How to create auto-suppression rules in AWS Security Hub

Post Syndicated from BK Das original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-create-auto-suppression-rules-in-aws-security-hub/

AWS Security Hub gives you a comprehensive view of your security alerts and security posture across your AWS accounts. With Security Hub, you have a single place that aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes your security alerts, or findings, from multiple AWS services. Security Hub lets you assign workflow statuses to these findings, which are NEW, NOTIFIED, SUPPRESSED, or RESOLVED. These statuses allow you to categorize which findings are open and need your attention.

In this blog post, we show how you can create automated suppression rules for specific types of findings in AWS Security Hub, such as ones that are an accepted risk by design, or have a compensating control. By automatically suppressing these findings that don’t require follow-up action from your security team, you can concentrate on investigating and remediating findings that are not yet resolved.

As an example of a finding that you may want to suppress, suppose that your development environment doesn’t need to have Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Flow Logs enabled because it does not contain any sensitive data (that is, it is an accepted risk). However, your production environment must have VPC Flow Logs enabled. You can use this solution to automatically suppress the development environment findings regarding VPC Flow Logs not being enabled. Then, you can focus on responding to and remediating findings regarding the production environment VPC Flow Logs that are not enabled.

This solution uses an Amazon EventBridge rule to evaluate Security Hub findings based on predefined filters. An AWS Lambda function is the target of the rule, and is triggered to perform the suppression. The Lambda function calls the Security Hub BatchUpdateFindings API action to set the finding of interest to the SUPPRESSED status.

Prerequisites

This solution assumes that you have Security Hub and AWS Config enabled in your administrator and member AWS accounts. AWS Config is required to execute the rules that will generate the findings. You will also need to enable the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices standard, because the examples in this post rely on those findings. You should ensure that you have configured your administrator account to aggregate your Security Hub findings from across your AWS accounts.

Solution overview

In Security Hub, the status of an investigation of a finding is tracked using the workflow status attribute. The workflow status for new findings is initially set to NEW. You can change the workflow status of a finding either by selecting it in the AWS Security Hub console, or by automating the change of workflow status by using AWS CLI or Security Hub API. After the owner of the finding’s resource is notified to take action, you can set the workflow status to NOTIFIED. After a finding is remediated, you can set the workflow status to RESOLVED. If the finding is not a concern for your given environment and does not require any action, then you can set the workflow status to SUPPRESSED.

In this solution, we show you how to automatically set the workflow status to SUPPRESSED for expected findings, by using EventBridge event patterns that trigger on Security Hub findings that match your defined criteria. The event pattern can match on fields of the findings such as account number, AWS Region, and Amazon Resource Names (ARNs). The Lambda function triggers on findings that match all defined criteria, and then sets the workflow status to SUPPRESSED for all matched findings using the BatchUpdateFindings Security Hub API action.

Solution architecture

 

Figure 1: Solution architecture overview

Figure 1: Solution architecture overview

Figure 1 shows the administrator account aggregating the Security Hub findings from the member accounts.

  1. Security Hub generates findings in the member accounts, then forwards the findings to the administrator account to be evaluated.
  2. In the administrator account, Security Hub evaluates every finding (whether generated or forwarded) against EventBridge rules.
  3. If a finding satisfies any of the defined EventBridge rule conditions, EventBridge triggers a Lambda function in the same Region. The EventBridge event bus delivers the finding to the Lambda function.
  4. The Lambda function in the administrator account performs the finding suppression evaluation, and sets the Security Hub workflow status of the finding to SUPPRESSED.

This architecture uses one Lambda function per Region. You can group together multiple suppression rules into the same EventBridge pattern when they apply to the same group of AWS accounts. You can also configure multiple separate EventBridge event patterns when a suppression rule shouldn’t apply to an account.

Implementation

First, we show how to write the EventBridge event pattern. You use the CDK to define the event rule and pattern. The following example code will suppress Security Hub findings that originate in the development accounts for VPC flow logs that aren’t enabled. The solution will filter new findings only.

In the following example, replace <account-id-1> and <account-id-2> with your own information.

event_pattern_obj = events.EventPattern(
            source=["aws.securityhub"],
            detail_type=["Security Hub Findings - Imported"],
            detail= {
                "findings": {
                    "GeneratorId": [
                        "aws-foundational-security-best-practices/v/1.0.0/EC2.6"
                    ],
                    "AwsAccountId": [
                        "<account-id-1>",
                        "<account-id-2>"
                    ],
                    "Workflow": {
                        "Status": [
                            "NEW"
                        ]
                    }
                }
            }
        )

Second, you define the EventBridge rule that will match on the defined pattern.

        vpc_flow_log_dev_account_event_rule = events.Rule(
                    self,
                    'vpc-flow-logs-development-account-eventbridge-rule',
                    description='VPC flow logs in development account finding suppression',
                    rule_name='vpc-flow-logs-development-account-sechub-rule',
                    event_pattern=event_pattern_obj
                    )

Finally, the EventBridge rule triggers the suppression Lambda function.

 vpc_flow_log_dev_account_event_rule.add_target(lambda_targets.LambdaFunction(security_hub_suppression_lambda))

Solution deployment

You can deploy the solution through either the AWS Management Console or the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK).

To deploy the solution by using the AWS Management Console

In your security account, launch the template by choosing the following Launch Stack button.
Select the Launch Stack button to launch the template

To deploy the solution by using the AWS CDK

You can find the latest code on GitHub, where you can also contribute to the sample code. The following commands show how to deploy the solution by using the AWS CDK. First, the CDK initializes your environment and uploads the Lambda assets to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Then, you can deploy the solution to your account. For <account_id>, specify the account number, or comma separated list of account numbers, that you want the suppression rule to apply to.

cdk bootstrap

cdk deploy sechub-finding-suppression --parameters GeneratorIds=<generator_ids> --parameters AccountNumbers=<account_ids>

To test the solution

  1. Create a VPC that does not have flow logs enabled. We have included a test VPC that you can deploy with the following command:
    cdk deploy vpc-test-suppression
    

  2. Verify that the Security Hub finding EC2.6 has been suppressed in the parent account and the target account. You might need to wait a few minutes for the AWS Config recorder to detect the newly created resource and then to manually trigger the following AWS Config rule:
    securityhub-vpc-flow-logs-enabled-* 
    

  3. After verifying the suppression, delete the test VPC you created to test the suppression rule:
    cdk destroy vpc-test-suppression
    

Next steps

You can configure EventBridge rules and patterns to suppress all of your findings that are accepted risk, by design, or that have a compensating control. For example, if you are performing IAM authentication by using Amazon RDS Proxy, you could consider suppressing the control [RDS.10] IAM authentication should be configured for RDS instances. You can also consider creating event patterns that filter based on resource tags, such as filtering VPCs based on tags rather than account numbers for [EC2.6] VPC flow logging should be enabled in all VPCs.

Summary

In this blog post, we showed how you can automatically suppress specific findings by using the Security Hub BatchUpdateFindings API action. We showed you how to configure EventBridge patterns and rules in order to trigger a Lambda function that calls this API action to suppress your expected findings. After you follow the steps in this blog post for automatic Security Hub suppression, your console view in Security Hub will only show findings that are not suppressed.

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Author

BK Das

BK works as a Senior Security Architect with AWS Professional Services. He love to solve security problems for his customers, and help them feel comfortable within AWS. Outside of work, BK loves to play computer games, and go on long drives.

Author

Josh Joy

Josh is a Senior Security Consultant with the AWS Global Security Practice, a part of our Worldwide Professional Services Organization. Josh helps customers improve their security posture as they migrate their most sensitive workloads to AWS. Josh enjoys diving deep and working backwards in order to help customers achieve positive outcomes.

Author

Moumita Saha

Moumita is a Security Consultant with AWS Professional Services working to help enterprise customers secure their workloads in the cloud. She assists customers in secure cloud migration, designing automated solutions to protect against cyber threats in the cloud. She is passionate about cyber security, data privacy, and new, emerging cloud-security technologies.