I get it. Cloud and DevOps are disruptive and create new risks. I’m a security pro; one with decades of hard-earned experience telling me that with great chaos comes great opportunity… for the bad as much as the good. And once again it’s time to circle the wagons, make sure policies are enforced, and our organization’s are protected. Or maybe that’s just all the subliminal vendor FUD leaking past my mental firewalls.
But maybe it’s time to tell that part of my brain to shut the blank up and start looking for all the ways cloud and DevOps make things better for security. Because they do. And not merely on the surface, but in deeply fundamental changes that upend a lot of our previous conceptions. The best part is that, for once, all of this is real, practical, and achievable today.
Major cloud providers provide solid security foundations (otherwise no one can use them), typically better than most self-managed data centers. Great baseline security is all well and good, but I’m far more interesting in ways cloud enables us to do security better. Not a little better, but fundamentally improve our existing practices, processes, and capabilities. This isn’t a theoretical concept, but a practical one that some of us are using today in the real world, and I’m going to show you a concrete example.
These capabilities are thanks to Software Defined Security and Event Driven Security.
Software Defined Security is the ability to programmatically manage our security technologies, including the security capabilities of non-security technologies. For the most part it’s been an abysmal failure since security companies don’t exactly have the best track record when it comes to APIs and automation (well, outside of marketing materials). Even today the burgeoning on-premise automation tools often find themselves having to remotely log into consoles and issue command lines to manage activity. Security automation has usually been a good way to automate your rapid departure from your current employer.
Cloud computing changes that in two ways. First, the broad accessibility of robust REST-based APIs to manage security features of cloud services and, on occasion, security tools or services themselves. SOAP APIs are usually too difficult to work with for anyone short of dedicated developers, while REST is often consumable for strong scripters and admins. Second, the non-security APIs allow security professionals to integrate with the infrastructure and platforms directly. We now use the same interfaces as operations and development, except we can use them to achieve security objectives.
For example, at various conferences I demonstrate an automated incident response workflow that quarantines and instance, locks down the AWS management, images the storage, launches a forensics analysis server and connects the images, and performs a deep analysis of it’s state, connected resources, and potential exposure. An old version is up on GitHub and I have a vastly updated version I’ll be releasing soon. All of this happens in a few seconds.
Another example, in that same project, nearly instantly identifies any instance in your account not managed by Chef. Identifying unmanaged servers in a traditional network is a common audit function that takes weeks or months. In cloud computing it’s two API calls and a three line comparison function. Last year at the RSA Conference I demonstrated automatically inserting a cloud WAF in front of detected web servers in less than a minute.
The second piece of the puzzle is newer. With Event Driven Security we leverage the core instrumentation of infrastructure and platforms to detect events and initiate security automation. Until now nearly all security tools relied on polling/scanning or custom agents that have a pesky tendency to kill performance or otherwise break things. For example, instead of scanning the network to detect a change, the network tells us when it changes, and that event triggers actions. It’s a subset of Software Defined Security, yet still distinct.
In this example I posted earlier this week I leverage Amazon’s new CloudWatch events and Lambda to automatically revert any security group changes, or only changes that fail to meet certain criteria, within 10 seconds. You could use the some template to reverse nearly any change in your environment, or kick off more complex workflows like the automated incident response.
Software Defined Security allows us to build security operations that are as elastic and agile as the cloud itself. Event Driven Security further reduces the changes of manual error, bringing even greater automation and speed, especially when paired with frameworks and concepts like DevOps and immutable infrastructure. These aren’t new concepts, but unlike in the past they are viable and actively used by real organizations in real production environments.
The combination fundamentally changes how we can build our security programs. Yes, we can still do all the old things we’ve always done, but with a little creative thinking we gain entirely new, and practical, capabilities. It’s a ridiculously exciting time for our community and profession.
