Based in San Francisco Bay Area, Securesql is a blog by John Menerick. His insights dissect complex systems, offering a masterclass in cyber guardianship through expert analysis and cutting-edge protective strategies.

Cloud security tools are hard

There are tools, security tools, and then there are cloud security tools.  Especially in the realm of security orchestration.  Many cloud snake oil tools were never designed for the cloud.  See RSA four years ago when a vendor slapped cloud on their marketing material for pre-existing on-premise software.  Or better yet:  They took their CFEngine instances and applied it to all of their customer's AWS instances.  A great example are the vulnerability managers / scanners.   Setup a DNS hostname or IP to scan.  Then the vulnerability "management" portion of the scanner will track the DNS / IP with metadata about the machine.  But what about when the IP or DNS name changes to a different IP / DNS hostname, but the machine instance stays the same? Many service-based security tools pricing structure are based upon some idea of a static concept (IP address, DNS entry, etc...)  So imagine an infrastructure where new machines are created and destroyed every few minutes.  It will get quite expensive.  Not to mention, the vulnerability / GRC management software doesn't have the concept of a machine instance jumping around the infrastructure with different IPs / DNS names but still representing the same machine scanned moments earlier.  Well, their business model understands this concept and it means more licenses and billable expenses.  This is assuming you are able to scan instances which exist for a few minutes then are terminated; you did solve that problem, right?  

Very few cloud snake oil tools have any type of API or programmatic interface by which to interact with the service or tool.  Imagine if you wanted to correlate information on everyone piggybacking into your office.  A simple correlation involves seeing who didn't swipe into the office but logged on locally to the office networked machine.  If you had to resort to scraping the building access system to get your swipes, then it doesn't have an API or programmatic interface.  One would expect to see start, stop, restart, running status, credential management, alerting, reporting, auditing, etc....  

One's mileage on the time it will take to construct / destroy the cloud security orchestration tool.  For many software-based tools, it will require a complex host or network agent.  Look at the build complexity required to run Chef: MongoDB, Solr, Rails, Ruby, etc...  Best case, the tool will require credentials or be at some trusted point in the architecture.  This is where orchestration tools will succeed.  Once you can do it for another environment, it is simple to transition the orchestration to the new environment.  Assuming one is building a mirror of their other environment.

While interoperability will always be an issue with security tools, orchestration is another beast.  Rarely, one will find one tool to natively interoperate with others.  Hence the business need for Bromium, Cloud Passage, High Cloud Security, HyTrust, and other cloud security entities.  Ask yourself; does your cloud security tool have the ability to push / pull information from your Arc Sight instance, correlate with Splunk's output, push into your GRC tool, pull the latest scan from Qualys, maintain policy compliance, and push out signatures to your Imperva instances?  How about a simpler question:  How will you pull your puppet / chef logs from Splunk or OSSEC and correlate with one's security checklist automation documentation to verify what one is seeing is a policy violation or an intrusion?  By the way, the asset which caused the violation is now destroyed by your orchestration software.  I hope your incident response team understands how to investigate cloud instances and be able to perform forensic investigations.

Relatively Free #aaS Resources

Checkbox AWS assurance testing?