Three Ways to Ensure Security of Cloud-Native Applications

Simplicity and integration excel when implementing a security solution. You can effectively minimize security and compliance threats by making security scanning an automatic by-product of your developers’ natural workflow.

Fremont, CA: While cloud-native applications are considered relatively stable, vulnerability possibilities are still present. Containers, orchestrators, and APIs included in an application’s surrounding infrastructure reflect new areas of attack. Apart from the cloud service itself, each of these layers has a range of user-defined settings to help users implement their security measures. This manual setup is riddled with user error and misconfiguration opportunities that expose the business to future attacks. Here are three ways to ensure the security of cloud-native applications:

Deploy Policies for What Is Acceptable and Assess Drift

Use automation to implement policies that support your risk appetite. Then constantly monitor drift that happens when security configurations of the cloud service, containers, or orchestrators are changed or when deployment resources themselves are modified. To identify this, permissible resources should be listed for each security setting, and each implementation checked for exceptions.

Identify and Manage Your Secrets

APIs often demand that secrets be passed to allow one piece of code to communicate to another piece of code. Passwords, SSH keys, tokens, and so on will contain these secrets. In managing secrets, common mistakes include placing them in the code itself, not rotating them, and not backing them up. In reality, simply storing secrets in a plain-text project configuration file or environmental variables is one of the most common recurrent errors. Fortunately, a secret detection scan will recognize secrets added to your code repository inadvertently or deliberately, allowing the developer to delete and invalidate the revealed secret before it can be used in an attack.

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Scan All Applications for Vulnerabilities

Attackers rarely go for mission-critical applications directly. Instead, they search for a weak link, a back-office internal application, or a one-and-done campaign marketing app. Then, through your containers and orchestrators, they progress to reach the confidential data. This is why it’s necessary to test all of your software whenever it’s replaced.