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?
During many recent security incidents, we hear a lot of messages about the lack of knowledge of the code dependencies, attacks to the software supply chain, Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), digital signatures, provenance, attestation, etc. The fact is, every time a new vulnerability appears in the landscape, we usually need to spend a lot of time and effort to detect the real impact on the applications and services that are running in our environment.
The Rego policy language is the backbone of Open Policy Agent (OPA), the policy enforcement tool that helps simplify cloud-native development at scale. With OPA Rego policy, the result is a reduced manual authorization burden, improved accuracy, and quicker time to market. But yes, there’s a learning curve, which makes Rego a main barrier to using OPA. You might be hesitant about the time investment needed to learn a new, highly specified language.
Securing your Kubernetes environments may seem daunting at first, given how many different parts must be individually protected. Still, with the proper organization, you can make Kubernetes security much simpler and more effective. We’ve put together a complete Kubernetes security checklist of best practices and security recommendations to help you keep track of your progress. To make this a little easier, we’ve divided this checklist into the following sections.
As technology explodes, so do the threats. Point solutions emerge as security players innovate in order to keep up. This creates the need for consolidation, as the fragmented solutions become too much to manage. We’re entering a consolidation phase now, the process of distilling, refining, and letting the cream rise to the top. We sat down with cybersecurity veteran and vigilante, Chris Wysopal, to get his perspective on emerging trends in cloud-native security.
Open Policy Agent, or OPA, has emerged as an industry standard for cloud-native authorization and policy as code. From 2018 to now, it has grown from being a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) sandbox project into a fully mature, graduated CNCF project, deployed by many of the largest organizations in the world. (For just the tip of the iceberg, here is a list of users who have made their adoption of OPA public).
Kubernetes provides an interface to run distributed systems smoothly. It takes care of scaling and failover for your applications, provides deployment patterns, and more. Regarding security, it’s the teams deploying workloads onto the Kubernetes cluster that have to consider which workloads they want to monitor for their application security requirements.
