Developers across the enterprise space are concerned about the security of the open-source software supply chain which they heavily depend on for their application development. In response, Google plans to make its own security-hardened internal open-source component repository available as a new paid service called Assured Open Source Software (Assured OSS).

The service will contain common open-source packages that have been built from source code after the code’s provenance and that of its dependencies has been vetted and the code has been reviewed and tested for vulnerabilities. The resulting packages will contain rich metadata that’s compliant with the new Supply chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA) framework and will be digitally signed by Google.

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North Korean IT workers are attempting to generate revenue for DPRK and conduct cyber intrusions

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Developers, Ops and DevOps teams must incorporate security into their processes – often a hard sell. Here’s how security leaders can successfully align with them to weave security into their tools and workflows.

Establishing security controls across the enterprise used to be the exclusive realm of security teams. Not anymore. As a result, security leaders must get buy-in from developers, IT/OT Ops and DevOps teams to build security into their daily processes. The key is not just better communication, but engaging with these groups where they are, using the language they speak. As this post explains, security departments must transform from gatekeeping naysayers to business partners.

The changing world of enterprise security

As technology environments expand and evolve, incorporating a myriad of asset types and network architectures, including cloud platforms and IaC automation, more and more IT teams find themselves managing a wider array of critically important assets. Consequently, they must implement, adhere to and maintain security controls to protect the data, applications and assets they oversee. In order to protect these assets, it’s become imperative that development teams, DevOps groups and operations teams (both IT and OT) build security into their daily operations and tasks. But security isn’t the core competency of these teams – nor should we expect it to be! Their business goals, priorities and motivations are different – sometimes diametrically so – and that can create inherent resistance to the security team’s goals of mitigating risk throughout the organization.

Let’s start by outlining these differences and the ways to bridge the communication gap that often underpins the resistance these business units aim at the security team.

Why we do what we do

Let’s establish the motivations for the three key players in today’s technology landscape: Security, Development and DevOps. Security teams are driven by the familiar CIA triad of Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability. Controls put in place throughout the organization are designed to ensure one or more of these tenets. Protecting data from exposure, ensuring that assets aren’t compromised and building resiliency into the infrastructure are all key motivations for security.

Development teams aren’t motivated in the same way at all. While there may be some cursory acknowledgement of keeping systems up and running, security isn’t typically top of mind. Developers are builders at their core. They create new functionality, drive sales through new features and architect new software from the ground up. They see security as an obstacle to their goal of building something new. It’s hard to rapidly write and deploy code that delivers fancy new features to your end users when you have to conduct security scans, check in code for review and do whatever else the security team requires. It’s a recipe for immediate conflict: the need to balance efficient coding practices while deploying code that is secure, safe and free of errors that could lead to a compromise of the application.

DevOps teams, however, straddle the line between these groups, shuttling the code, applications and infrastructure from testbeds out into production. Like developers, DevOps sees security as an obstacle, but here, the primary driver isn’t necessarily creating something new, but rather, finding efficient ways to complete their tasks. This usually revolves around immense amounts of automation, which allows DevOps teams to be fast, flexible and able to address large-scale deployments with minimal effort. Here, security is seen as a hindrance to these automation processes because it requires multiple checks to ensure production deployments are safe and secured, and because it creates checkboxes to add to existing DevOps tasks which often aren’t as automated as their other workflows. This can dramatically slow down the deployment process, and that’s where the rub happens again.

Looking across the lines, there doesn’t seem to be an obvious place where these teams can intersect and find common ground. Or is there? Security leaders who know that these goals are far more aligned than most realize tend to succeed at breaking down resistance and building a stronger, more seamless security program that meaningfully reduces risk for the organization. It all starts with changing the message to align with what’s important to each of these teams.

WIIFM wins the day yet again

A common mistake security teams make with their communication programs is to assume that everyone understands that security is important, and they repeat a heavy security-focused message. But for most non-security business units in an organization, we often fail to explain security in terms that highlight WIIFM, i.e. “What’s In It For Me?”. Realistically, most non-security business units within an organization view security as an obstacle to their own efforts and commonly write it off as “that other team’s job”. Web content filters block websites. Endpoint security prevents the installation of fun games and applications. Email security stops people from clicking on enticing links promising lottery winnings, package delivery updates or tax solutions (seriously, please don’t click on anything like that). When security controls are seen as coming from “the department of no”, is it any wonder that developers and DevOps admins are hesitant to allow security controls into their domains?

Security doesn’t have to be “the department of no”, and the more we embrace security controls that sync with the way users, admins and engineers do business, the easier it is to show them what’s in it for them and the organization as a whole. So, let’s look at some recommendations across the People-Process-Tools triad where you can improve buy-in from your development and DevOps teams and tear down the obstacles that often prevent security teams from maturing and meeting their goals.

Table: People-Process-Tools Recommendations for Security Teams

Development Teams

DevOps Teams

People

Don’t require your developers to become security professionals and learn a bunch of security tools. They live in coding environments, and it’s in everyone’s interest for them to remain there.
That said, teaching secure coding practices IS valuable, and helps to bring a measure of security into the overall process by having developers do what they normally do: write code.
In communications with developers, acknowledge that there is no expectation that they must use additional security tools or that they are responsible for understanding security at the same level as the security professionals in the org. 

DevOps teams generally have a better alignment with security, but they’re still very busy folks and also shouldn’t be burdened with the expectation that they’ll be security experts. 
Communications with DevOps teams should, like with developers, highlight the areas where security controls have integration mechanisms that DevOps teams will require to keep their automation engines running.

Process

Focus on policy-based controls which provide output to developers in code. That is to say, show where broken code is and what code could be used to fix it instead of a PDF report that shows a “critical severity vulnerability in your app”.
Translate security findings into work requests that show exactly what needs to be done and where. (this can and should be automated!)
Developers value real-time responses. They’re trying to build new functionality quickly, and waiting on security processes to provide feedback before they can ship code is anathema to the way they work. 

Security controls should be implemented within a DevOps workflow as early in the process as possible. As these teams deal in scale, strong security controls that ensure images, applications, containers and other assets are secured before they’re rolled out in the thousands means that DevOps teams can focus on fixing something just once.
As much as possible, adopt a red light/green light (or a go/no go) stance for any issues or problems detected from a security standpoint. This is easier to automate into existing DevOps workflow decision-making trees and prevents DevOps from having to slow down and translate security findings into concrete tasks.
Expanding the above point: where possible, provide specific remediation steps to DevOps teams. They’re focused on “getting it done”, and the more time spent trying to figure out what to do only serves to impede their workflows.

Tools

Any software product you bring into the development workflows MUST integrate natively into their existing development tools. Do not expect developers to learn new security tools. Instead, bring security into their build environments (and yes, these tools exist!)
Security findings should automatically be translated into developer work requests and integrated into issue tracking systems (ex. Jira)

Security tools in the DevOps world must have easy and robust APIs and allow for integrations wherever and however the DevOps team works. This means support for multiple cloud platforms, toolsets and scripting languages.
Like with developers, security tools should integrate seamlessly into existing DevOps tools and output findings in a way that’s relevant to their workloads. This means integration into IT ticketing systems or other workflow management tools as well (ex. ServiceNOW).

Conclusion

At the end of the day, security professionals and leaders need to communicate with their audiences where the audiences themselves are, not where the security folks are. We must demonstrate that the security controls that we want to implement won’t be obstacles to the creation of new software features and functionality your development teams are focused on. We also need to show how those same controls won’t impede the speed and scalability that DevOps teams thrive on. If we are successful in communicating like this, security teams can move away from being seen as “the department of no”, and instead be recognized as a business partner who empowers the organization to be more operationally efficient while also reducing and mitigating risk to the core mission. 

Learn More

Read the white paper 3 Levels of Security Strategy for Business Risk Decisions
Watch the on-demand webinar Cyber Leadership Lessons from the New World of Work: What’s Next?
Read the blog Aligning Cybersecurity and Business: Nobody Said It Was Easy

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The addition of Terrascan to the Nessus family of products helps users better secure cloud native infrastructure by identifying misconfigurations, security weaknesses, and policy violations by scanning Infrastructure as Code repositories. 

Twenty-three years ago when Nessus was created by Renaud Deraison, the computers the scan engine was designed for were physically attached to hubs and switches, changed infrequently and were always available unless somebody shut their system down for the weekend. Fast forward to the current day: Almost every organization has a cloud-first strategy and new workloads can be spun up and down in minutes across the globe with just a few clicks. 

It would only follow that the tactics and tools security professionals use to evaluate the security of systems would need to change. This is especially true when dealing with cloud native environments which require security practitioners to do a deep dive into the guts of configuration files (aka Infrastructure as Code) in order to validate things like secrets management, RBAC, encryption, user privileges and other controls configured by individual developers. 

That’s why we decided to integrate Nessus with Terrascan, our open-source IaC security analyzer. Terrascan enables cloud security practitioners to scan infrastructure code and find security issues as part of the software delivery process. Including Terrascan in Nessus enables Nessus users to expand the scope of their security assessments to include the validation of modern cloud infrastructure before it gets deployed. 

Intro to Terrascan: Cloud-First Security Testing 

As the creator of Terrascan, I see this as a super exciting opportunity for both the Nessus and Terrascan communities. Coming from a security and risk management background, I can relate to the challenges that security teams face when their company moves to a cloud-first strategy. In addition to having to deal with securing a whole new stack of technology, security team members have to deal with new workflows and requirements. 

I remember one of my first public cloud projects. The company had decided it needed to rewrite a critical customer-facing system using a cloud-native architecture in order to stay competitive. It set an aggressive timeline of 12 weeks for the first working release. To accomplish this, they created a cross-functional team that included representatives from the business, software development, architecture, security, and operations teams. I was moved from security into the project team. 

At first the task seemed daunting. There was a lot to learn and implement in a short period of time, and as the representative of the security team, I wanted to make sure security was embedded into every decision we made. That meant having a scalable way to review and provision network security settings and configuration, identity and access management policies, and ensuring that any cloud resource was configured following security best practices.

Speed, Consistency and Scalability with Infrastructure as Code 

Around that time I discovered a tool called Terraform and the concept of Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Using Terraform we were able to quickly provision our infrastructure in a consistent manner where the code to provision our infrastructure lived side by side to our application code. This was a huge benefit compared to the way things were done in our on-premises data center, where we used ticketing systems to engage the security team and where developers perceived security as a black box that a siloed team handled.

But wait? What about standardization and security checks?

I soon realized IaC tools like Terraform still require a high level of governance in order to ensure each team and developer adhere to security standards and build infrastructure uniformly. Without a process of ensuring standards and security controls, development teams could quickly and consistently push misconfigured resources into production at scale. This translated into having to spend an increasing amount of time performing manual reviews of Terraform templates and code. Not only was this process an inefficient use of time but it was also not scalable, and would result either in missing product-delivery deadlines and/or releasing code to production that had not been tested for security issues. 

With that I knew we were going to need a different approach to security in the cloud and started thinking about a solution. 

Security Standard Enforcement and Risk Mitigation with Terrascan

With this in mind I developed an open source code scanner for Terraform – Terrascan. 

Why Terrascan?

Typically, businesses decide to embark into cloud transformation journeys to reduce costs and increase the agility of their development teams. What I’ve found is that by adopting a tool like Terrascan and other cloud security best practices the security team can contribute to these goals while reducing risks in the environment. Adopting a policy-as-code approach to security allows for better understanding of security controls across the organization where issues are found as early as possible during development. This helps reduce the cost of finding and fixing issues in production, while empowering development teams to release with confidence.

Today, Terrascan features a pluggable architecture that uses the same approach to scan multiple IaC and cloud-native solutions including Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Azure Resource Manager, Kubernetes, Helm, and Kustomize, and is used to address two core challenges:

Standardization: Terrascan helps implement policy as code by including 500+ policies across multiple providers that assess for misconfigurations using the Open Policy Agent (OPA) engine. Using the underlying Rego language, policies can be easily written and extended to include any standards specific to your environment. Examples of common security weaknesses that can be easily mitigated using Terrascan include: 

Server-side encryption misconfigurations
Use of AWS Key Management Service (KMS) with Customer Managed Keys (CMS)
Encryption in-transit SSL/TLS not enabled and configured properly
Security Groups open to the public internet
Inadvertent public exposure of cloud services
Access logs not enabled on resources that support them

Risk Mitigation: Using Terrascan you can easily integrate cloud infrastructure security into DevOps pipelines to prevent security issues from reaching production. This includes integration with tools like Atlantis, Argo CD, GitLab and GitHub Actions. 

Why Open Source?

Our belief at Tenable is that security is an important, foundational concern of any cloud project. The creation of open source tools like Terrascan helps to standardize and democratize security in a way that anyone can contribute to. It benefits all organizations, and the community itself, to have security policies open for everyone to look at so we can quickly identify the best practices. Then we can apply those best practices consistently across all applications by exposing our code base to community members to actively contribute to the underpinning policy base and easily modify to meet their specific needs. 

Get Started Today with Terrascan!

Accessing the new Terrascan capabilities within Nessus is a breeze. The first thing you will need to do is download the latest Nessus version (10.1.2 or later). Once you log back in, click on the new Terrascan resource item on the left-hand side navigation menu to install.

Once installed, you’re ready to launch your first Terrascan assessments. It’s that easy!

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