Securing Containers with NIST 800-190 and MVISION CNAPP

Government and Private Sector organizations are transforming their businesses by embracing DevOps principles, microservice design patterns, and container technologies across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. Container adoption is becoming mainstream to drive digital transformation and business growth and to accelerate product and feature velocity. Companies have moved quickly to embrace cloud native applications and infrastructure to take advantage of cloud provider systems and to align their design decisions with cloud properties of scalability, resilience, and security first architectures. The declarative nature of these systems enables numerous advantages in application development and deployment, like faster development and deployment cycles, quicker bug fixes and patches, and consistent build and monitoring workflows. These streamlined and well controlled design principles in automation pipelines lead to faster feature delivery and drive competitive differentiation.

These complex problem definitions have led to the development of a special publication from National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) – NIST SP 800-190 Application Security Container Guide. It provides guidelines for securing container applications and infrastructure components, including sectional review of the fundamentals of containers, key risks presented by core components of application container technologies, countermeasures, threat scenario examples, and actionable information for planning, implementing, operating, and maintaining container technologies.

Lack of a comprehensive container security strategy or often not knowing where to start can be a challenge to effectively address risks presented in these unique ecosystems. While teams have recognized the need to evolve their security toolchains and processes to embrace automation, it is imperative for them to integrate specific security and compliance checks early into their respective DevOps processes. There are legitimate concerns that persist about miscon­figurations and runtime risks in cloud native applications, and still too few organizations have a robust security plan in place.

As outlined in one of the supporting charts in the whitepaper, CNAPP has capabilities that effectively address all the risk elements described in the NIST special publication guidance.

MVISION Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) is a comprehensive device-to-cloud security platform for visibility and control across SaaS, PaaS, & IaaS platforms.  It provides deep coverage on cloud native security controls that can be implemented throughout the entire application lifecycle. By mapping all the applicable risk elements and countermeasures from Sections 3 and 4 of NIST SP 800-190 to capabilities within the platform, we want to provide an architectural point of reference to help customers and industry partners automate compliance and implement security best practices for containerized application workloads. This mapping and a detailed review of platform capabilities aligned with key countermeasures can be referenced here.

While the breadth of coverage is critical, it is worth noting that the most effective way to secure containerized applications requires embedding security controls into each phase of the container lifecycle. If we leverage Department of Defense’s Enterprise DevSecOps Reference Design guidance as a point of reference, it describes the DevSecOps lifecycle in terms of nine transition stages comprising of plan, develop, build, test, release, deliver, deploy, operate, and monitor.

Specific to containerized applications and workloads, a more abstract view of a container’s lifecycle spans across three high-level phases of Build, Deploy, and Run.

The foundational principle of DevSecOps implementations is that the software development lifecycle is not a monolithic linear process.  The “big bang” style delivery of the Waterfall SDLC process is replaced with small but more frequent deliveries, so that it is easier to change course as necessary. Each small delivery is accomplished through a fully automated process or semi-automated process with minimal human intervention to accelerate continuous integration and delivery. The DevSecOps lifecycle is adaptable and has many feedback loops for continuous improvement.

Deploy

In the “Deploy” phase, developers configure containerized applications for deployment into production. Context grows beyond information about images to include details about configuration options available for orchestrated services. Security efforts in this phase often center around complying with operational best practices, applying least-privilege principles, and identifying misconfigurations to reduce the likelihood and impact of potential compromises.

Build

The “Build” phase centers on what ends up inside the container images in terms of the components and layers that make up an application. Usually created by the developers, security efforts are typically focused on reducing business risk later in the container lifecycle by applying best practices and identifying and eliminating known vulnerabilities early. These assessments can be conducted in an “inner” loop iteratively as developers perform incremental builds and add security linting and automated tests or can be driven via an “outer” feedback loop that’s driven by operational security reviews and penetration testing efforts.

By applying this understanding of container lifecycle stages to respective countermeasures that can be implemented and audited upon within MVISION Cloud, CNAPP customers can establish an optimal security posture and achieve synergies of shift left and runtime security models.   Security assessments are critically important early in planning and design, where important decisions are made about architecture approach, development tooling and technology platforms and where mistakes or misunderstandings can be dangerous and expensive. As DevOps teams move their workloads into the cloud, security teams will need to implement best practices that apply operations, monitoring and runtime security controls across public, private, and hybrid cloud consumption models.

Runtime

“Runtime” is broadly classified as a separate phase wherein containers go into production with live data, live users, and exposure to networks that could be internal or external in nature. The primary purpose of implementing security during the runtime phase is to protect running applications as well as the underlying container infrastructure by finding and stopping malicious actors in real time.

As a cloud security posture management platform, CNAPP provides a set of capabilities that ensure that assets comply with industry regulations, best practices, and security policies. This includes proactive scanning for vulnerabilities in container images and VMs and ensuring secure container runtime configurations to prevent non-compliant builds from being pushed to production.  The same principles apply to orchestrator configurations to help secure how containers get deployed using CI/CD tools. These baseline checks can be augmented with other policy types to ensure file integrity monitoring and configuration hardening of hosts (e.g., no insecure ports or unnecessary services), which help apply defense-in-depth by minimizing the overall attack surface.

CNAPP first discovers all the cloud-native components mapped to an application, including hosts, IaaS/PaaS services, containers, and the orchestration context that a container operates within.  With the use of native tagging and network flow log analysis, customers can visualize cloud infrastructure interactions including across compute, network, and storage components. Additionally, the platform scans cloud native object and file stores to assess presence of any sensitive data or malware. Depending on the configuration compliance of the underlying resources and data sensitivity, an aggregate risk score is computed per application which provides detailed context for an application owner to understand risks and prioritize mitigation efforts.

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Finally, the platform enforces policy-based immutability on running container instances (and hosts) to help identify process-, service-, and application-level whitelists. By leveraging the declarative nature of containerized workloads, threats can be detected during the runtime phase, including any exposure created as a result of misconfigurations, application package vulnerabilities, and runtime anomalies such as execution of reverse shell or other remote access tools. While segmentation of workloads can be achieved in the build and deploy phases of a workload using posture checks for constructs like namespaces, network policies, and container runtime configurations to limit system calls, the same should also be enforced in the runtime phase to detect and respond to malicious activity in an automated and scalable way.  The platform defines baselines and behavioral models that can specially be effective to investigate attempts at network reconnaissance, remote code execution due to zero-day application library and package vulnerabilities, and malware callbacks.  Additionally, by mapping these threats and incidents to the MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques, it provides a common taxonomy to cloud security teams regardless of the underlying cloud application or an individual component. This helps them extend their processes and security incident runbooks to the cloud, including their ability to remediate security misconfigurations and preemptively address all the container risk categories outlined in NIST 800-190.