DevOps Security Tools

 

In this article, we will go through the various DevOps Security tools that have been evolving over the years and which can save us from any foreseen web attacks. There are multiple ways that a web application can be targeted, like SQL Injection, CSRF attacks, or DDoS attacks - so on and so forth. There has been additional pressure over the applications that are being developed which are resistant to such intrusions on them. Detection of intrusions has become one of the most demanded features of any defense-in-depth strategy. 

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Earlier the situation was that these web applications were safe behind a firewall but over the years this has proven no guard to save from such advanced attacks and hence the demand for the tools that provide us the much-needed security in DevOps space. An intrusion detection system will possess the capability to evaluate the situation and based on it generates an alarm on detecting a packet with hostile potential, this was never the case with a firewall as such. Let us now take a look at each of the Security DevOps tools and also understand how these help us attain security.

[ Related Page: What are DevOps Tools ]

List of DevOps Security Tools:

1. Signal Sciences Web Protection Platform
2. Checkmarx AppSec Accelerator
3. OSSEC
4. OWASP Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP)
5. LogRhythm SIEM
6. Venafi Trust Protection Platform
7. Charles Proxy
8. Burp Proxy
9. CyberArk
10. Snort
11. JBoss Data Virtualization

Learn DevOps Security Tools:

As per the understanding that we have obtained in the section above, let us take a detailed look at each and every tool – and at the same time also let us try to understand the pros and cons of it, should they be put to use in a DevOps environment.

1. Signal Sciences Web Protection Platform:

Signal Sciences Web Protection Platform (WPP) offers broad threat protection but at the same time, it is not one of the best positioned as a point provider. The company from its very inception took the lessons that they’ve learned over the years to develop this platform to defend against real-world threats. It is definitely one of the applications that will enable a full spectrum of cybersecurity to web applications. WPP is not just a Web Application Firewall (WAF), but it is much more than that.

Technologies that fall into the bucket of WAF tend to defend web applications against attacks that are limited to the network level. WPP has the ability to plugin into any given DevOps toolchain and enables security to that DevOps team without any further hassles. There is very good integration with Slack for communication, with JIRA for bug tracking, with PagerDuty for alerting, and also with Datadog for the infrastructure monitoring. On the other side, WPP can also plugin into Apache, NGINX, or even to IIS Web servers or to the applications themselves.

Following are some of the advantages of using Signal Sciences Web Protection Platform (WPP), let us now take a look at each and every one of them:

Advantages:

• Signal Sciences offers the very first Next-Gen Web Application Firewall with the acronym NGWAF.
• WPP offers web application defense from the attacks based on the real-world experience
• WPP can bring out the proper insight as to where and how your web applications or APIs are attacked and also suggestions on how to secure them from those attacks.

2. Checkmarx AppSec Accelerator

AppSec Accelerator is wonderful application security managed service which helps organizations to transition to a very secure SDLC model combining it with Static / Dynamic application security testing to provide the best possible security coverage. The tool will help you to streamline and also to automate your application security testing. Through the tool itself, all the needed expertise is also provided to ensure the application’s security is successfully attained. The tool in itself enables you to rapidly ramp up, set up, and deploy your app sec program. It will also enable you to transition your Organization to a fully automated secure SDLC one.

Following are some of the advantages of using Checkmarx AppSec Accelerator, let us now take a look at each and every one of them:

Advantages:

• It is a wonderful tool that allows you to write secure code and also allows you to follow all the best practices.
• Uses the user’s credentials to generate a comprehensive report that is pretty easy to understand and also makes it easy to solve those identified potential security issues.
• It scans your codebase also to identify any potential vulnerabilities
• It also has the ability to identify the cross-site scripting bugs from your codebase in an easy manner.

3. OSSEC:

OSSEC is a free, open-source host-based intrusion detection system (HIDS). It performs log analysis, integrity checking, Windows registry monitoring, rootkit detection, time-based alerting, and active response. It provides intrusion detection for most operating systems, including Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, OS X, Solaris, and Windows. OSSEC has a centralized, cross-platform architecture allowing multiple systems to be easily monitored and managed.

OSSEC consists of the main application, a Windows agent, and a web interface. The main application, OSSEC, is required for distributed network or stand-alone installations. It is supported by Linux, Solaris, BSD, and Mac environments. Windows agent, which is provided for Microsoft Windows environments. The main application needs to be installed and configured for server mode to support the Windows Agent. Web interface (deprecated), which as a separate application provides a graphical user interface. Like the main application, it is supported by Linux, Solaris, BSD, and Mac environments. It is now suggested to use Kibana, Splunk Graylog, or something similar for monitoring alerts.

Following are some of the advantages of using OSSEC, let us now take a look at each and every one of them:

Advantages:

• The intrusion detection system can be referred to as a management system for both computers and networks. It is a combination of architected devices and software applications with the purpose of detecting malicious activities and violation of policies and produce a report on that.
• The intrusion detection system can monitor a network for any kind of abusive, abnormal, or malicious activity.
• It keeps logging off every single malicious or abusive activity. These logs are very important for security professionals to take any steps or to set any rules against these activities.
• The logs kept by IDS can be used against an abuser as evidence to take any legal step.

4. OWASP Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP):

OWASP’s Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) is yet another popular free security tool that is actively maintained by hundreds of community members. It helps you identify the security vulnerabilities on your web application while you are just developing or testing your web applications. It is one of the best tools that are available for experienced penetration testers who use manual security testing. It is ideal for developers and functional testers as well as security experts. Penetration testing is the art of testing your applications for vulnerabilities and also at the same time answering a simple question – what should be done to secure your application that could be used against it?

Following are some of the advantages of using OWASP ZAP, let us now take a look at each and every one of them:

Advantages:

• OWASP ZAP is like the swiss army knife of all web assessment tools. It has a proxy and these tools are built-in into it.
• Since it is written in Java, it also enjoys the benefit of being platform-independent.
• One of the best features of ZAP is the configuration that you can make to the sensitivity and also the scan aggressiveness.
• Setting up the default alert threshold to low and take up the responsibility to identify the findings manually.
• ZAP allows users to save sessions, thereby allowing the testers to resume their testing from the point where they have deviated to other tasks.

5. LogRhythm SIEM:

A SIEM is an important instrument in your security toolkit—but it’s not the only one. To keep up with the ever-evolving threat landscape, you may need a SIEM with additional capabilities for network forensics, endpoint monitoring, UEBA, and incident response. LogRhythm’s unified Threat Lifecycle Management Platform is designed to scale with your organization’s security needs without costly integrations or customizations. It delivers real-time visibility, intelligence, and automation across your entire IT environment.

Improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your SOC with LogRhythm Enterprise or LogRhythm XM. Both will accelerate your team’s threat detection and response capabilities and deliver comprehensive compliance assurance and security automation and orchestration. Both are designed for ease of use out of the box. Select the configuration that is right for your organization.

[ Related Page: Automation DevOps ]

Following are some of the advantages of using LogRhythm SIEM, let us now take a look at each and every one of them:

Advantages:

• Improved efficiency for your SOC with end-to-end capabilities that include network forensics, UEBA, and incident response.
• Comprehensive compliance automation and assurance.
• Accelerated threat detection and response for improved mean time to detect and respond metrics for your SOC.
• Easy-to-use out-of-the-box features so your team can begin to provide value immediately after deployment.

6. Venafi Trust Protection Platform:

Most of the existing organizations either use homegrown solutions or completely depend on excel trackers and stuff like that to track their keys and certificates manually. Following these methods, gives you subliminal chances to scale further and doesn’t let you grow in today’s market conditions. Organizations as such can then follow using tools like Venafi Trust Protection Platform (TPP) to consume all their key and certificate management needs through this platform rather than depending on manual methods of management. Tools like this provide the required automation towards protecting machine identities where the Organizations rely on their communications to be private and secure at the same time.

The Venafi Platform secures communication and authentication across all machine identity types, including SSL/TLS, SSH, IoT, and mobile. The Venafi Platform automates protection for the millions of keys and certificates that organizations rely on to determine their machine identities. Protecting these machine identities across websites, virtual machines, mobile devices, applications, and the cloud infrastructure prevents compromised keys and certificates from granting unauthorized access or triggering application outages.

Following are some of the advantages of using the Venafi Trust Protection Platform (TPP), let us now take a look at each and every one of them:

Advantages:

• This tool allows you to continuously discover all the keys, certificates and CAs
• This tool also allows you to continuously monitor keys and certificates for any possible anomalies and weaknesses.
• Provides an opportunity to automate the rapid replacement of compromised keys and certificates at the earliest.
• It also ensures to enforce of key policies and certificate policies to strengthen security further.
• It also allows the automation of the certificate requests and renewals.

7. Charles Proxy:

Charles is intended to be a dive-in piece of software. Start it up, it will attempt to automatically configure your browser so you’re up and running immediately. Start browsing the web and watch the results appear in Charles; click on them and take a look at what is recorded. In order to auto-configure your proxy settings on Mac OS X, you need to grant permission to Charles by entering your password.

If your proxy settings have been auto-configured you should now be able to use your web browser and observe the events being recorded in Charles. It is incredibly powerful as you are now able to see everything that is being transmitted and received – it lets you look underneath the hood at what is actually happening.

Following are some of the advantages of using Charles Proxy, let us now take a look at each and every one of them:

Advantages:

• This tool enables you to examine the DTM files and also ensures to know the order in which they are loaded
• Can use any device to see the analytics beacons irrespective of the type of the device
• Allows you to tweak a page and make modifications, allows you to emulate its behavior as if it were loaded on Production.
• It lets you save the session of analytics traffic so that it can be sent to the concerned people later in time.
• Let’s capture the full URL of the POST beacon so that the parser tool could be used to split it out.
• Let’s you take a look at the headers and also the cookies attached to a given beacon at any point in time.?

[ Related Article: DevOps Methodology ]

8. Burp Proxy:

Burp Proxy is yet another graphical Security Testing tool for web applications that acts as an intercepting proxy server. It is a tool that is written in Java and has two versions to it – A free version that is available for download and also a Full version that can be purchased as it is a Professional Edition software tool. It just plays the role of a man in the middle between your browser and also the target (the web application). It is developed in specific as a comprehensive solution for web application security checks. These behaviors as a proxy server, scanner, and also as an intruder also provides more advanced options like Spider, Repeater, Decoder, Comparer, Extender, and also a Sequencer.

Following are some of the advantages of using Burp Proxy, let us now take a look at each and every one of them:

Advantages:

• The tool allows manual testers to intercept all the incoming requests and responses between your browser and the target web application (even if the protocol is HTTPS enabled).
• There is an ability to view, edit or drop individual messages to manipulate both the client and server-side components of the application.
• All the requests and responses passing through the Proxy are recorded through the Proxy history
• Allows the usage of annotation on individual items with comments or colored highlights that allow you to follow up on these at a later point in time.
• Burp Proxy can also perform the automatic modification of responses to facilitate testing in a better way.
• There is a possibility to configure fine-grained interception rules enabling you to focus more on interesting interactions.
• HTML5 WebSockets are intercepted and logged in a different history than the regular HTTP messages
• Burp Proxy supports invisible proxy for clients that are not proxy aware, thereby enabling the testing on thick client applications and mobile applications.

9. CyberArk

CyberArk, an information security company that focuses more on privileged account security on a primary basis. It is a complete suite that comprises various security and account management solutions that are specifically designed to ensure the safety of privileged accounts and the like. One of the tools from the aforementioned suite of tools is the Privileged Password Management and Control that is built specifically to meet the Organization’s stringent needs on the compliance standards on privileged password management.

Stronger privileged password management controls are implemented to enhance the way businesses and organizations secure and also monitor privileged accounts. The tools from this Organization are specifically observed to be deployed in the financial industry.

Following are some of the advantages of using CyberArk, let us now take a look at each and every one of them:

Advantages:

• One of the greatest advantages that tools like these bring to the table is not just the maintenance or the security towards these credentials but also curtails the manual effort of keeping all these details updated at a single place for further use.
• Not just the effort but also reduces the time that is otherwise spent on maintaining these accounts.
• Maintenance efforts are also managed pretty well with the tool to judge when an account needs to be created or deleted.
• Any policies that need to be applied around this area can be applied in one place rather than on multiple places or multiple systems or multiple people.
• Can bring a process to the table around the Password management and the like, as there will no longer be a manual intervention for these maintenance activities.

[ Related Article: What is Cyberark ]

10. Snort:

Snort is yet another free and open-source security DevOps tool that finds its usage in the areas of Network Intrusion Prevention System (NIPS) and Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS). Snort is cross-platform and can be installed on Windows NT, Windows 2000, HP-UX, Solaris, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Linux, MacOSX, and many other UNIX flavors of operating systems. It is capable to perform protocol analysis, content search/content match, and alongside those, it can also diagnose attacks like buffer overflow, stealth port scans, CGI attacks, SMB probes, OS fingerprinting attempts, and many more attacks.

Following are some of the advantages of using Snort, let us now take a look at each and every one of them:

Advantages:

• One of the biggest advantages of Snort is that it is very easy to configure.
• Rules are very flexible and at the same time very easy to be written, a newer attack that is found can be included in the rule base within seconds.
• Snort allows examination of packets to determine the cause of the alert and based on that if there is any action to be taken or not.
• Availability of an active community of users and developers helps address newer attacks and feature requests.
• Another advantage of Snort is that it doesn’t carry any licensing cost and software maintenance updates.
• It doesn’t require any infrastructure on its own but complements the existing commercial products pretty easily with no hassles.

11. JBoss Data Virtualization:

JBoss Data Virtualization can be defined as a data integration solution that sits in front of multiple data sources and then allows them to be treated as a single source. JBoss Data Virtualization also offers a plethora of offers that comprise data abstraction, federation, integration, transformation and also provides delivery capabilities in order to combine data from one or more than one sources into a reusable set of logical data models, accessible via standard SQL and/or Web Services for agile data Utilization.

[ Related Article: JBoss Tutorialspoint ]

Following are some of the advantages of using JBoss Data Virtualization, let us now take a look at each and every one of them:

Advantages:

• The most common advantage that one can see with JBoss Data Virtualization is the expanded connectivity

• And then comes the Developer Productivity

• And finally, last but not least the Enhanced Security

[ Related Article: Top DevOps Interview Questions and Answers ]

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Conclusion:

In this article, we have seen the absolute need for security in the space of DevOps (irrespective of the line of business that the Organizations run. With this common understanding, we have gone through the various options that we had at hand and also understood their advantages when deployed in your DevOps pipeline. Hope you have got all the information that you seek from this article itself. Please do provide your valuable feedback for us to improve the quality of the articles that we come up with.