Leverage Collective Experience and Collaborative Tools in DevSecOps
In the fast-paced cybersecurity landscape, product security is a top concern. DevSecOps kicks in, seamlessly incorporating security practices into DevOps, empowering teams to overcome challenges. Let’s dive into DevSecOps and explore how collaboration can give your team an edge against cybercriminals.
Application security and product security
Unfortunately, application security teams are often late in the development process. They maintain the level of security of open software, ensuring the integrity and confidentiality of data consumed or generated. They focus on securing data flows, isolating environments with firewalls, and implementing strong user authentication and access control.
The product safety team aims to guarantee the intrinsic reliability of the application. They recommend tools and resources, make them available to developers and operations. In the DevSecOps approach, each team is responsible for the security of the applications they build. These teams implement secure coding practices, perform static and dynamic testing, and ensure that applications are resilient to exploits, sensitive data remains secure, and applications can withstand loads and attacks.
Strengthen product safety
The SecOps union, which intervenes in the product team, generally has cross-functional roles, ensuring consistency between projects for both technological and financial reasons. They encourage DevOps teams to use selected security tools and ensure proper implementation. This step rationalizes security resources, and further collaboration allows each DevOps team to benefit from the work and experience of others.
There may be simple ways to strengthen product security with collaborative tools:
1 — Plan for mitigation
In the event of a security incident or vulnerability, knowing that potential defects are identified and controlled is mandatory for SecOps. This is why offering profiling information and a way for users to sandbox the software ranks among the best things they can do. This might start by using a container with restricted rights but designing a security profile can take it a step further. Supplying an AppArmor profile or Seccomp filter ensures that even if an application is compromised, the attacker’s potential and attack surface remains highly limited and known. Incident response and forensic teams will thank you for this.
2 — Identify abnormal behavior
Developers can identify error signals during application development, usually in the form of error messages in logs. DevOps teams can determine whether a particular error event indicates abnormal or offensive behavior by categorizing error messages and associating them with abnormal behavior in a shared artifact repository on Github or other collaborative platforms. Using structured logging also makes subsequent analysis easier.
3 — Compare, calculate and correlate
These indicators must be compared, calculated, and correlated. Multiple failed authentication attempts or attempts to submit data or incorrectly formatted documents are reliable markers of unexpected behavior. Relying on centralized tools like SIEM for this task may go against some DevOps principles. Instead, application decisions must be made quickly and locally, adapting to the application’s required speed. Multiple description languages exist, enabling the creation of behavioral scenarios directly from developer-provided data with minimal integration into CI/CD processes.
4 — Take action
Once the aberrant behavior is identified, steps must be taken to protect the application. Actions might include slowing down the flow which could compromise the application’s processing capabilities, revoking attackers’ access, or banning their IP. Those with SOAR may use it to quickly respond to security events, while others may prefer decentralized decision making using tools like CrowdSec to interact with a web front end, authentication server, or firewall.
5 — Share security signal
Because SecOps often works with multiple DevOps teams, tools that recognize abnormal behavior and offer cascaded responses are especially helpful. Sharing security signals allows each DevOps team to benefit from the experiences of others. By associating scenarios with each code library to characterize abnormal behavior, time is saved every time another team uses that library. Scenarios stored in the local repository are accessible to everyone, enabling the creation of a security framework for each application that integrates them. In the end, securing an application is largely dependent on the previous experience gained by all DevSecOps teams.
6 — Share more
Collaborative tools allow sharing of attack signals, using frameworks like MITER ATT&CK for example. Aggressive sources banned for offensive behavior on one app can be banned on all enterprise apps. For example, respectively CrowdSec Security Engine can share signals on a local or global scale, so attacker IPs are recognized and immediately blocked, protecting applications and data while easing the burden on security infrastructure.
Stronger together
The DevSecOps team comes together to secure their applications, encouraging collaboration for the best reliability and data security. Embracing tools that draw on collective experience improves protection against a growing gang of cybercriminals. By sharing attack signals and leveraging on-sourced intel, organizations stand stronger simultaneously, prepared to confront cyberthreats. In the end, it’s all about teamwork, proving that we are an unstoppable force against cyberattacks.
You can demonstrate the collaborative tools mentioned in the article by visiting https://booking.crowdsec.net/book-a-demo
Note: This article was written by Jerome Clauzade at CrowdSec.
