The principle of least privilege (PoLP) is a defensive strategy in the software development world. Alternatively called the principle of minimal privilege or the principle of least authority, PoLP ensures that users can only access the systems, processes, networks, and files required to complete their assigned tasks. When properly configured, unauthorized users can’t navigate to restricted application functions or switch roles.
Containers are a standardized software packaging format that provides a predictable, replicable way to run applications. Container isolation is one of the primary benefits of containerized applications. Using containers enables us to isolate our software from its environment, increasing consistency and reliability across our development and staging environments. You’re probably familiar with — or are using — Docker containers.
Creating Java applications is great, and many resources are available. To speed up development, many folks use frameworks and libraries that do some of the heavy lifting. When looking at modern Java applications, almost all of them contain dependencies from libraries developed by someone else. Dependencies take up about 80 to 90 percent of the binary — so, we should take good care of them when creating a Java project.
A Google remote procedure call (gRPC) is Google’s open source version of the remote procedure call (RPC) framework. It’s a communication protocol leveraging HTTP/2 and protocol buffer (protobuf) technologies. gRPC enables a remote client or server to communicate with another server by simply calling the receiving server’s function as if it were local. This makes communicating and transferring large data sets between client and server much easier in distributed systems.
Today we’re announcing a new container security cheat sheet and report — created in collaboration with our partner Sysdig. Download cheatsheet In this post, we’ll outline tips to help you successfully navigate the challenges of container security with a focus on three core principles: Traditional security approaches are incapable of handling the distributed and ephemeral nature of containers.
Distributed containerized systems compose applications, resources, services, databases, and other artifacts. These components often need sensitive information such as user keys, passwords, API keys, and certificates to function properly. Secrets management is critical for adequately handling sensitive information and Kubernetes deployments often utilize their built-in Secrets resource type and associated RBAC controls but what if you aren’t deploying on Kubernetes?
Drupal is a popular content management system (CMS) that leading corporations and government agencies use for mission-critical applications. With a supportive community of developers, robust security, multilingual support, compliance with WCAG guidelines, and ease of integration, Drupal is a go-to CMS.
One of the main goals for this research was to explore how it is possible to execute arbitrary commands even when using a safe API that prevents command injection. The focus will be on Version Control System (VCS) tools like git and hg (mercurial), that, among some of their options, allow the execution of arbitrary commands (under some circumstances). The targets for this research are web applications and library projects (written in any programming language) that call these commands using a safe API.
Open source libraries and frameworks are a great way to jump-start development projects. Open source empowers developers to do some great things without reinventing the wheel and developing solutions for problems that have already been solved. However, adding any code to a project carries an inherent risk of introducing potential vulnerabilities that may have made their way into it through error or malice.
There are many ways to find bugs in Python code: the built-in debugger (pdb), a healthy amount of unit tests, a debugger in an IDE like Pycharm or Visual Studio, try/catch statements, if/else statements, assert statements, or the tried and true practice of covering every inch of your codebase in print() statements like it’s going out of style. Assert statements can help us catch bugs quickly and are far less intrusive than copious amounts of print statements.
