t want to constantly switch between regions, the service sends all findings to CloudWatch Events by default, so you can forward them on to other AWS resources or external systems (e.g. chat or ticketing systems) for further analysis and remediation. Better still, you can configure automated response using Lambda, similar to what we did with Inspector findings discussed previously.
I wrote about automating application security testing in my previous blog. If you host your application or API on AWS and would like an additional layer of protection agains web attacks, you should consider using AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF).
It is relatively easy to set up and Amazon kindly provide some preconfigured rules and tutorials. AWS WAF is deployed in front of CloudFront (your CDN) and/or Application Load Balancer and inspects traffic before it reaches your assets. You can create multiple conditions and rules to watch for.
If you’ve been configuring firewalls in datacentres before the cloud services became ubiquitous, you will feel at home setting up IP match conditions to blacklist or whitelist IP addresses. However, AWS WAF also provides more sophisticated rules for detecting and blocking known bad IP addresses, SQL Injections and Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacks.
Additionally, you can chose to test your rules first, counting the times it gets triggered rather than setting it to block requests straight away. AWS also throw in a standard level of DDoS protection (AWS Shield) with WAF at no extra cost, so there is really no excuse not to use it.
If you rely on EC2 instances in at least some parts of your cloud infrastructure, it is important to reduce the attack surface by hardening them. You might want to check out my previous blogs on GuardDuty, Config, IAM and CloudTrail for other tips on securing your AWS infrastructure. But today we are going to be focusing on yet another Amazon service – Inspector.
To start with, we need to make sure the Inspector Agent is installed on our EC2 instances. There are a couple of ways of doing this and I suggest simply using the Inspector service Advance Setup option. In addition, you can specify the instances you want to include in your scan as well as its duration and frequency. You can also select the rules packages to scan against.
After the agent is installed, the scan will commence in line with the configuration you specified in the previous step. You will then be able to download the report detailing the findings.
The above setup gives you everything you need to get started but there is certainly room for improvement.
It is not always convenient to go to the Inspector dashboard itself to check for discovered vulnerabilities. Instead, I recommend creating an SNS Topic which will be notified if Inspector finds new weaknesses. You can go a step further and, in the true DevSecOps way, set up a Lambda function that will automatically remediate Inspector findings on your behalf and subscribe it to this topic. AWS kindly open sourced a Lambda job (Python script) that automatically patches EC2 instances when an Inspector assessment generates a CVE finding.
You can see how Lambda is doing its magic installing updates in the CloudWatch Logs:
Or you can connect to your EC2 instance directly and check yum logs:
You will see a number of packages updated automatically when the Lambda function is triggered based on the Inspector CVE findings. The actual list will of course depend on how many updates you are missing and will correspond to the CloudWatch logs.
You can run scans periodically and still choose to receive the notifications but the fact that security vulnerabilities are being discovered and remediated automatically, even as you sleep, should give you at least some peace of mind.
I wrote previously about inventorying your assets in AWS using an external open source tool. An alternative to this approach is to use AWS Config.
This AWS service certainly has its imperfections (e.g. it doesn’t support all AWS resources) but it is easy to set up and can be quite useful too. When you first enable it, Config will analyse the resources in your account and make the summary available to you in a dashboard (example below). It’s a regional service, so you might want to enable it in all active regions.
Config, however, doesn’t stop there. You can now use this snapshot as a reference point and track all changes to your resources on a timeline. It can be useful when you need to analyse historical records, demonstrate compliance or gain visibility in your change management practices. It can also notify you of any configuration changes if you set up SNS notifications.
Config rules allow you to continuously track compliance with various baselines. AWS provide quite a few out of the box and you can create your own to tailor to the specific environment you operate in. You have to pay separately for rules, so I encourage you to check out pricing first.
As with some other AWS services, you can aggregate the data in a single account. I recommend using the account used for security operations as a master. You will then need to establish a two-way handshake, inviting member accounts and authorising the master account to be able to consolidate the results.
Cyber Security Leadership 