Tag Archives: security

2022 attacks! An August reading list to go “Shields Up”

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original https://blog.cloudflare.com/2022-attacks-an-august-reading-list-to-go-shields-up/

2022 attacks! An August reading list to go “Shields Up”

2022 attacks! An August reading list to go “Shields Up”

In 2022, cybersecurity is a must-have for those who don’t want to take chances on getting caught in a cyberattack with difficult to deal consequences. And with a war in Europe (Ukraine) still going on, cyberwar also doesn’t show signs of stopping in a time when there never were so many people online, 4.95 billion in early 2022, 62.5% of the world’s total population (estimates say it grew around 4% during 2021 and 7.3% in 2020).

Throughout the year we, at Cloudflare, have been making new announcements of products, solutions and initiatives that highlight the way we have been preventing, mitigating and constantly learning, over the years, with several thousands of small and big cyberattacks. Right now, we block an average of 124 billion cyber threats per day. The more we deal with attacks, the more we know how to stop them, and the easier it gets to find and deal with new threats — and for customers to forget we’re there, protecting them.

In 2022, we have been onboarding many customers while they’re being attacked, something we know well from the past (Wikimedia/Wikipedia or Eurovision are just two case-studies of many, and last year there was a Fortune Global 500 company example we wrote about). Recently, we dealt and did a rundown about an SMS phishing attack.

Providing services for almost 20% of websites online and to millions of Internet properties and customers using our global network in more than 270 cities (recently we arrived to Guam) also plays a big role. For example, in Q1’22 Cloudflare blocked an average of 117 billion cyber threats each day (much more than in previous quarters).

Now that August is here, and many in the Northern Hemisphere are enjoying the summer and vacations, let’s do a reading list that is also a sum up focused on cyberattacks that also gives, by itself, some 2022 guide on this more than ever relevant area.

War & Cyberwar: Attacks increasing

But first, some context. There are all sorts of attacks, but they have been generally speaking increasing and just to give some of our data regarding DDoS attacks in 2022 Q2: ​​application-layer attacks increased by 72% YoY (Year over Year) and network-layer DDoS attacks increased by 109% YoY.

The US government gave “warnings” back in March, after the war in Ukraine started, to all in the country but also allies and partners to be aware of the need to “enhance cybersecurity”. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) created the Shields Up initiative, given how the “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could impact organizations both within and beyond the region”. The UK and Japan, among others, also issued warnings.

That said, here are the two first and more general about attacks reading list suggestions:

Shields up: free Cloudflare services to improve your cyber readiness (✍️)
After the war started and governments released warnings, we did this free Cloudflare services cyber readiness sum up blog post. If you’re a seasoned IT professional or a novice website operator, you can see a variety of services for websites, apps, or APIs, including DDoS mitigation and protection of teams or even personal devices (from phones to routers). If this resonates with you, this announcement of collaboration to simplify the adoption of Zero Trust for IT and security teams could also be useful: CrowdStrike’s endpoint security meets Cloudflare’s Zero Trust Services.

In Ukraine and beyond, what it takes to keep vulnerable groups online (✍️)
This blog post is focused on the eighth anniversary of our Project Galileo, that has been helping human-rights, journalism and non-profits public interest organizations or groups. We highlight the trends of the past year, including the dozens of organizations related to Ukraine that were onboarded (many while being attacked) since the war started. Between July 2021 and May 2022, we’ve blocked an average of nearly 57.9 million cyberattacks per day, an increase of nearly 10% over last year in a total of 18 billion attacks.

In terms of attack methods to Galileo protected organizations, the largest fraction (28%) of mitigated requests were classified as “HTTP Anomaly”, with 20% of mitigated requests tagged as SQL injection or SQLi attempts (to target databases) and nearly 13% as attempts to exploit specific CVEs (publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities) — you can find more insights about those here, including the Spring4Shell vulnerability, the Log4j or the Atlassian one.

And now, without further ado, here’s the full reading list/attacks guide where we highlight some blog posts around four main topics:

1. DDoS attacks & solutions

2022 attacks! An August reading list to go “Shields Up”
The most powerful botnet to date, Mantis.

Cloudflare mitigates 26 million request per second DDoS attack (✍️)
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) are the bread and butter of state-based attacks, and we’ve been automatically detecting and mitigating them. Regardless of which country initiates them, bots are all around the world and in this blog post you can see a specific example on how big those attacks can be (in this case the attack targeted a customer website using Cloudflare’s Free plan). We’ve named this most powerful botnet to date, Mantis.

That said, we also explain that although most of the attacks are small, e.g. cyber vandalism, even small attacks can severely impact unprotected Internet properties.

DDoS attack trends for 2022 Q2 (✍️)
We already mentioned how application (72%) and network-layer (109%) attacks have been growing year over year — in the latter, attacks of 100 Gbps and larger increased by 8% QoQ, and attacks lasting more than 3 hours increased by 12% QoQ. Here you can also find interesting trends, like how Broadcast Media companies in Ukraine were the most targeted in Q2 2022 by DDoS attacks. In fact, all the top five most attacked industries are all in online/Internet media, publishing, and broadcasting.

Cloudflare customers on Free plans can now also get real-time DDoS alerts (✍️)
A DDoS is cyber-attack that attempts to disrupt your online business and can be used in any type of Internet property, server, or network (whether it relies on VoIP servers, UDP-based gaming servers, or HTTP servers). That said, our Free plan can now get real-time alerts about HTTP DDoS attacks that were automatically detected and mitigated by us.

One of the benefits of Cloudflare is that all of our services and features can work together to protect your website and also improve its performance. Here’s our specialist, Omer Yoachimik, top 3 tips to leverage a Cloudflare free account (and put your settings more efficient to deal with DDoS attacks):

  1. Put Cloudflare in front of your website:

  2. Leverage Cloudflare’s free security features

    • DDoS Protection: it’s enabled by default, and if needed you can also override the action to Block for rules that have a different default value.
    • Security Level: this feature will automatically issue challenges to requests that originate from IP addresses with low IP reputation. Ensure it’s set to Medium at least.
    • Block bad bots – Cloudflare’s free tier of bot protection can help ward off simple bots (from cloud ASNs) and headless browsers by issuing a computationally expensive challenge.
    • Firewall rules: you can create up to five free custom firewall rules to block or challenge traffic that you never want to receive.
    • Managed Ruleset: in addition to your custom rule, enable Cloudflare’s Free Managed Ruleset to protect against high and wide impacting vulnerabilities

  3. Move your content to the cloud

    • Cache as much of your content as possible on the Cloudflare network. The fewer requests that hit your origin, the better — including unwanted traffic.

2. Application level attacks & WAF

Application security: Cloudflare’s view (✍️)
Did you know that around 8% of all Cloudflare HTTP traffic is mitigated? That is something we explain in this application’s general trends March 2022 blog post. That means that overall, ~2.5 million requests per second are mitigated by our global network and never reach our caches or the origin servers, ensuring our customers’ bandwidth and compute power is only used for clean traffic.

You can also have a sense here of what the top mitigated traffic sources are — Layer 7 DDoS and Custom WAF (Web Application Firewall) rules are at the top — and what are the most common attacks. Other highlights include that at that time 38% of HTTP traffic we see is automated (right the number is actually lower, 31% — current trends can be seen on Radar), and the already mentioned (about Galileo) SQLi is the most common attack vector on API endpoints.

WAF for everyone: protecting the web from high severity vulnerabilities (✍️)
This blog post shares a relevant announcement that goes hand in hand with Cloudflare mission of “help build a better Internet” and that also includes giving some level of protection even without costs (something that also help us be better in preventing and mitigating attacks). So, since March we are providing a Cloudflare WAF Managed Ruleset that is running by default on all FREE zones, free of charge.

On this topic, there has also been a growing client side security number of threats that concerns CIOs and security professionals that we mention when we gave, in December, all paid plans access to Page Shield features (last month we made Page Shield malicious code alerts more actionable. Another example is how we detect Magecart-Style attacks that have impacted large organizations like British Airways and Ticketmaster, resulting in substantial GDPR fines in both cases.

3. Phishing (Area 1)

Why we are acquiring Area 1 (✍️)
Phishing remains the primary way to breach organizations. According to CISA, 90% of cyber attacks begin with it. And, in a recent report, the FBI referred to Business Email Compromise as the $43 Billion problem facing organizations.

It was in late February that it was announced that Cloudflare had agreed to acquire Area 1 Security to help organizations combat advanced email attacks and phishing campaigns. Our blog post explains that “Area 1’s team has built exceptional cloud-native technology to protect businesses from email-based security threats”. So, all that technology and expertise has been integrated since then with our global network to give customers the most complete Zero Trust security platform available.

The mechanics of a sophisticated phishing scam and how we stopped it (✍️)
What’s in a message? Possibly a sophisticated attack targeting employees and systems. On August 8, 2022, Twilio shared that they’d been compromised by a targeted SMS phishing attack. We saw an attack with very similar characteristics also targeting Cloudflare’s employees. Here, we do a rundown on how we were able to thwart the attack that could have breached most organizations, by using our Cloudflare One products, and physical security keys. And how others can do the same. No Cloudflare systems were compromised.

Our Cloudforce One threat intelligence team dissected the attack and assisted in tracking down the attacker.

2022 attacks! An August reading list to go “Shields Up”

Introducing browser isolation for email links to stop modern phishing threats (✍️)
Why do humans still click on malicious links? It seems that it’s easier to do it than most people think (“human error is human”). Here we explain how an organization nowadays can’t truly have a Zero Trust security posture without securing email; an application that end users implicitly trust and threat actors take advantage of that inherent trust.

As part of our journey to integrate Area 1 into our broader Zero Trust suite, Cloudflare Gateway customers can enable Remote Browser Isolation for email links. With that, we now give unmatched level of protection from modern multi-channel email-based attacks. While we’re at it, you can also learn how to replace your email gateway with Cloudflare Area 1.

About account takeovers, we explained back in March 2021 how we prevent account takeovers on our own applications (on the phishing side we were already using, as a customer, at the time, Area 1).

Also from last year, here’s our research in password security (and the problem of password reuse) — it gets technical. There’s a new password related protocol called OPAQUE (we added a new demo about it on January 2022) that could help better store secrets that our research team is excited about.

4. Malware/Ransomware & other risks

How Cloudflare Security does Zero Trust (✍️)
Security is more than ever part of an ecosystem that the more robust, the more efficient in avoiding or mitigating attacks. In this blog post written for our Cloudflare One week, we explain how that ecosystem, in this case inside our Zero Trust services, can give protection from malware, ransomware, phishing, command & control, shadow IT, and other Internet risks over all ports and protocols.

Since 2020, we launched Cloudflare Gateway focused on malware detection and prevention directly from the Cloudflare edge. Recently, we also include our new CASB product (to secure workplace tools, personalize access, secure sensitive data).

2022 attacks! An August reading list to go “Shields Up”

Anatomy of a Targeted Ransomware Attack (✍️)
What a ransomware attack looks like for the victim:

“Imagine your most critical systems suddenly stop operating. And then someone demands a ransom to get your systems working again. Or someone launches a DDoS against you and demands a ransom to make it stop. That’s the world of ransomware and ransom DDoS.”

Ransomware attacks continue to be on the rise and there’s no sign of them slowing down in the near future. That was true more than a year ago, when this blog post was written and is still ongoing, up 105% YoY according to a Senate Committee March 2022 report. And the nature of ransomware attacks is changing. Here, we highlight how Ransom DDoS (RDDoS) attacks work, how Cloudflare onboarded and protected a Fortune 500 customer from a targeted one, and how that Gateway with antivirus we mentioned before helps with just that.

We also show that with ransomware as a service (RaaS) models, it’s even easier for inexperienced threat actors to get their hands on them today (“RaaS is essentially a franchise that allows criminals to rent ransomware from malware authors”). We also include some general recommendations to help you and your organization stay secure. Don’t want to click the link? Here they are:

  • Use 2FA everywhere, especially on your remote access entry points. This is where Cloudflare Access really helps.
  • Maintain multiple redundant backups of critical systems and data, both onsite and offsite
  • Monitor and block malicious domains using Cloudflare Gateway + AV
  • Sandbox web browsing activity using Cloudflare RBI to isolate threats at the browser
2022 attacks! An August reading list to go “Shields Up”

Investigating threats using the Cloudflare Security Center (✍️)
Here, first we announce our new threat investigations portal, Investigate, right in the Cloudflare Security Center, that allows all customers to query directly our intelligence to streamline security workflows and tighten feedback loops.

That’s only possible because we have a global and in-depth view, given that we protect millions of Internet properties from attacks (the free plans help us to have that insight). And the data we glean from these attacks trains our machine learning models and improves the efficacy of our network and application security products.

Steps we’ve taken around Cloudflare’s services in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia (✍️)
There’s an emergence of the known as wiper malware attacks (intended to erase the computer it infects) and in this blog post, among other things, we explain how when a wiper malware was identified in Ukraine (it took offline government agencies and a major bank), we successfully adapted our Zero Trust products to make sure our customers were protected. Those protections include many Ukrainian organizations, under our Project Galileo that is having a busy year, and they were automatically put available to all our customers. More recently, the satellite provider Viasat was affected.

Zaraz use Workers to make third-party tools secure and fast (✍️)
Cloudflare announced it acquired Zaraz in December 2021 to help us enable cloud loading of third-party tools. Seems unrelated to attacks? Think again (this takes us back to the secure ecosystem I already mentioned). Among other things, here you can learn how Zaraz can make your website more secure (and faster) by offloading third-party scripts.

That allows to avoid problems and attacks. Which? From code tampering to lose control over the data sent to third-parties. My colleague Yo’av Moshe elaborates on what this solution prevents: “the third-party script can intentionally or unintentionally (due to being hacked) collect information it shouldn’t collect, like credit card numbers, Personal Identifiers Information (PIIs), etc.”. You should definitely avoid those.

Introducing Cloudforce One: our new threat operations and research team (✍️)
Meet our new threat operations and research team: Cloudforce One. While this team will publish research, that’s not its reason for being. Its primary objective: track and disrupt threat actors. It’s all about being protected against a great flow of threats with minimal to no involvement.

Wrap up

The expression “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” doesn’t seem to apply to the fast pacing Internet industry, where attacks are also in the fast track. If you or your company and services aren’t properly protected, attackers (human or bots) will probably find you sooner than later (maybe they already did).

To end on a popular quote used in books, movies and in life: “You keep knocking on the devil’s door long enough and sooner or later someone’s going to answer you”. Although we have been onboarding many organizations while attacks are happening, that’s not the less hurtful solution — preventing and mitigating effectively and forget the protection is even there.

If you want to try some security features mentioned, the Cloudflare Security Center is a good place to start (free plans included). The same with our Zero Trust ecosystem (or Cloudflare One as our SASE, Secure Access Service Edge) that is available as self-serve, and also includes a free plan (this vendor-agnostic roadmap shows the general advantages of the Zero Trust architecture).

If trends are more your thing, Cloudflare Radar has a near real-time dedicated area about attacks, and you can browse and interact with our DDoS attack trends for 2022 Q2 report.

The mechanics of a sophisticated phishing scam and how we stopped it

Post Syndicated from Matthew Prince original https://blog.cloudflare.com/2022-07-sms-phishing-attacks/

The mechanics of a sophisticated phishing scam and how we stopped it

The mechanics of a sophisticated phishing scam and how we stopped it

Yesterday, August 8, 2022, Twilio shared that they’d been compromised by a targeted phishing attack. Around the same time as Twilio was attacked, we saw an attack with very similar characteristics also targeting Cloudflare’s employees. While individual employees did fall for the phishing messages, we were able to thwart the attack through our own use of Cloudflare One products, and physical security keys issued to every employee that are required to access all our applications.

We have confirmed that no Cloudflare systems were compromised. Our Cloudforce One threat intelligence team was able to perform additional analysis to further dissect the mechanism of the attack and gather critical evidence to assist in tracking down the attacker.

This was a sophisticated attack targeting employees and systems in such a way that we believe most organizations would be likely to be breached. Given that the attacker is targeting multiple organizations, we wanted to share here a rundown of exactly what we saw in order to help other companies recognize and mitigate this attack.

Targeted Text Messages

On July 20, 2022, the Cloudflare Security team received reports of employees receiving legitimate-looking text messages pointing to what appeared to be a Cloudflare Okta login page. The messages began at 2022-07-22 22:50 UTC. Over the course of less than 1 minute, at least 76 employees received text messages on their personal and work phones. Some messages were also sent to the employee’s family members. We have not yet been able to determine how the attacker assembled the list of employee’s phone numbers but have reviewed access logs to our employee directory services and have found no sign of compromise.

Cloudflare runs a 24×7 Security Incident Response Team (SIRT). Every Cloudflare employee is trained to report anything that is suspicious to the SIRT. More than 90 percent of the reports to SIRT turn out to not be threats. Employees are encouraged to report anything and never discouraged from over-reporting. In this case, however, the reports to SIRT were a real threat.

The text messages received by employees looked like this:

The mechanics of a sophisticated phishing scam and how we stopped it

They came from four phone numbers associated with T-Mobile-issued SIM cards: (754) 268-9387, (205) 946-7573, (754) 364-6683 and (561) 524-5989. They pointed to an official-looking domain: cloudflare-okta.com. That domain had been registered via Porkbun, a domain registrar, at 2022-07-20 22:13:04 UTC — less than 40 minutes before the phishing campaign began.

Cloudflare built our secure registrar product in part to be able to monitor when domains using the Cloudflare brand were registered and get them shut down. However, because this domain was registered so recently, it had not yet been published as a new .com registration, so our systems did not detect its registration and our team had not yet moved to terminate it.

If you clicked on the link it took you to a phishing page. The phishing page was hosted on DigitalOcean and looked like this:

The mechanics of a sophisticated phishing scam and how we stopped it

Cloudflare uses Okta as our identity provider. The phishing page was designed to look identical to a legitimate Okta login page. The phishing page prompted anyone who visited it for their username and password.

Real-Time Phishing

We were able to analyze the payload of the phishing attack based on what our employees received as well as its content being posted to services like VirusTotal by other companies that had been attacked. When the phishing page was completed by a victim, the credentials were immediately relayed to the attacker via the messaging service Telegram. This real-time relay was important because the phishing page would also prompt for a Time-based One Time Password (TOTP) code.

Presumably, the attacker would receive the credentials in real-time, enter them in a victim company’s actual login page, and, for many organizations that would generate a code sent to the employee via SMS or displayed on a password generator. The employee would then enter the TOTP code on the phishing site, and it too would be relayed to the attacker. The attacker could then, before the TOTP code expired, use it to access the company’s actual login page — defeating most two-factor authentication implementations.

The mechanics of a sophisticated phishing scam and how we stopped it

Protected Even If Not Perfect

We confirmed that three Cloudflare employees fell for the phishing message and entered their credentials. However, Cloudflare does not use TOTP codes. Instead, every employee at the company is issued a FIDO2-compliant security key from a vendor like YubiKey. Since the hard keys are tied to users and implement origin binding, even a sophisticated, real-time phishing operation like this cannot gather the information necessary to log in to any of our systems. While the attacker attempted to log in to our systems with the compromised username and password credentials, they could not get past the hard key requirement.

But this phishing page was not simply after credentials and TOTP codes. If someone made it past those steps, the phishing page then initiated the download of a phishing payload which included AnyDesk’s remote access software. That software, if installed, would allow an attacker to control the victim’s machine remotely. We confirmed that none of our team members got to this step. If they had, however, our endpoint security would have stopped the installation of the remote access software.

How Did We Respond?

The main response actions we took for this incident were:

1. Block the phishing domain using Cloudflare Gateway

Cloudflare Gateway is a Secure Web Gateway solution providing threat and data protection with DNS / HTTP filtering and natively-integrated Zero Trust. We use this  solution internally to proactively identify malicious domains and block them. Our team added the malicious domain to Cloudflare Gateway to block all employees from accessing it.

Gateway’s automatic detection of malicious domains also identified the domain and blocked it, but the fact that it was registered and messages were sent within such a short interval of time meant that the system hadn’t automatically taken action before some employees had clicked on the links. Given this incident we are working to speed up how quickly malicious domains are identified and blocked. We’re also implementing controls on access to newly registered domains which we offer to customers but had not implemented ourselves.

2. Identify all impacted Cloudflare employees and reset compromised credentials

We were able to compare recipients of the phishing texts to login activity and identify threat-actor attempts to authenticate to our employee accounts. We identified login attempts blocked due to the hard key (U2F) requirements indicating that the correct password was used, but the second factor could not be verified. For the three of our employees’ credentials were leaked, we reset their credentials and any active sessions and initiated scans of their devices.

3. Identify and take down threat-actor infrastructure

The threat actor’s phishing domain was newly registered via Porkbun, and hosted on DigitalOcean. The phishing domain used to target Cloudflare was set up less than an hour before the initial phishing wave. The site had a Nuxt.js frontend, and a Django backend. We worked with DigitalOcean to shut down the attacker’s server. We also worked with Porkbun to seize control of the malicious domain.

From the failed sign-in attempts we were able to determine that the threat actor was leveraging Mullvad VPN software and distinctively using the Google Chrome browser on a Windows 10 machine. The VPN IP addresses used by the attacker were 198.54.132.88, and 198.54.135.222. Those IPs are assigned to Tzulo, a US-based dedicated server provider whose website claims they have servers located in Los Angeles and Chicago. It appears, actually, that the first was actually running on a server in the Toronto area and the latter on a server in the Washington, DC area. We blocked these IPs from accessing any of our services.

4. Update detections to identify any subsequent attack attempts

With what we were able to uncover about this attack, we incorporated additional signals to our already existing detections to specifically identify this threat-actor. At the time of writing we have not observed any additional waves targeting our employees. However, intelligence from the server indicated the attacker was targeting other organizations, including Twilio. We reached out to these other organizations and shared intelligence on the attack.

5. Audit service access logs for any additional indications of attack

Following the attack, we screened all our system logs for any additional fingerprints from this particular attacker. Given Cloudflare Access serves as the central control point for all Cloudflare applications, we can search the logs for any indication the attacker may have breached any systems. Given employees’ phones were targeted, we also carefully reviewed the logs of our employee directory providers. We did not find any evidence of compromise.

Lessons Learned and Additional Steps We’re Taking

We learn from every attack. Even though the attacker was not successful, we are making additional adjustments from what we’ve learned. We’re adjusting the settings for Cloudflare Gateway to restrict or sandbox access to sites running on domains that were registered within the last 24 hours. We will also run any non-whitelisted sites containing terms such as “cloudflare” “okta” “sso” and “2fa” through our browser isolation technology. We are also increasingly using Area 1’s phish-identification technology to scan the web and look for any pages that are designed to target Cloudflare. Finally, we’re tightening up our Access implementation to prevent any logins from unknown VPNs, residential proxies, and infrastructure providers. All of these are standard features of the same products we offer to customers.

The attack also reinforced the importance of three things we’re doing well. First, requiring hard keys for access to all applications. Like Google, we have not seen any successful phishing attacks since rolling hard keys out. Tools like Cloudflare Access made it easy to support hard keys even across legacy applications. If you’re an organization interested in how we rolled out hard keys, reach out to [email protected] and our security team would be happy to share the best practices we learned through this process.

Second, using Cloudflare’s own technology to protect our employees and systems. Cloudflare One’s solutions like Access and Gateway were critical to staying ahead of this attack. We configured our Access implementation to require hard keys for every application. It also creates a central logging location for all application authentications. And, if ever necessary, a place from which we can kill the sessions of a potentially compromised employee. Gateway allows us the ability to shut down malicious sites like this one quickly and understand what employees may have fallen for the attack. These are all functionalities that we make available to Cloudflare customers as part of our Cloudflare One suite and this attack demonstrates how effective they can.

Third, having a paranoid but blame-free culture is critical for security. The three employees who fell for the phishing scam were not reprimanded. We’re all human and we make mistakes. It’s critically important that when we do, we report them and don’t cover them up. This incident provided another example of why security is part of every team member at Cloudflare’s job.

Detailed Timeline of Events

2022-07-20 22:49 UTC Attacker sends out 100+ SMS messages to Cloudflare employees and their families.
2022-07-20 22:50 UTC Employees begin reporting SMS messages to Cloudflare Security team.
2022-07-20 22:52 UTC Verify that the attacker’s domain is blocked in Cloudflare Gateway for corporate devices.
2022-07-20 22:58 UTC Warning communication sent to all employees across chat and email.
2022-07-20 22:50 UTC to
2022-07-20 23:26 UTC		 Monitor telemetry in the Okta System log & Cloudflare Gateway HTTP logs to locate credential compromise. Clear login sessions and suspend accounts on discovery.
2022-07-20 23:26 UTC Phishing site is taken down by the hosting provider.
2022-07-20 23:37 UTC Reset leaked employee credentials.
2022-07-21 00:15 UTC Deep dive into attacker infrastructure and capabilities.

Indicators of compromise

Value Type Context and MITRE Mapping
cloudflare-okta[.]com hosted on 147[.]182[.]132[.]52 Phishing URL T1566.002: Phishing: Spear Phishing Link sent to users.
64547b7a4a9de8af79ff0eefadde2aed10c17f9d8f9a2465c0110c848d85317a SHA-256 T1219: Remote Access Software being distributed by the threat actor

What You Can Do

If you are similar attacks in your environment, please don’t hesitate to reach out to [email protected], and we’re happy to share best practices on how to keep your business secure. Finally, if you want to work on detecting and mitigating the next attacks with us? We’re hiring on our Detection and Response team, come join us!

1.1.1.1 + WARP: More features, still private

Post Syndicated from Mari Galicer original https://blog.cloudflare.com/geoexit-improving-warp-user-experience-larger-network/

1.1.1.1 + WARP: More features, still private

1.1.1.1 + WARP: More features, still private

It’s a Saturday night. You open your browser, looking for nearby pizza spots that are open. If the search goes as intended, your browser will show you results that are within a few miles, often based on the assumed location of your IP address. At Cloudflare, we affectionately call this type of geolocation accuracy the “pizza test”. When you use a Cloudflare product that sits between you and the Internet (for example, WARP), it’s one of the ways we work to balance user experience and privacy. Too inaccurate and you’re getting pizza places from a neighboring country; too accurate and you’re reducing the privacy benefits of obscuring your location.

With that in mind, we’re excited to announce two major improvements to our 1.1.1.1 + WARP apps: first, an improvement to how we ensure search results and other geographically-aware Internet activity work without compromising your privacy, and second, a larger network with more locations available to WARP+ subscribers, powering even speedier connections to our global network.

A better Internet browsing experience for every WARP user

When we originally built the 1.1.1.1+ WARP mobile app, we wanted to create a consumer-friendly way to connect to our network and privacy-respecting DNS resolver.

What we discovered over time is that the topology of the Internet dictates a different type of experience for users in different locations. Why? Sometimes, because traffic congestion or technical issues route your traffic to a less congested part of the network. Other times, Internet Service Providers may not peer with Cloudflare or engage in traffic engineering to optimize their networks how they see fit, which could result in user traffic connecting to a location that doesn’t quite map to their locale or language.

Regardless of the cause, the impact is that your search results become less relevant, if not outright confusing. For example, in somewhere dense with country borders, like Europe, your traffic in Berlin could get routed to Amsterdam because your mobile operator chooses to not peer in-country, giving you results in Dutch instead of German. This can also be disruptive if you’re trying to stream content subject to licensing restrictions, such as a person in the UK trying to watch BBC iPlayer or a person in Brazil trying to watch the World Cup.

So we fixed this. We just rolled out a major update to the service that powers WARP that will give you a geographically accurate browsing experience without revealing your IP address to the websites you’re visiting. Instead, websites you visit will see a Cloudflare IP address instead, making it harder for them to track you directly.

How it works

Traditionally, consumer VPNs deliberately route your traffic through a server in another country, making your connection slow, and often getting blocked because of their ability to flout location-based content restrictions. We took a different approach when we first launched WARP in 2018, giving you the best possible performance by routing your traffic through the Cloudflare data center closest to you. However, because not every Internet Service Provider (ISP) peers with Cloudflare, users sometimes end up exiting the Cloudflare network from a more “random” data center – one that does not accurately represent their locale.

Websites and third party services often infer geolocation from your IP address, and now, 1.1.1.1 + WARP replaces your original IP address with one that consistently and accurately represents your approximate location.

Here’s how we did it:

  1. We ran an analysis on a subset of our network traffic to find a rough approximation of how many users we have per city.
  2. We divided that amongst our egress IPs, using an anycast architecture to be efficient with the number of additional IPs we had to allocate and advertise per metro area.
  3. We then submitted geolocation information of those IPs to various geolocation database providers, ensuring third party services associate those Cloudflare egress IPs with an accurate approximate location.

It was important to us to provide the benefits of this location accuracy without compromising user privacy, so the app doesn’t ask for specific location permissions or log your IP address.

1.1.1.1 + WARP: More features, still private

An even bigger network for WARP+ users

1.1.1.1 + WARP: More features, still private

We also recently announced that we’ve expanded our network to over 275 cities in over 100 countries. This gave us an opportunity to revisit where we offered WARP, and how we could expand the number of locations users can connect to WARP with (in other words: an opportunity to make things faster).

From today, all WARP+ subscribers will benefit from a larger network with 20+ new cities: with no change in subscription pricing. A closer Cloudflare data center means less latency between your device and Cloudflare, which directly improves your download speed, thanks to what’s called the Bandwidth-Delay Product (put simply: lower latency, higher throughput!).

As a result, sites load faster, both for those on the Cloudflare network and those that aren’t. As we continue to expand our network, we’ll be revising this on a regular basis to ensure that all WARP and WARP+ subscribers continue to get great performance.

Speed, privacy, and relevance

Beyond being able to find pizza on a Saturday night, we believe everyone should be able to browse the Internet freely – and not have to sacrifice the speed, privacy, or relevance of their search results in order to do so.

In the near future, we’ll be investing in features to bring even more of the benefits of Cloudflare infrastructure to every 1.1.1.1 + WARP user. Stay tuned!

Fortinet FortiCNP – Now Available in AWS Marketplace

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/fortinet-forticnp-now-available-in-aws-marketplace/

When I first started to talk about AWS in front of IT professionals, they would always listen intently and ask great questions. Invariably, a seasoned pro would raise there hand and ask “This all sounds great, but have you thought about security?” Of course we had, and for a while I would describe our principal security features ahead of time instead of waiting for the question.

Today, the field of cloud security is well-developed, as is the practice of SecOps (Security Operations). There are plenty of tools, plenty of best practices, and a heightened level of awareness regarding the important of both. However, as on-premises workloads continue to migrate to the cloud, SecOps practitioners report that they are concerned about alert fatigue, while having to choose tools that ensure the desired level of workload coverage. According to a recent survey conducted by Fortinet, 78% of the respondents were looking for a single cloud security platform that offers sufficient workload coverage to address all of their needs.

Fortinet FortiCNP
In response to this clear need for a single tool that addresses cloud workloads and cloud storage, Fortinet has launched FortiCNP (Cloud Native Protection). As the name implies, this security product is designed to offer simple & effective protection of cloud resources. It monitors and tracks multiple sources of security issues including configurations, user activity, and VPC Flow Logs. FortiCNP scans cloud storage for content that is sensitive or malicious, and also inspects containers for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. The findings and alerts generated by all of this monitoring, tracking, and scanning is mapped into actionable insights and compliance reports, all available through a single dashboard.

Now in AWS Marketplace
I am happy to report that FortiCNP is now available in AWS Marketplace and that you can start your subscription today! It connects to multiple AWS security tools including Amazon Inspector, AWS Security Hub, and Amazon GuardDuty, with plans to add support for Amazon Macie, and other Fortinet products such as FortiEDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) and FortiGate-VM (next-generation firewall) later this year.

FortinCNP provides you with features that are designed to address your top risk management, threat management, compliance, and SecOps challenges. Drawing on all of the data sources and tools that I mentioned earlier, it runs hundreds of configuration assessments to identify risks, and then presents the findings in a scored, prioritized fashion.

Getting Started with FortiCNP
After subscribing to FortiCNP in AWS Marketplace, I set up my accounts and enable some services. In the screenshots that follow I will show you the highlights of each step, and link you to the docs for more information:

Enable Security Hub and EventBridge – Following the instructions in AWS Security Hub and EventBridge Configuration, I choose an AWS region to hold my aggregated findings, enable Amazon GuardDuty and Amazon Inspector, and route the findings to AWS Security Hub.

Add VPC Flow Logs – Again following the instructions (AWS Traffic Configuration), I enable VPC Flow Logs. This allows FortiCNP to access cloud traffic data and present it in the Traffic view.

Add AWS Accounts – FortiCNP can protect a single AWS account or all of the accounts in an entire Organization, or anywhere in-between. Accounts and Organizations can be added manually, or by using a CloudFormation template that sets up an IAM Role, enables CloudTrail, and takes care of other housekeeping. To learn more, read Amazon Web Services Account OnBoarding. Using the ADMIN page of FortiCNP, I choose to add a single account using a template:

Following the prompts, I run a CloudFormation template and review the resources that it creates:

After a few more clicks, FortiCNP verifies my license and then I am ready to go.

Enable Storage Guardian – I can enable data protection for individual S3 buckets, and initiate a scan (more info at Activate Data Protection on Bucket / Container).

With all of the setup steps complete, I can review and act on the findings. I start by reviewing the dashboard:

Because I just started using the product, the overall risk trend section at the top has just a few days worth of history. The Resource Overview shows that my resources are at low risk, with only informational messages. I have no exposed storage with sensitive data, and none with malware (always good to know).

I can click on a resource type to learn more the findings. Each resource has an associated risk score:

From here I can click on a resource to see which of the findings contribute to the risk score:

I can switch to the Changes tab to see all relevant configuration changes for the resource:

I can also add notes to the resource, and I can send notifications to several messaging and ticketing systems:

Compliance reports are generated automatically on a monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis. I can also generate a one-time compliance report to cover any desired time frame:

Reports are available immediately, and can be downloaded for review:

The policies that are used to generate findings are open and accessible,and can be enabled, disabled, and fine-tuned. For example, the Alert on activity from suspicious locations (sorry, all of you who are connecting from Antarctica):

There’s a lot more but I am just about out of space. Check out the online documentation to learn a lot more.

Available Today
You can subscribe to FortiCNP now and start enjoying the benefits today!

— Jeff;

Introducing even more security enhancements to npm

Post Syndicated from Myles Borins original https://github.blog/2022-07-26-introducing-even-more-security-enhancements-to-npm/

The JavaScript community downloads over 5 billion packages from npm a day, and we at GitHub recognize how important it is that developers can do so with confidence. As stewards of the npm registry, it’s important that we continue to invest in improvements that increase developer trust and the overall security of the registry itself.

Today, we are announcing the general availability of an enhanced 2FA experience on npm, as well as sharing additional investments we’ve made to the verification process of accounts and packages.

The following improvements to npm are available today, including:

  • A streamlined login and publishing experience with the npm CLI.
  • The ability to connect GitHub and Twitter accounts to npm.
  • All packages on npm have been re-signed and we’ve added a new npm CLI command to audit package integrity.

Streamlined login and publishing experience

Account security is significantly improved by adopting 2FA, but if the experience adds too much friction, we can’t expect customers to adopt it. We recently announced a variety of enhancements to the npm registry to make 2FA adoption easier for developers—in a public beta release. Early adopters of our new 2FA experience shared feedback around the process of logging in and publishing with the npm CLI, and we recognized there was room for improvement. Our initial design was created to be backwards compatible with npm 6 and other clients; in fact the Yarn project was able to backport support for our new experience to Yarn 1 in less than 10 lines of code!

We’ve been hard at work making the CLI experience better than ever based on this feedback, and the improved login and publish experience is now available in npm 8.15.0 today. With the new experience, users will benefit from:

  • Login and publish authentication are managed in the browser.
  • Login can use an existing session only prompting for your second factor or email verification OTP to create a new session.
  • Publish now supports “remember me for 5 minutes” and allows for subsequent publishes from the same IP + access token to avoid the 2FA prompt for a 5-minute period. This is especially useful when publishing from a npm workspace.

It is currently opt-in with the --auth-type=web flag and will be the default experience in npm 9.


npm login --auth-type=web

npm publish --auth-type=web

npm login --auth-type=web

These improved experiences will make it easier for users to secure their accounts. A secure account is the beginning of a secure ecosystem. Check out our documentation to learn more about 2FA in npm.

Connecting GitHub and Twitter Accounts to npm

 

Screenshot of account recovery options on npm

Developers have been able to include their GitHub and Twitter handles on their npm profiles for almost as long as npm accounts have been available. This data has been helpful to connect the identity of an account on npm to an identity on other platforms; however this data has historically been a free-form text field that wasn’t validated or verified.

That’s why today we are launching the ability to link your npm account to your GitHub and Twitter accounts. Linking of these accounts is performed via official integrations with both GitHub and Twitter and ensures that verified account data are included on npm profiles moving forward. We will no longer be showing the previously unverified GitHub or Twitter data on public user profiles, making it possible for developers to audit identities and trust that an account is who they say they are.

Having a verified link between your identities across platforms significantly improves our ability to do account recovery. This new verified data lays the foundation for automating identity verification as part of account recovery. Over time, we will deprecate this legacy data, but we will continue to honor it for now to ensure that customers do not get locked out of their accounts.

You can verify your packages locally with npm audit signatures

Until today npm users have had to rely on a multi-step process to validate the signature of npm packages. This PGP based process was both complex and required users to have knowledge on cryptographic tools which provided a poor developer experience. Developers relying on this existing process should soon start using the new “audit signatures” command. The PGP keys are set to expire early next year with more details to follow.

Recently, we began work to re-sign all npm packages with new signatures relying on the secure ECDSA algorithm and using an HSM for key management, and you can now rely on this signature to verify the integrity of the packages you install from npm.

We have introduced a new audit signatures command in npm CLI version 8.13.0 and above.

Example of a successful audit signature verification

Example of a successful audit signature verification

The below sample GitHub Actions workflow with audit signature in action.

name: npm Package

on:
  release:
    types: [created]

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
     - uses: actions/checkout@v3

     - uses: actions/setup-node@v3
       with:
        node-version: 16.x
        registry-url: 'https://registry.npmjs.org'

     - run: npm install -g npm

     - run: npm ci

     - run: npm audit signatures

     - run: npm test

     - run: npm publish
       env:
        NODE_AUTH_TOKEN: ${{secrets.npm_token}}

What’s next?

Our primary goal continues to be protecting the npm registry, and our next major milestone will be enforcing 2FA for all high-impact accounts, those that manage packages with more than 1 million weekly downloads or 500 dependents, tripling the number of accounts we will require to adopt a second factor. Prior to this enforcement we will be making even more improvements to our account recovery process, including introducing additional forms of identity verification and automating as much of the process as possible.

Learn more about these features by visiting our documentation:

For questions and comments, open a discussion in our feedback repository.

New for Amazon GuardDuty – Malware Detection for Amazon EBS Volumes

Post Syndicated from Danilo Poccia original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-for-amazon-guardduty-malware-detection-for-amazon-ebs-volumes/

With Amazon GuardDuty, you can monitor your AWS accounts and workloads to detect malicious activity. Today, we are adding to GuardDuty the capability to detect malware. Malware is malicious software that is used to compromise workloads, repurpose resources, or gain unauthorized access to data. When you have GuardDuty Malware Protection enabled, a malware scan is initiated when GuardDuty detects that one of your EC2 instances or container workloads running on EC2 is doing something suspicious. For example, a malware scan is triggered when an EC2 instance is communicating with a command-and-control server that is known to be malicious or is performing denial of service (DoS) or brute-force attacks against other EC2 instances.

GuardDuty supports many file system types and scans file formats known to be used to spread or contain malware, including Windows and Linux executables, PDF files, archives, binaries, scripts, installers, email databases, and plain emails.

When potential malware is identified, actionable security findings are generated with information such as the threat and file name, the file path, the EC2 instance ID, resource tags and, in the case of containers, the container ID and the container image used. GuardDuty supports container workloads running on EC2, including customer-managed Kubernetes clusters or individual Docker containers. If the container is managed by Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) or Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), the findings also include the cluster name and the task or pod ID so application and security teams can quickly find the affected container resources.

As with all other GuardDuty findings, malware detections are sent to the GuardDuty console, pushed through Amazon EventBridge, routed to AWS Security Hub, and made available in Amazon Detective for incident investigation.

How GuardDuty Malware Protection Works
When you enable malware protection, you set up an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service-linked role that grants GuardDuty permissions to perform malware scans. When a malware scan is initiated for an EC2 instance, GuardDuty Malware Protection uses those permissions to take a snapshot of the attached Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes that are less than 1 TB in size and then restore the EBS volumes in an AWS service account in the same AWS Region to scan them for malware. You can use tagging to include or exclude EC2 instances from those permissions and from scanning. In this way, you don’t need to deploy security software or agents to monitor for malware, and scanning the volumes doesn’t impact running workloads. The EBS volumes in the service account and the snapshots in your account are deleted after the scan. Optionally, you can preserve the snapshots when malware is detected.

The service-linked role grants GuardDuty access to AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) keys used to encrypt EBS volumes. If the EBS volumes attached to a potentially compromised EC2 instance are encrypted with a customer-managed key, GuardDuty Malware Protection uses the same key to encrypt the replica EBS volumes as well. If the volumes are not encrypted, GuardDuty uses its own key to encrypt the replica EBS volumes and ensure privacy. Volumes encrypted with EBS-managed keys are not supported.

Security in cloud is a shared responsibility between you and AWS. As a guardrail, the service-linked role used by GuardDuty Malware Protection cannot perform any operation on your resources (such as EBS snapshots and volumes, EC2 instances, and KMS keys) if it has the GuardDutyExcluded tag. Once you mark your snapshots with GuardDutyExcluded set to true, the GuardDuty service won’t be able to access these snapshots. The GuardDutyExcluded tag supersedes any inclusion tag. Permissions also restrict how GuardDuty can modify your snapshot so that they cannot be made public while shared with the GuardDuty service account.

The EBS volumes created by GuardDuty are always encrypted. GuardDuty can use KMS keys only on EBS snapshots that have a GuardDuty scan ID tag. The scan ID tag is added by GuardDuty when snapshots are created after an EC2 finding. The KMS keys that are shared with GuardDuty service account cannot be invoked from any other context except the Amazon EBS service. Once the scan completes successfully, the KMS key grant is revoked and the volume replica in GuardDuty service account is deleted, making sure GuardDuty service cannot access your data after completing the scan operation.

Enabling Malware Protection for an AWS Account
If you’re not using GuardDuty yet, Malware Protection is enabled by default when you activate GuardDuty for your account. Because I am already using GuardDuty, I need to enable Malware Protection from the console. If you’re using AWS Organizations, your delegated administrator accounts can enable this for existing member accounts and configure if new AWS accounts in the organization should be automatically enrolled.

In the GuardDuty console, I choose Malware Protection under Settings in the navigation pane. There, I choose Enable and then Enable Malware Protection.

Console screenshot.

Snapshots are automatically deleted after they are scanned. In General settings, I have the option to retain in my AWS account the snapshots where malware is detected and have them available for further analysis.

Console screenshot.

In Scan options, I can configure a list of inclusion tags, so that only EC2 instances with those tags are scanned, or exclusion tags, so that EC2 instances with tags in the list are skipped.

Console screenshot.

Testing Malware Protection GuardDuty Findings
To generate several Amazon GuardDuty findings, including the new Malware Protection findings, I clone the Amazon GuardDuty Tester repo:

$ git clone https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-guardduty-tester

First, I create an AWS CloudFormation stack using the guardduty-tester.template file. When the stack is ready, I follow the instructions to configure my SSH client to log in to the tester instance through the bastion host. Then, I connect to the tester instance:

$ ssh tester

From the tester instance, I start the guardduty_tester.sh script to generate the findings:

$ ./guardduty_tester.sh 

***********************************************************************
* Test #1 - Internal port scanning                                    *
* This simulates internal reconaissance by an internal actor or an   *
* external actor after an initial compromise. This is considered a    *
* low priority finding for GuardDuty because its not a clear indicator*
* of malicious intent on its own.                                     *
***********************************************************************


Starting Nmap 6.40 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2022-05-19 09:36 UTC
Nmap scan report for ip-172-16-0-20.us-west-2.compute.internal (172.16.0.20)
Host is up (0.00032s latency).
Not shown: 997 filtered ports
PORT     STATE  SERVICE
22/tcp   open   ssh
80/tcp   closed http
5050/tcp closed mmcc
MAC Address: 06:25:CB:F4:E0:51 (Unknown)

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 4.96 seconds

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

***********************************************************************
* Test #2 - SSH Brute Force with Compromised Keys                     *
* This simulates an SSH brute force attack on an SSH port that we    *
* can access from this instance. It uses (phony) compromised keys in  *
* many subsequent attempts to see if one works. This is a common      *
* techique where the bad actors will harvest keys from the web in     *
* places like source code repositories where people accidentally leave*
* keys and credentials (This attempt will not actually succeed in     *
* obtaining access to the target linux instance in this subnet)       *
***********************************************************************

2022-05-19 09:36:29 START
2022-05-19 09:36:29 Crowbar v0.4.3-dev
2022-05-19 09:36:29 Trying 172.16.0.20:22
2022-05-19 09:36:33 STOP
2022-05-19 09:36:33 No results found...
2022-05-19 09:36:33 START
2022-05-19 09:36:33 Crowbar v0.4.3-dev
2022-05-19 09:36:33 Trying 172.16.0.20:22
2022-05-19 09:36:37 STOP
2022-05-19 09:36:37 No results found...
2022-05-19 09:36:37 START
2022-05-19 09:36:37 Crowbar v0.4.3-dev
2022-05-19 09:36:37 Trying 172.16.0.20:22
2022-05-19 09:36:41 STOP
2022-05-19 09:36:41 No results found...
2022-05-19 09:36:41 START
2022-05-19 09:36:41 Crowbar v0.4.3-dev
2022-05-19 09:36:41 Trying 172.16.0.20:22
2022-05-19 09:36:45 STOP
2022-05-19 09:36:45 No results found...
2022-05-19 09:36:45 START
2022-05-19 09:36:45 Crowbar v0.4.3-dev
2022-05-19 09:36:45 Trying 172.16.0.20:22
2022-05-19 09:36:48 STOP
2022-05-19 09:36:48 No results found...
2022-05-19 09:36:49 START
2022-05-19 09:36:49 Crowbar v0.4.3-dev
2022-05-19 09:36:49 Trying 172.16.0.20:22
2022-05-19 09:36:52 STOP
2022-05-19 09:36:52 No results found...
2022-05-19 09:36:52 START
2022-05-19 09:36:52 Crowbar v0.4.3-dev
2022-05-19 09:36:52 Trying 172.16.0.20:22
2022-05-19 09:36:56 STOP
2022-05-19 09:36:56 No results found...
2022-05-19 09:36:56 START
2022-05-19 09:36:56 Crowbar v0.4.3-dev
2022-05-19 09:36:56 Trying 172.16.0.20:22
2022-05-19 09:37:00 STOP
2022-05-19 09:37:00 No results found...
2022-05-19 09:37:00 START
2022-05-19 09:37:00 Crowbar v0.4.3-dev
2022-05-19 09:37:00 Trying 172.16.0.20:22
2022-05-19 09:37:04 STOP
2022-05-19 09:37:04 No results found...
2022-05-19 09:37:04 START
2022-05-19 09:37:04 Crowbar v0.4.3-dev
2022-05-19 09:37:04 Trying 172.16.0.20:22
2022-05-19 09:37:08 STOP
2022-05-19 09:37:08 No results found...
2022-05-19 09:37:08 START
2022-05-19 09:37:08 Crowbar v0.4.3-dev
2022-05-19 09:37:08 Trying 172.16.0.20:22
2022-05-19 09:37:12 STOP
2022-05-19 09:37:12 No results found...
2022-05-19 09:37:12 START
2022-05-19 09:37:12 Crowbar v0.4.3-dev
2022-05-19 09:37:12 Trying 172.16.0.20:22
2022-05-19 09:37:16 STOP
2022-05-19 09:37:16 No results found...
2022-05-19 09:37:16 START
2022-05-19 09:37:16 Crowbar v0.4.3-dev
2022-05-19 09:37:16 Trying 172.16.0.20:22
2022-05-19 09:37:20 STOP
2022-05-19 09:37:20 No results found...
2022-05-19 09:37:20 START
2022-05-19 09:37:20 Crowbar v0.4.3-dev
2022-05-19 09:37:20 Trying 172.16.0.20:22
2022-05-19 09:37:23 STOP
2022-05-19 09:37:23 No results found...
2022-05-19 09:37:23 START
2022-05-19 09:37:23 Crowbar v0.4.3-dev
2022-05-19 09:37:23 Trying 172.16.0.20:22
2022-05-19 09:37:27 STOP
2022-05-19 09:37:27 No results found...
2022-05-19 09:37:27 START
2022-05-19 09:37:27 Crowbar v0.4.3-dev
2022-05-19 09:37:27 Trying 172.16.0.20:22
2022-05-19 09:37:31 STOP
2022-05-19 09:37:31 No results found...
2022-05-19 09:37:31 START
2022-05-19 09:37:31 Crowbar v0.4.3-dev
2022-05-19 09:37:31 Trying 172.16.0.20:22
2022-05-19 09:37:34 STOP
2022-05-19 09:37:34 No results found...
2022-05-19 09:37:35 START
2022-05-19 09:37:35 Crowbar v0.4.3-dev
2022-05-19 09:37:35 Trying 172.16.0.20:22
2022-05-19 09:37:38 STOP
2022-05-19 09:37:38 No results found...
2022-05-19 09:37:38 START
2022-05-19 09:37:38 Crowbar v0.4.3-dev
2022-05-19 09:37:38 Trying 172.16.0.20:22
2022-05-19 09:37:42 STOP
2022-05-19 09:37:42 No results found...
2022-05-19 09:37:42 START
2022-05-19 09:37:42 Crowbar v0.4.3-dev
2022-05-19 09:37:42 Trying 172.16.0.20:22
2022-05-19 09:37:46 STOP
2022-05-19 09:37:46 No results found...

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

***********************************************************************
* Test #3 - RDP Brute Force with Password List                        *
* This simulates an RDP brute force attack on the internal RDP port  *
* of the windows server that we installed in the environment.  It uses*
* a list of common passwords that can be found on the web. This test  *
* will trigger a detection, but will fail to get into the target      *
* windows instance.                                                   *
***********************************************************************

Sending 250 password attempts at the windows server...
Hydra v9.4-dev (c) 2022 by van Hauser/THC & David Maciejak - Please do not use in military or secret service organizations, or for illegal purposes (this is non-binding, these *** ignore laws and ethics anyway).

Hydra (https://github.com/vanhauser-thc/thc-hydra) starting at 2022-05-19 09:37:46
[WARNING] rdp servers often don't like many connections, use -t 1 or -t 4 to reduce the number of parallel connections and -W 1 or -W 3 to wait between connection to allow the server to recover
[INFO] Reduced number of tasks to 4 (rdp does not like many parallel connections)
[WARNING] the rdp module is experimental. Please test, report - and if possible, fix.
[DATA] max 4 tasks per 1 server, overall 4 tasks, 1792 login tries (l:7/p:256), ~448 tries per task
[DATA] attacking rdp://172.16.0.24:3389/
[STATUS] 1099.00 tries/min, 1099 tries in 00:01h, 693 to do in 00:01h, 4 active
1 of 1 target completed, 0 valid password found
Hydra (https://github.com/vanhauser-thc/thc-hydra) finished at 2022-05-19 09:39:23

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

***********************************************************************
* Test #4 - CryptoCurrency Mining Activity                            *
* This simulates interaction with a cryptocurrency mining pool which *
* can be an indication of an instance compromise. In this case, we are*
* only interacting with the URL of the pool, but not downloading      *
* any files. This will trigger a threat intel based detection.        *
***********************************************************************

Calling bitcoin wallets to download mining toolkits

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

***********************************************************************
* Test #5 - DNS Exfiltration                                          *
* A common exfiltration technique is to tunnel data out over DNS      *
* to a fake domain.  Its an effective technique because most hosts    *
* have outbound DNS ports open.  This test wont exfiltrate any data,  *
* but it will generate enough unusual DNS activity to trigger the     *
* detection.                                                          *
***********************************************************************

Calling large numbers of large domains to simulate tunneling via DNS

***********************************************************************
* Test #6 - Fake domain to prove that GuardDuty is working            *
* This is a permanent fake domain that customers can use to prove that*
* GuardDuty is working.  Calling this domain will always generate the *
* Backdoor:EC2/C&CActivity.B!DNS finding type                         *
***********************************************************************

Calling a well known fake domain that is used to generate a known finding

; <<>> DiG 9.11.4-P2-RedHat-9.11.4-26.P2.amzn2.5.2 <<>> GuardDutyC2ActivityB.com any
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 11495
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 8, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;GuardDutyC2ActivityB.com.	IN	ANY

;; ANSWER SECTION:
GuardDutyC2ActivityB.com. 6943	IN	SOA	ns1.markmonitor.com. hostmaster.markmonitor.com. 2018091906 86400 3600 2592000 172800
GuardDutyC2ActivityB.com. 6943	IN	NS	ns3.markmonitor.com.
GuardDutyC2ActivityB.com. 6943	IN	NS	ns5.markmonitor.com.
GuardDutyC2ActivityB.com. 6943	IN	NS	ns7.markmonitor.com.
GuardDutyC2ActivityB.com. 6943	IN	NS	ns2.markmonitor.com.
GuardDutyC2ActivityB.com. 6943	IN	NS	ns4.markmonitor.com.
GuardDutyC2ActivityB.com. 6943	IN	NS	ns6.markmonitor.com.
GuardDutyC2ActivityB.com. 6943	IN	NS	ns1.markmonitor.com.

;; Query time: 27 msec
;; SERVER: 172.16.0.2#53(172.16.0.2)
;; WHEN: Thu May 19 09:39:23 UTC 2022
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 238


*****************************************************************************************************
Expected GuardDuty Findings

Test 1: Internal Port Scanning
Expected Finding: EC2 Instance  i-011e73af27562827b  is performing outbound port scans against remote host. 172.16.0.20
Finding Type: Recon:EC2/Portscan

Test 2: SSH Brute Force with Compromised Keys
Expecting two findings - one for the outbound and one for the inbound detection
Outbound:  i-011e73af27562827b  is performing SSH brute force attacks against  172.16.0.20
Inbound:  172.16.0.25  is performing SSH brute force attacks against  i-0bada13e0aa12d383
Finding Type: UnauthorizedAccess:EC2/SSHBruteForce

Test 3: RDP Brute Force with Password List
Expecting two findings - one for the outbound and one for the inbound detection
Outbound:  i-011e73af27562827b  is performing RDP brute force attacks against  172.16.0.24
Inbound:  172.16.0.25  is performing RDP brute force attacks against  i-0191573dec3b66924
Finding Type : UnauthorizedAccess:EC2/RDPBruteForce

Test 4: Cryptocurrency Activity
Expected Finding: EC2 Instance  i-011e73af27562827b  is querying a domain name that is associated with bitcoin activity
Finding Type : CryptoCurrency:EC2/BitcoinTool.B!DNS

Test 5: DNS Exfiltration
Expected Finding: EC2 instance  i-011e73af27562827b  is attempting to query domain names that resemble exfiltrated data
Finding Type : Trojan:EC2/DNSDataExfiltration

Test 6: C&C Activity
Expected Finding: EC2 instance  i-011e73af27562827b  is querying a domain name associated with a known Command & Control server. 
Finding Type : Backdoor:EC2/C&CActivity.B!DNS

After a few minutes, the findings appear in the GuardDuty console. At the top, I see the malicious files found by the new Malware Protection capability. One of the findings is related to an EC2 instance, the other to an ECS cluster.

Console screenshot.

First, I select the finding related to the EC2 instance. In the panel, I see the information on the instance and the malicious file, such as the file name and path. In the Malware scan details section, the Trigger finding ID points to the original GuardDuty finding that triggered the malware scan. In my case, the original finding was that this EC2 instance was performing RDP brute force attacks against another EC2 instance.

Console screenshot.

Here, I choose Investigate with Detective and, directly from the GuardDuty console, I go to the Detective console to visualize AWS CloudTrail and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) flow data for the EC2 instance, the AWS account, and the IP address affected by the finding. Using Detective, I can analyze, investigate, and identify the root cause of suspicious activities found by GuardDuty.

Console screenshot.

When I select the finding related to the ECS cluster, I have more information on the resource affected, such as the details of the ECS cluster, the task, the containers, and the container images.

Console screenshot.

Using the GuardDuty tester scripts makes it easier to test the overall integration of GuardDuty with other security frameworks you use so that you can be ready when a real threat is detected.

Comparing GuardDuty Malware Protection with Amazon Inspector
At this point, you might ask yourself how GuardDuty Malware Protection relates to Amazon Inspector, a service that scans AWS workloads for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure. The two services complement each other and offer different layers of protection:

  • Amazon Inspector offers proactive protection by identifying and remediating known software and application vulnerabilities that serve as an entry point for attackers to compromise resources and install malware.
  • GuardDuty Malware Protection detects malware that is found to be present on actively running workloads. At that point, the system has already been compromised, but GuardDuty can limit the time of an infection and take action before a system compromise results in a business-impacting event.

Availability and Pricing
Amazon GuardDuty Malware Protection is available today in all AWS Regions where GuardDuty is available, excluding the AWS China (Beijing), AWS China (Ningxia), AWS GovCloud (US-East), and AWS GovCloud (US-West) Regions.

At launch, GuardDuty Malware Protection is integrated with these partner offerings:

With GuardDuty, you don’t need to deploy security software or agents to monitor for malware. You only pay for the amount of GB scanned in the file systems (not for the size of the EBS volumes) and for the EBS snapshots during the time they are kept in your account. All EBS snapshots created by GuardDuty are automatically deleted after they are scanned unless you enable snapshot retention when malware is found. For more information, see GuardDuty pricing and EBS pricing. Note that GuardDuty only scans EBS volumes less than 1 TB in size. To help you control costs and avoid repeating alarms, the same volume is not scanned more often than once every 24 hours.

Detect malicious activity and protect your applications from malware with Amazon GuardDuty.

— Danilo

AWS achieves TISAX certification (Information with Very High Protection Needs (AL3)

Post Syndicated from Janice Leung original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-achieves-tisax-certification-information-with-very-high-protection-needs-al3/

We’re excited to announce the completion of the Trusted Information Security Assessment Exchange (TISAX) certification on June 30, 2022 for 19 AWS Regions. These Regions achieved the Information with Very High Protection Needs (AL3) label for the control domains Information Handling and Data Protection. This alignment with TISAX requirements demonstrates our continued commitment to adhere to the heightened expectations for cloud service providers. AWS automotive customers can run their applications in the AWS Cloud certified Regions in confidence.

The following 19 Regions are currently TISAX certified:

  • US East (Ohio)
  • US East (Northern Virginia)
  • US West (Oregon)
  • Africa (Cape Town)
  • Asia Pacific (Hong Kong)
  • Asia Pacific (Mumbai)
  • Asia Pacific (Osaka)
  • Asia Pacific (Korea)
  • Asia Pacific (Singapore)
  • Asia Pacific (Sydney)
  • Asia Pacific (Tokyo)
  • Canada (Central)
  • Europe (Frankfurt)
  • Europe (Ireland)
  • Europe (London)
  • Europe (Milan)
  • Europe (Paris)
  • Europe (Stockholm)
  • South America (Sao Paulo)

TISAX is a European automotive industry-standard information security assessment (ISA) catalog based on key aspects of information security, such as data protection and connection to third parties.

AWS was evaluated and certified by independent third-party auditors on June 30, 2022. The Certificate of Compliance demonstrating the AWS compliance status is available on the European Network Exchange (ENX) Portal (the scope ID and assessment ID are SM22TH and AYA2D4-1, respectively) and through AWS Artifact. AWS Artifact is a self-service portal for on-demand access to AWS compliance reports. Sign in to AWS Artifact in the AWS Management Console, or learn more at Getting Started with AWS Artifact.

For up-to-date information, including when additional Regions are added, see the AWS Compliance Program, and choose TISAX.

AWS strives to continuously bring services into scope of its compliance programs to help you meet your architectural and regulatory needs. Please reach out to your AWS account team if you have questions or feedback about TISAX compliance.

To learn more about our compliance and security programs, see AWS Compliance Programs. As always, we value your feedback and questions; reach out to the AWS Compliance team through the Contact Us page.

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below.

Want more AWS Security how-to content, news, and feature announcements? Follow us on Twitter.

Author

Janice Leung

Janice is a security audit program manager at AWS, based in New York. She leads security audits across Europe and has previously worked in security assurance and technology risk management in the financial industry for 10 years.

AWS achieves HDS certification to three additional Regions

Post Syndicated from Janice Leung original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-achieves-hds-certification-to-three-additional-regions/

We’re excited to announce that three additional AWS Regions—Asia Pacific (Korea), Europe (London), and Europe (Stockholm)—have been granted the Health Data Hosting (Hébergeur de Données de Santé, HDS) certification. This alignment with the HDS requirements demonstrates our continued commitment to adhere to the heightened expectations for cloud service providers. AWS customers who handle personal health data can be hosted in the AWS Cloud certified Regions with confidence.

The following 16 Regions are now in scope of this certification:

  • US East (Ohio)
  • US East (Northern Virginia)
  • US West (Northern California)
  • US West (Oregon)
  • Asia Pacific (Mumbai)
  • Asia Pacific (Korea)
  • Asia Pacific (Singapore)
  • Asia Pacific (Sydney)
  • Asia Pacific (Tokyo)
  • Canada (Central)
  • Europe (Frankfurt)
  • Europe (Ireland)
  • Europe (London)
  • Europe (Paris)
  • Europe (Stockholm)
  • South America (Sao Paulo)

Introduced by the French governmental agency for health, Agence Française de la Santé Numérique (ASIP Santé), HDS certification aims to strengthen the security and protection of personal health data. Achieving this certification demonstrates that AWS provides a framework for technical and governance measures to secure and protect personal health data, governed by French law.

AWS was evaluated and certified by independent third-party auditors on June 30, 2022. The Certificate of Compliance demonstrating the AWS compliance status is available on the Agence du Numérique en Santé (ANS) website and through AWS Artifact. AWS Artifact is a self-service portal for on-demand access to AWS compliance reports. Sign in to AWS Artifact in the AWS Management Console, or learn more at Getting Started with AWS Artifact.

For up-to-date information, including when additional Regions are added, see the AWS Compliance Program, and choose HDS.

AWS strives to continuously bring services into scope of its compliance programs to help you meet your architectural and regulatory needs. Please reach out to your AWS account team if you have questions or feedback about HDS compliance.

To learn more about our compliance and security programs, see AWS Compliance Programs. As always, we value your feedback and questions; reach out to the AWS Compliance team through the Contact Us page.

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below.

Want more AWS Security how-to content, news, and feature announcements? Follow us on Twitter.

Author

Janice Leung

Janice is a security audit program manager at AWS, based in New York. She leads security audits across Europe and has previously worked in security assurance and technology risk management in the financial industry for 10 years.

Extend AWS IAM roles to workloads outside of AWS with IAM Roles Anywhere

Post Syndicated from Faraz Angabini original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/extend-aws-iam-roles-to-workloads-outside-of-aws-with-iam-roles-anywhere/

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) has now made it easier for you to use IAM roles for your workloads that are running outside of AWS, with the release of IAM Roles Anywhere. This feature extends the capabilities of IAM roles to workloads outside of AWS. You can use IAM Roles Anywhere to provide a secure way for on-premises servers, containers, or applications to obtain temporary AWS credentials and remove the need for creating and managing long-term AWS credentials.

In this post, I will briefly discuss how IAM Roles Anywhere works. I’ll mention some of the common use cases for IAM Roles Anywhere. And finally, I’ll walk you through an example scenario to demonstrate how the implementation works.

Background

To enable your applications to access AWS services and resources, you need to provide the application with valid AWS credentials for making AWS API requests. For workloads running on AWS, you do this by associating an IAM role with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), or AWS Lambda resources, depending on the compute platform hosting your application. This is secure and convenient, because you don’t have to distribute and manage AWS credentials for applications running on AWS. Instead, the IAM role supplies temporary credentials that applications can use when they make AWS API calls.

IAM Roles Anywhere enables you to use IAM roles for your applications outside of AWS to access AWS APIs securely, the same way that you use IAM roles for workloads on AWS. With IAM Roles Anywhere, you can deliver short-term credentials to your on-premises servers, containers, or other compute platforms. When you use IAM Roles Anywhere to vend short-term credentials you can remove the need for long-term AWS access keys and secrets, which can help improve security, and remove the operational overhead of managing and rotating the long-term credentials. You can also use IAM Roles Anywhere to provide a consistent experience for managing credentials across hybrid workloads.

In this post, I assume that you have a foundational knowledge of IAM, so I won’t go into the details here about IAM roles. For more information on IAM roles, see the IAM documentation.

How does IAM Roles Anywhere work?

IAM Roles Anywhere relies on public key infrastructure (PKI) to establish trust between your AWS account and certificate authority (CA) that issues certificates to your on-premises workloads. Your workloads outside of AWS use IAM Roles Anywhere to exchange X.509 certificates for temporary AWS credentials. The certificates are issued by a CA that you register as a trust anchor (root of trust) in IAM Roles Anywhere. The CA can be part of your existing PKI system, or can be a CA that you created with AWS Certificate Manager Private Certificate Authority (ACM PCA).

Your application makes an authentication request to IAM Roles Anywhere, sending along its public key (encoded in a certificate) and a signature signed by the corresponding private key. Your application also specifies the role to assume in the request. When IAM Roles Anywhere receives the request, it first validates the signature with the public key, then it validates that the certificate was issued by a trust anchor previously configured in the account. For more details, see the signature validation documentation.

After both validations succeed, your application is now authenticated and IAM Roles Anywhere will create a new role session for the role specified in the request by calling AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS). The effective permissions for this role session are the intersection of the target role’s identity-based policies and the session policies, if specified, in the profile you create in IAM Roles Anywhere. Like any other IAM role session, it is also subject to other policy types that you might have in place, such as permissions boundaries and service control policies (SCPs).

There are typically three main tasks, performed by different personas, that are involved in setting up and using IAM Roles Anywhere:

  • Initial configuration of IAM Roles Anywhere – This task involves creating a trust anchor, configuring the trust policy of the role that IAM Roles Anywhere is going to assume, and defining the role profile. These activities are performed by the AWS account administrator and can be limited by IAM policies.
  • Provisioning of certificates to workloads outside AWS – This task involves ensuring that the X.509 certificate, signed by the CA, is installed and available on the server, container, or application outside of AWS that needs to authenticate. This is performed in your on-premises environment by an infrastructure admin or provisioning actor, typically by using existing automation and configuration management tools.
  • Using IAM Roles Anywhere – This task involves configuring the credential provider chain to use the IAM Roles Anywhere credential helper tool to exchange the certificate for session credentials. This is typically performed by the developer of the application that interacts with AWS APIs.

I’ll go into the details of each task when I walk through the example scenario later in this post.

Common use cases for IAM Roles Anywhere

You can use IAM Roles Anywhere for any workload running in your data center, or in other cloud providers, that requires credentials to access AWS APIs. Here are some of the use cases we think will be interesting to customers based on the conversations and patterns we have seen:

Example scenario and walkthrough

To demonstrate how IAM Roles Anywhere works in action, let’s walk through a simple scenario where you want to call S3 APIs to upload some data from a server in your data center.

Prerequisites

Before you set up IAM Roles Anywhere, you need to have the following requirements in place:

  • The certificate bundle of your own CA, or an active ACM PCA CA in the same AWS Region as IAM Roles Anywhere
  • An end-entity certificate and associated private key available on the on-premises server
  • Administrator permissions for IAM roles and IAM Roles Anywhere

Setup

Here I demonstrate how to perform the setup process by using the IAM Roles Anywhere console. Alternatively, you can use the AWS API or Command Line Interface (CLI) to perform these actions. There are three main activities here:

  • Create a trust anchor
  • Create and configure a role that trusts IAM Roles Anywhere
  • Create a profile

To create a trust anchor

  1. Navigate to the IAM Roles Anywhere console.
  2. Under Trust anchors, choose Create a trust anchor.
  3. On the Create a trust anchor page, enter a name for your trust anchor and select the existing AWS Certificate Manager Private CA from the list. Alternatively, if you want to use your own external CA, choose External certificate bundle and provide the certificate bundle.
Figure 1: Create a trust anchor in IAM Roles Anywhere

Figure 1: Create a trust anchor in IAM Roles Anywhere

To create and configure a role that trusts IAM Roles Anywhere

  1. Using the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), you are going to create an IAM role with appropriate permissions that you want your on-premises server to assume after authenticating to IAM Roles Anywhere. Save the following trust policy as rolesanywhere-trust-policy.json on your computer. 
    {
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Principal": {
                "Service": "rolesanywhere.amazonaws.com"
            },
            "Action": [
                "sts:AssumeRole",
                "sts:SetSourceIdentity",
                "sts:TagSession"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

  2. Save the following identity-based policy as onpremsrv-permissions-policy.json. This grants the role permissions to write objects into the specified S3 bucket. 
    {
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": "s3:PutObject",
            "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::<DOC-EXAMPLE-BUCKET>/*"
        }
    ]
}

  3. Run the following two AWS CLI commands to create the role and attach the permissions policy. 
    aws iam create-role \
--role-name ExampleS3WriteRole \
--assume-role-policy-document file://<path>/rolesanywhere-trust-policy.json



aws iam put-role-policy \
--role-name ExampleS3WriteRole \
--policy-name onpremsrv-inline-policy \
--policy-document file://<path>/onpremsrv-permissions-policy.json

You can optionally use condition statements based on the attributes extracted from the X.509 certificate to further restrict the trust policy to control the on-premises resources that can obtain credentials from IAM Roles Anywhere. IAM Roles Anywhere sets the SourceIdentity value to the CN of the subject (onpremsrv01 in my example). It also sets individual session tags (PrincipalTag/) with the derived attributes from the certificate. So, you can use the principal tags in the Condition clause in the trust policy as additional authorization constraints.

For example, the Subject for the certificate I use in this post is as follows.

Subject: … O = Example Corp., OU = SecOps, CN = onpremsrv01

So, I can add condition statements like the following into the trust policy (rolesanywhere-trust-policy.json):

...
    "Condition": {
        "StringEquals": {
            "aws:PrincipalTag/x509Subject/CN": "onpremsrv01",
            "aws:PrincipalTag/x509Subject/OU": "SecOps"
        }
    }
...

To learn more, see the trust policy for IAM Roles Anywhere documentation.

To create a profile

  1. Navigate to the Roles Anywhere console.
  2. Under Profiles, choose Create a profile.
  3. On the Create a profile page, enter a name for the profile.
  4. For Roles, select the role that you created in the previous step (ExampleS3WriteRole).
  5. 5. Optionally, you can define session policies to further scope down the sessions delivered by IAM Roles Anywhere. This is particularly useful when you configure the profile with multiple roles and want to restrict permissions across all the roles. You can add the desired session polices as managed policies or inline policy. Here, for demonstration purpose, I add an inline policy to only allow requests coming from my specified IP address.
Figure 2: Create a profile in IAM Roles Anywhere

Figure 2: Create a profile in IAM Roles Anywhere

At this point, IAM Roles Anywhere setup is complete and you can start using it.

Use IAM Roles Anywhere

IAM Roles Anywhere provides a credential helper tool that can be used with the process credentials functionality that all current AWS SDKs support. This simplifies the signing process for the applications. See the IAM Roles Anywhere documentation to learn how to get the credential helper tool.

To test the functionality first, run the credential helper tool (aws_signing_helper) manually from the on-premises server, as follows.

./aws_signing_helper credential-process \
    --certificate /path/to/certificate.pem \
    --private-key /path/to/private-key.pem \
    --trust-anchor-arn <TA_ARN> \
    --profile-arn <PROFILE_ARN> \
    --role-arn <ExampleS3WriteRole_ARN>
Figure 3: Running the credential helper tool manually

Figure 3: Running the credential helper tool manually

You should successfully receive session credentials from IAM Roles Anywhere, similar to the example in Figure 3. Once you’ve confirmed that the setup works, update or create the ~/.aws/config file and add the signing helper as a credential_process. This will enable unattended access for the on-premises server. To learn more about the AWS CLI configuration file, see Configuration and credential file settings.

# ~/.aws/config content
[default]
 credential_process = ./aws_signing_helper credential-process
    --certificate /path/to/certificate.pem
    --private-key /path/to/private-key.pem
    --trust-anchor-arn <TA_ARN>
    --profile-arn <PROFILE_ARN>
    --role-arn <ExampleS3WriteRole_ARN>

To verify that the config works as expected, call the aws sts get-caller-identity AWS CLI command and confirm that the assumed role is what you configured in IAM Roles Anywhere. You should also see that the role session name contains the Serial Number of the certificate that was used to authenticate (cc:c3:…:85:37 in this example). Finally, you should be able to copy a file to the S3 bucket, as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Verify the assumed role

Figure 4: Verify the assumed role

Audit

As with other AWS services, AWS CloudTrail captures API calls for IAM Roles Anywhere. Let’s look at the corresponding CloudTrail log entries for the activities we performed earlier.

The first log entry I’m interested in is CreateSession, when the on-premises server called IAM Roles Anywhere through the credential helper tool and received session credentials back.

{
    ...
    "eventSource": "rolesanywhere.amazonaws.com",
    "eventName": "CreateSession",
    ...
    "requestParameters": {
        "cert": "MIICiTCCAfICCQD6...mvw3rrszlaEXAMPLE",
        "profileArn": "arn:aws:rolesanywhere:us-west-2:111122223333:profile/PROFILE_ID",
        "roleArn": "arn:aws:iam::111122223333:role/ExampleS3WriteRole",
        ...
    },
    "responseElements": {
        "credentialSet": [
        {
            "assumedRoleUser": {
                "arn": "arn:aws:sts::111122223333:assumed-role/ExampleS3WriteRole/00ccc3a2432f8c5fec93f0fc574f118537",
            },
            "credentials": {
                ...
            },
            ...
            "sourceIdentity": "CN=onpremsrv01"
        }
      ],
    },
    ...
}

You can see that the cert, along with other parameters, is sent to IAM Roles Anywhere and a role session along with temporary credentials is sent back to the server.

The next log entry we want to look at is the one for the s3:PutObject call we made from our on-premises server.

{
    ...
    "eventSource": "s3.amazonaws.com",
    "eventName": "PutObject",
    "userIdentity":{
        "type": "AssumedRole",
        "arn": "arn:aws:sts::111122223333:assumed-role/ExampleS3WriteRole/00ccc3a2432f8c5fec93f0fc574f118537",
        ...
        "sessionContext":
        {
            ...
            "sourceIdentity": "CN=onpremsrv01"
        },
    },
    ...
}

In addition to the CloudTrail logs, there are several metrics and events available for you to use for monitoring purposes. To learn more, see Monitoring IAM Roles Anywhere.

Additional notes

You can disable the trust anchor in IAM Roles Anywhere to immediately stop new sessions being issued to your resources outside of AWS. Certificate revocation is supported through the use of imported certificate revocation lists (CRLs). You can upload a CRL that is generated from your CA, and certificates used for authentication will be checked for their revocation status. IAM Roles Anywhere does not support callbacks to CRL Distribution Points (CDPs) or Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) endpoints.

Another consideration, not specific to IAM Roles Anywhere, is to ensure that you have securely stored the private keys on your server with appropriate file system permissions.

Conclusion

In this post, I discussed how the new IAM Roles Anywhere service helps you enable workloads outside of AWS to interact with AWS APIs securely and conveniently. When you extend the capabilities of IAM roles to your servers, containers, or applications running outside of AWS you can remove the need for long-term AWS credentials, which means no more distribution, storing, and rotation overheads.

I mentioned some of the common use cases for IAM Roles Anywhere. You also learned about the setup process and how to use IAM Roles Anywhere to obtain short-term credentials.

 
If you have any questions, you can start a new thread on AWS re:Post or reach out to AWS Support.

Faraz Angabini

Faraz Angabini

Faraz is a senior security specialist at AWS. He helps AWS strategic customers in their cloud journey. His interests include security, identity and access management, encryption, networking, and infrastructure.

Making Page Shield malicious code alerts more actionable

Post Syndicated from Simon Wijckmans original https://blog.cloudflare.com/making-page-shield-malicious-code-alerts-more-actionable/

Making Page Shield malicious code alerts more actionable

Making Page Shield malicious code alerts more actionable

Last year during CIO week, we announced Page Shield in general availability. Today, we talk about improvements we’ve made to help Page Shield users focus on the highest impact scripts and get more value out of the product. In this post we go over improvements to script status, metadata and categorization.

What is Page Shield?

Page Shield protects website owners and visitors against malicious 3rd party JavaScript. JavaScript can be leveraged in a number of malicious ways: browser-side crypto mining, data exfiltration and malware injection to mention a few.

For example a single hijacked JavaScript can expose millions of user’s credit card details across a range of websites to a malicious actor. The bad actor would scrape details by leveraging a compromised JavaScript library, skimming inputs to a form and exfiltrating this to a 3rd party endpoint under their control.

Today Page Shield partially relies on Content Security Policies (CSP), a browser native framework that can be used to control and gain visibility of which scripts are allowed to load on pages (while also reporting on any violations). We use these violation reports to provide detailed information in the Cloudflare dashboard regarding scripts being loaded by end-user browsers.

Page Shield users, via the dashboard, can see which scripts are active on their website and on which pages. Users can be alerted in case a script performs malicious activity, and monitor code changes of the script.

Script status

To help identify malicious scripts, and make it easier to take action on live threats, we have introduced a status field.

When going to the Page Shield dashboard, the customer will now only see scripts with a status of active. Active scripts are those that were seen in the last seven days and didn’t get served through the “cdn-cgi” endpoint (which is managed by Cloudflare).

We also introduced other statuses:

  • infrequent scripts are scripts that have only been seen in a negligible amount of CSP reports over a period of time. TThey normally indicate a single user’s browser using a compromised browser extension. The goal of this status is to reduce noise caused by browser plugins that inject their JavaScript in the HTML.
  • inactive scripts are those that have not been reported for seven days and therefore have likely since been removed or replaced.
  • cdn-cgi are scripts served from the ‘/cdn-cgi/’ endpoint which is managed by Cloudflare. These scripts are related to Cloudflare products like our analytics or Bot Management features. Cloudflare closely monitors these scripts, they are fairly static, so they shouldn’t require close monitoring by a customer and therefore are hidden by default unless our detections find anything suspicious.

If the customer wishes to see the full list of scripts including the non-active scripts they can still do so by clicking ‘All scripts’.

Making Page Shield malicious code alerts more actionable

Script metadata in alerts

Customers that opt into the enterprise add-on version of Page Shield can also choose to set up notifications for malicious scripts. In the previous version, we offered the script URL, first seen on and last seen on data. These alerts have been revamped to improve the experience for security analysts. Our goal is to provide all data a security analyst would manually look-up in order to validate a script. With this update we’ve made a significant step in that direction through using insights delivered by Cloudflare Radar.

At the top of the email alert you will now find where the script was seen along with other information regarding when the script was seen and the full URL (not clickable for security purposes).

As part of the enterprise add-on version of Page Shield we review the scripts through a custom machine learning classifier and a range of domain and URL threat feeds. A very common question with any machine learning scoring system is “why did it score the way it scored”. Because of this, the machine learning score generated by our system has now been split up to show the components that made up the score; currently: obfuscation and data exfiltration values. This should help to improve the ability for a customer to review a script in case of a false positive.

Threat feeds can be very helpful in detecting new attack styles that our classifier hasn’t been trained for yet. Some of these feeds offer us a range of categories of malicious endpoints such as ‘malware’, ‘spyware’ or ‘phishing’. Our enterprise add-on customers will now be able to see the categorization in our alerts (as shown above) and on the dashboard. The goal is to provide more context on why a script is considered malicious.

We also now provide information on script changes along with the “malicious code score” for each version.

Making Page Shield malicious code alerts more actionable

Right below the most essential information we have added WHOIS information on the party domain that is providing the script. In some cases the registrar may hide relevant information such as the organization’s name, however, information on the date of registration and expiration can be very useful in detecting unexpected changes in ownership. For example, we often see malicious scripts being hosted under newly registered domains.

Making Page Shield malicious code alerts more actionable

We also now offer details regarding the SSL certificates issued for this domain through certificate transparency monitoring. This can be useful in detecting a potential take over. For example, if a 3rd party script endpoint usually uses a Digicert certificate, but recently a Let’s Encrypt certificate has been issued this could be an indicator that another party is trying to take over the domain.

Making Page Shield malicious code alerts more actionable

Last but not least, we have improved our dashboard link to take users directly to the specific script details page provided by the Page Shield UI.

What’s next?

There are many ways to perform malicious activity through JavaScript. Because of this it is important that we build attack type specific detection mechanisms as well as overarching tools that will help detect anomalies. We are currently building a new component purpose built to look for signs of malicious intent in data endpoints by leveraging the connect-src CSP directive. The goal is to improve the accuracy of our Magecart-style attack detection.

We are also working on providing the ability to generate CSP policies directly through Page Shield making it easy to perform positive blocking and maintain rules over time.

Another feature we are working on is offering the ability to block scripts from accessing a user’s webcam, microphone or location through a single click.

More about this in future blog posts. Many more features to come!

Graph Networks – 10X investigation with Graph Visualisations

Post Syndicated from Grab Tech original https://engineering.grab.com/graph-visualisation

Introduction

Detecting fraud schemes used to require investigations using large amounts and varying types of data that come from many different anti-fraud systems. Investigators then need to combine the different types of data and use statistical methods to uncover suspicious claims, which is time consuming and inefficient in most cases.

We are always looking for ways to improve fraud investigation methods and stay one step ahead of our ever-growing fraudsters. In the introductory blog of this series, we’ve mentioned experimenting with a set of Graph Network technologies, including Graph Visualisation.

In this post, we will introduce our Graph Visualisation Platform and briefly illustrate how it makes fraud investigations easier and more effective.

Why visualise a graph?

If you’re a fan of crime shows, you would have come across scenes like a detective putting together evidence, such as pictures, notes and articles, on a board and connecting them with thumb tacks and yarn. When you look at the board, it’s easy to see the relationships between the different pieces of evidence. That’s what graphs do, especially in fraud detection.

In the same way, while graph data is the raw material of an investigation, some of the most interesting relationships are often inferred rather than modelled directly in the data. Visualising these relationships can give a unique “big picture” of the data that is difficult or impossible to obtain with traditional relational tables and business intelligence tools.

On the other hand, graph visualisation enhances the quick identification of relationships and significant structures because it is an intuitive way to help detect patterns. Plus, the human brain processes visual information much faster; that’s where our Graph Visualisation platform comes in.

What is the Graph Visualisation platform?

Graph Visualisation platform is a full-featured investigation platform that can reveal hidden connections and context in data by transforming raw records into highly visual and interactive maps. From there, investigators can grab any data point and quickly see relationships, patterns, and anomalies, and if necessary, drill down to investigate further.

This is all done without writing a manual query, switching between anti-fraud systems, or having to think about data science! These are some of the interactions on the platform that easily make anomalies or relevant patterns stand out.

Expanding the data

To date, we have over three billion nodes and edges in our storage system. It is not possible (nor necessary) to show all of the data at once. The platform allows the user to grab any data point and easily expand to view the relationships.

Timeline tracking and history replay

The Graph Visualisation platform’s interactive time filter lets you see temporal relationships within your data and clearly reveals the chronological progression of events. You can start with a specific time of interest, track everything that happens after, then quickly focus on the time and relationships that matter most.

10X investigations

Here are a few examples of how the Graph Visualisation platform facilitates fraud investigations.

Appeal confirmation

The following image shows the difference between a true fraudster and a falsely identified one. On the left, we have a Grab rental corporate account that was falsely detected by a fraud rule. Upon review, we discovered that there is no suspicious connection to this account, thus the account got unblocked.

On the right, we have a passenger that was blocked by the system and they appealed. Investigations showed that the passenger is, in fact, part of an extremely dense device-sharing network, so we maintained our decision to block.

Modus operandi discovery

Passenger sharing device

Fraudsters tend to share physical resources to maximise their revenue. With our Graph Visualisation platform, you can see exactly how this pattern looks like. The image below shows a device that is shared by a lot of fraudsters.

Anti-money laundering (AML)

On the left, we see a pattern of healthy spending on Grab. However, on the right, we can see that passengers are highly connected, and it has frequent large amount transfers to other payment providers.

Closing thoughts

Graph Visualisation is an intuitive way to investigate suspicious connections and potential patterns of crime. Investigators can directly interact with any data point to get the details they need and literally view the relationships in the data to make fast, accurate, and defensible decisions.

While fraud detection is a good use case for Graph Visualisation, it’s not the only possibility. Graph Visualisation can help make anything more efficient and intelligent, especially if you have highly connected data.

In the next part of this blog series, we will talk about the Graph service platform and the importance of building graph services with graph databases. Check out the other articles in this series:

Join us

Grab is the leading superapp platform in Southeast Asia, providing everyday services that matter to consumers. More than just a ride-hailing and food delivery app, Grab offers a wide range of on-demand services in the region, including mobility, food, package and grocery delivery services, mobile payments, and financial services across 428 cities in eight countries.

Powered by technology and driven by heart, our mission is to drive Southeast Asia forward by creating economic empowerment for everyone. If this mission speaks to you, join our team today!

Live-patching security vulnerabilities inside the Linux kernel with eBPF Linux Security Module

Post Syndicated from Frederick Lawler original https://blog.cloudflare.com/live-patch-security-vulnerabilities-with-ebpf-lsm/

Live-patching security vulnerabilities inside the Linux kernel with eBPF Linux Security Module

Live-patching security vulnerabilities inside the Linux kernel with eBPF Linux Security Module

Linux Security Modules (LSM) is a hook-based framework for implementing security policies and Mandatory Access Control in the Linux kernel. Until recently users looking to implement a security policy had just two options. Configure an existing LSM module such as AppArmor or SELinux, or write a custom kernel module.

Linux 5.7 introduced a third way: LSM extended Berkeley Packet Filters (eBPF) (LSM BPF for short). LSM BPF allows developers to write granular policies without configuration or loading a kernel module. LSM BPF programs are verified on load, and then executed when an LSM hook is reached in a call path.

Let’s solve a real-world problem

Modern operating systems provide facilities allowing “partitioning” of kernel resources. For example FreeBSD has “jails”, Solaris has “zones”. Linux is different – it provides a set of seemingly independent facilities each allowing isolation of a specific resource. These are called “namespaces” and have been growing in the kernel for years. They are the base of popular tools like Docker, lxc or firejail. Many of the namespaces are uncontroversial, like the UTS namespace which allows the host system to hide its hostname and time. Others are complex but straightforward – NET and NS (mount) namespaces are known to be hard to wrap your head around. Finally, there is this very special very curious USER namespace.

USER namespace is special, since it allows the owner to operate as “root” inside it. How it works is beyond the scope of this blog post, however, suffice to say it’s a foundation to having tools like Docker to not operate as true root, and things like rootless containers.

Due to its nature, allowing unpriviledged users access to USER namespace always carried a great security risk.  One such risk is privilege escalation.

Privilege escalation is a common attack surface for operating systems. One way users may gain privilege is by mapping their namespace to the root namespace via the unshare syscall and specifying the CLONE_NEWUSER flag. This tells unshare to create a new user namespace with full permissions, and maps the new user and group ID to the previous namespace. You can use the unshare(1) program to map root to our original namespace:

$ id
uid=1000(fred) gid=1000(fred) groups=1000(fred) …
$ unshare -rU
# id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root),65534(nogroup)
# cat /proc/self/uid_map
         0       1000          1

In most cases using unshare is harmless, and is intended to run with lower privileges. However, this syscall has been known to be used to escalate privileges.

Syscalls clone and clone3 are worth looking into as they also have the ability to CLONE_NEWUSER. However, for this post we’re going to focus on unshare.

Debian solved this problem with this “add sysctl to disallow unprivileged CLONE_NEWUSER by default” patch, but it was not mainlined. Another similar patch “sysctl: allow CLONE_NEWUSER to be disabled” attempted to mainline, and was met with push back. A critique is the inability to toggle this feature for specific applications. In the article “Controlling access to user namespaces” the author wrote: “… the current patches do not appear to have an easy path into the mainline.” And as we can see, the patches were ultimately not included in the vanilla kernel.

Our solution – LSM BPF

Since upstreaming code that restricts USER namespace seem to not be an option, we decided to use LSM BPF to circumvent these issues. This requires no modifications to the kernel and allows us to express complex rules guarding the access.

Track down an appropriate hook candidate

First, let us track down the syscall we’re targeting. We can find the prototype in the include/linux/syscalls.h file. From there, it’s not as obvious to track down, but the line:

/* kernel/fork.c */

Gives us a clue of where to look next in kernel/fork.c. There a call to ksys_unshare() is made. Digging through that function, we find a call to unshare_userns(). This looks promising.

Up to this point, we’ve identified the syscall implementation, but the next question to ask is what hooks are available for us to use? Because we know from the man-pages that unshare is used to mutate tasks, we look at the task-based hooks in include/linux/lsm_hooks.h. Back in the function unshare_userns() we saw a call to prepare_creds(). This looks very familiar to the cred_prepare hook. To verify we have our match via prepare_creds(), we see a call to the security hook security_prepare_creds() which ultimately calls the hook:

…
rc = call_int_hook(cred_prepare, 0, new, old, gfp);
…

Without going much further down this rabbithole, we know this is a good hook to use because prepare_creds() is called right before create_user_ns() in unshare_userns() which is the operation we’re trying to block.

LSM BPF solution

We’re going to compile with the eBPF compile once-run everywhere (CO-RE) approach. This allows us to compile on one architecture and load on another. But we’re going to target x86_64 specifically. LSM BPF for ARM64 is still in development, and the following code will not run on that architecture. Watch the BPF mailing list to follow the progress.

This solution was tested on kernel versions >= 5.15 configured with the following:

BPF_EVENTS
BPF_JIT
BPF_JIT_ALWAYS_ON
BPF_LSM
BPF_SYSCALL
BPF_UNPRIV_DEFAULT_OFF
DEBUG_INFO_BTF
DEBUG_INFO_DWARF_TOOLCHAIN_DEFAULT
DYNAMIC_FTRACE
FUNCTION_TRACER
HAVE_DYNAMIC_FTRACE

A boot option lsm=bpf may be necessary if CONFIG_LSM does not contain “bpf” in the list.

Let’s start with our preamble:

deny_unshare.bpf.c:

#include <linux/bpf.h>
#include <linux/capability.h>
#include <linux/errno.h>
#include <linux/sched.h>
#include <linux/types.h>

#include <bpf/bpf_tracing.h>
#include <bpf/bpf_helpers.h>
#include <bpf/bpf_core_read.h>

#define X86_64_UNSHARE_SYSCALL 272
#define UNSHARE_SYSCALL X86_64_UNSHARE_SYSCALL

Next we set up our necessary structures for CO-RE relocation in the following way:

deny_unshare.bpf.c:

…

typedef unsigned int gfp_t;

struct pt_regs {
	long unsigned int di;
	long unsigned int orig_ax;
} __attribute__((preserve_access_index));

typedef struct kernel_cap_struct {
	__u32 cap[_LINUX_CAPABILITY_U32S_3];
} __attribute__((preserve_access_index)) kernel_cap_t;

struct cred {
	kernel_cap_t cap_effective;
} __attribute__((preserve_access_index));

struct task_struct {
    unsigned int flags;
    const struct cred *cred;
} __attribute__((preserve_access_index));

char LICENSE[] SEC("license") = "GPL";

…

We don’t need to fully-flesh out the structs; we just need the absolute minimum information a program needs to function. CO-RE will do whatever is necessary to perform the relocations for your kernel. This makes writing the LSM BPF programs easy!

deny_unshare.bpf.c:

SEC("lsm/cred_prepare")
int BPF_PROG(handle_cred_prepare, struct cred *new, const struct cred *old,
             gfp_t gfp, int ret)
{
    struct pt_regs *regs;
    struct task_struct *task;
    kernel_cap_t caps;
    int syscall;
    unsigned long flags;

    // If previous hooks already denied, go ahead and deny this one
    if (ret) {
        return ret;
    }

    task = bpf_get_current_task_btf();
    regs = (struct pt_regs *) bpf_task_pt_regs(task);
    // In x86_64 orig_ax has the syscall interrupt stored here
    syscall = regs->orig_ax;
    caps = task->cred->cap_effective;

    // Only process UNSHARE syscall, ignore all others
    if (syscall != UNSHARE_SYSCALL) {
        return 0;
    }

    // PT_REGS_PARM1_CORE pulls the first parameter passed into the unshare syscall
    flags = PT_REGS_PARM1_CORE(regs);

    // Ignore any unshare that does not have CLONE_NEWUSER
    if (!(flags & CLONE_NEWUSER)) {
        return 0;
    }

    // Allow tasks with CAP_SYS_ADMIN to unshare (already root)
    if (caps.cap[CAP_TO_INDEX(CAP_SYS_ADMIN)] & CAP_TO_MASK(CAP_SYS_ADMIN)) {
        return 0;
    }

    return -EPERM;
}

Creating the program is the first step, the second is loading and attaching the program to our desired hook. There are several ways to do this: Cilium ebpf project, Rust bindings, and several others on the ebpf.io project landscape page. We’re going to use native libbpf.

deny_unshare.c:

#include <bpf/libbpf.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include "deny_unshare.skel.h"

static int libbpf_print_fn(enum libbpf_print_level level, const char *format, va_list args)
{
    return vfprintf(stderr, format, args);
}

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    struct deny_unshare_bpf *skel;
    int err;

    libbpf_set_strict_mode(LIBBPF_STRICT_ALL);
    libbpf_set_print(libbpf_print_fn);

    // Loads and verifies the BPF program
    skel = deny_unshare_bpf__open_and_load();
    if (!skel) {
        fprintf(stderr, "failed to load and verify BPF skeleton\n");
        goto cleanup;
    }

    // Attaches the loaded BPF program to the LSM hook
    err = deny_unshare_bpf__attach(skel);
    if (err) {
        fprintf(stderr, "failed to attach BPF skeleton\n");
        goto cleanup;
    }

    printf("LSM loaded! ctrl+c to exit.\n");

    // The BPF link is not pinned, therefore exiting will remove program
    for (;;) {
        fprintf(stderr, ".");
        sleep(1);
    }

cleanup:
    deny_unshare_bpf__destroy(skel);
    return err;
}

Lastly, to compile, we use the following Makefile:

Makefile:

CLANG ?= clang-13
LLVM_STRIP ?= llvm-strip-13
ARCH := x86
INCLUDES := -I/usr/include -I/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu
LIBS_DIR := -L/usr/lib/lib64 -L/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
LIBS := -lbpf -lelf

.PHONY: all clean run

all: deny_unshare.skel.h deny_unshare.bpf.o deny_unshare

run: all
	sudo ./deny_unshare

clean:
	rm -f *.o
	rm -f deny_unshare.skel.h

#
# BPF is kernel code. We need to pass -D__KERNEL__ to refer to fields present
# in the kernel version of pt_regs struct. uAPI version of pt_regs (from ptrace)
# has different field naming.
# See: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=fd56e0058412fb542db0e9556f425747cf3f8366
#
deny_unshare.bpf.o: deny_unshare.bpf.c
	$(CLANG) -g -O2 -Wall -target bpf -D__KERNEL__ -D__TARGET_ARCH_$(ARCH) $(INCLUDES) -c $< -o $@
	$(LLVM_STRIP) -g $@ # Removes debug information

deny_unshare.skel.h: deny_unshare.bpf.o
	sudo bpftool gen skeleton $< > $@

deny_unshare: deny_unshare.c deny_unshare.skel.h
	$(CC) -g -Wall -c $< -o [email protected]
	$(CC) -g -o $@ $(LIBS_DIR) [email protected] $(LIBS)

.DELETE_ON_ERROR:

Result

In a new terminal window run:

$ make run
…
LSM loaded! ctrl+c to exit.

In another terminal window, we’re successfully blocked!

$ unshare -rU
unshare: unshare failed: Cannot allocate memory
$ id
uid=1000(fred) gid=1000(fred) groups=1000(fred) …

The policy has an additional feature to always allow privilege pass through:

$ sudo unshare -rU
# id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root)

In the unprivileged case the syscall early aborts. What is the performance impact in the privileged case?

Measure performance

We’re going to use a one-line unshare that’ll map the user namespace, and execute a command within for the measurements:

$ unshare -frU --kill-child -- bash -c "exit 0"

With a resolution of CPU cycles for syscall unshare enter/exit, we’ll measure the following as root user:

  1. Command ran without the policy
  2. Command run with the policy

We’ll record the measurements with ftrace:

$ sudo su
# cd /sys/kernel/debug/tracing
# echo 1 > events/syscalls/sys_enter_unshare/enable ; echo 1 > events/syscalls/sys_exit_unshare/enable

At this point, we’re enabling tracing for the syscall enter and exit for unshare specifically. Now we set the time-resolution of our enter/exit calls to count CPU cycles:

# echo 'x86-tsc' > trace_clock

Next we begin our measurements:

# unshare -frU --kill-child -- bash -c "exit 0" &
[1] 92014

Run the policy in a new terminal window, and then run our next syscall:

# unshare -frU --kill-child -- bash -c "exit 0" &
[2] 92019

Now we have our two calls for comparison:

# cat trace
# tracer: nop
#
# entries-in-buffer/entries-written: 4/4   #P:8
#
#                                _-----=> irqs-off
#                               / _----=> need-resched
#                              | / _---=> hardirq/softirq
#                              || / _--=> preempt-depth
#                              ||| / _-=> migrate-disable
#                              |||| /     delay
#           TASK-PID     CPU#  |||||  TIMESTAMP  FUNCTION
#              | |         |   |||||     |         |
         unshare-92014   [002] ..... 762950852559027: sys_unshare(unshare_flags: 10000000)
         unshare-92014   [002] ..... 762950852622321: sys_unshare -> 0x0
         unshare-92019   [007] ..... 762975980681895: sys_unshare(unshare_flags: 10000000)
         unshare-92019   [007] ..... 762975980752033: sys_unshare -> 0x0

unshare-92014 used 63294 cycles.
unshare-92019 used 70138 cycles.

We have a 6,844 (~10%) cycle penalty between the two measurements. Not bad!

These numbers are for a single syscall, and add up the more frequently the code is called. Unshare is typically called at task creation, and not repeatedly during normal execution of a program. Careful consideration and measurement is needed for your use case.

Outro

We learned a bit about what LSM BPF is, how unshare is used to map a user to root, and how to solve a real-world problem by implementing a solution in eBPF. Tracking down the appropriate hook is not an easy task, and requires a bit of playing and a lot of kernel code. Fortunately, that’s the hard part. Because a policy is written in C, we can granularly tweak the policy to our problem. This means one may extend this policy with an allow-list to allow certain programs or users to continue to use an unprivileged unshare. Finally, we looked at the performance impact of this program, and saw the overhead is worth blocking the attack vector.

“Cannot allocate memory” is not a clear error message for denying permissions. We proposed a patch to propagate error codes from the cred_prepare hook up the call stack. Ultimately we came to the conclusion that a new hook is better suited to this problem. Stay tuned!

How Cloudflare Security does Zero Trust

Post Syndicated from Noelle Gotthardt original https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-cloudflare-security-does-zero-trust/

How Cloudflare Security does Zero Trust

How Cloudflare Security does Zero Trust

Throughout Cloudflare One week, we provided playbooks on how to replace your legacy appliances with Zero Trust services. Using our own products is part of our team’s culture, and we want to share our experiences when we implemented Zero Trust.

Our journey was similar to many of our customers. Not only did we want better security solutions, but the tools we were using made our work more difficult than it needed to be. This started with just a search for an alternative to remotely connecting on a clunky VPN, but soon we were deploying Zero Trust solutions to protect our employees’ web browsing and email. Next, we are looking forward to upgrading our SaaS security with our new CASB product.

We know that getting started with Zero Trust can seem daunting, so we hope that you can learn from our own journey and see how it benefited us.

Replacing a VPN: launching Cloudflare Access

Back in 2015, all of Cloudflare’s internally-hosted applications were reached via a hardware-based VPN. On-call engineers would fire up a client on their laptop, connect to the VPN, and log on to Grafana. This process was frustrating and slow.

Many of the products we build are a direct result of the challenges our own team is facing, and Access is a perfect example. Launching as an internal project in 2015, Access enabled employees to access internal applications through our identity provider. We started with just one application behind Access with the goal of improving incident response times. Engineers who received a notification on their phones could tap a link and, after authenticating via their browser, would immediately have the access they needed. As soon as people started working with the new authentication flow, they wanted it everywhere. Eventually our security team mandated that we move our apps behind Access, but for a long time it was totally organic: teams were eager to use it.

With authentication occuring at our network edge, we were able to support a globally-distributed workforce without the latency of a VPN, and we were able to do so securely. Moreover, our team is committed to protecting our internal applications with the most secure and usable authentication mechanisms, and two-factor authentication is one of the most important security controls that can be implemented. With Cloudflare Access, we’re able to rely on the strong two-factor authentication mechanisms of our identity provider.

Not all second factors of authentication deliver the same level of security. Some methods are still vulnerable to man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. These attacks often feature bad actors stealing one-time passwords, commonly through phishing, to gain access to private resources. To eliminate that possibility, we implemented FIDO2 supported security keys. FIDO2 is an authenticator protocol designed to prevent phishing, and we saw it as an improvement to our reliance on soft tokens at the time.

While the implementation of FIDO2 can present compatibility challenges, we were enthusiastic to improve our security posture. Cloudflare Access enabled us to limit access to our systems to only FIDO2. Cloudflare employees are now required to use their hardware keys to reach our applications. The onboarding of Access was not only a huge win for ease of use, the enforcement of security keys was a massive improvement to our security posture.

Mitigate threats & prevent data exfiltration: Gateway and Remote Browser Isolation

Deploying secure DNS in our offices

A few years later, in 2020, many customers’ security teams were struggling to extend the controls they had enabled in the office to their remote workers. In response, we launched Cloudflare Gateway, offering customers protection from malware, ransomware, phishing, command & control, shadow IT, and other Internet risks over all ports and protocols. Gateway directs and filters traffic according to the policies implemented by the customer.

Our security team started with Gateway to implement DNS filtering in all of our offices. Since Gateway was built on top of the same network as 1.1.1.1, the world’s fastest DNS resolver, any current or future Cloudflare office will have DNS filtering without incurring additional latency. Each office connects to the nearest data center and is protected.

Deploying secure DNS for our remote users

Cloudflare’s WARP client was also built on top of our 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver. It extends the security and performance offered in offices to remote corporate devices. With the WARP client deployed, corporate devices connect to the nearest Cloudflare data center and are routed to Cloudflare Gateway. By sitting between the corporate device and the Internet, the entire connection from the device is secure, while also offering improved speed and privacy.

We sought to extend secure DNS filtering to our remote workforce and deployed the Cloudflare WARP client to our fleet of endpoint devices. The deployment enabled our security teams to better preserve our privacy by encrypting DNS traffic over DNS over HTTPS (DoH). Meanwhile, Cloudflare Gateway categorizes domains based on Radar, our own threat intelligence platform, enabling us to block high risk and suspicious domains for users everywhere around the world.

How Cloudflare Security does Zero Trust

Adding on HTTPS filtering and Browser Isolation

DNS filtering is a valuable security tool, but it is limited to blocking entire domains. Our team wanted a more precise instrument to block only malicious URLs, not the full domain. Since Cloudflare One is an integrated platform, most of the deployment was already complete. All we needed was to add the Cloudflare Root CA to our endpoints and then enable HTTP filtering in the Zero Trust dashboard. With those few simple steps, we were able to implement more granular blocking controls.

In addition to precision blocking, HTTP filtering enables us to implement tenant control. With tenant control, Gateway HTTP policies regulate access to corporate SaaS applications. Policies are implemented using custom HTTP headers. If the custom request header is present and the request is headed to an organizational account, access is granted. If the request header is present and the request goes to a non-organizational account, such as a personal account, the request can be blocked or opened in an isolated browser.

After protecting our users’ traffic at the DNS and HTTP layers, we implemented Browser Isolation. When Browser Isolation is implemented, all browser code executes in the cloud on Cloudflare’s network. This isolates our endpoints from malicious attacks and common data exfiltration techniques. Some remote browser isolation products introduce latency and frustrate users. Cloudflare’s Browser Isolation uses the power of our network to offer a seamless experience for our employees. It quickly improved our security posture without compromising user experience.

Preventing phishing attacks: Onboarding Area 1 email security

Also in early 2020, we saw an uptick in employee-reported phishing attempts. Our cloud-based email provider had strong spam filtering, but they fell short at blocking malicious threats and other advanced attacks. As we experienced increasing phishing attack volume and frequency we felt it was time to explore more thorough email protection options.

The team looked for four main things in a vendor: the ability to scan email attachments, the ability to analyze suspected malicious links, business email compromise protection, and strong APIs into cloud-native email providers. After testing many vendors, Area 1 became the clear choice to protect our employees. We implemented Area 1’s solution in early 2020, and the results have been fantastic.

Given the overwhelmingly positive response to the product and the desire to build out our Zero Trust portfolio, Cloudflare acquired Area 1 Email Security in April 2022. We are excited to offer the same protections we use to our customers.

What’s next: Getting started with Cloudflare’s CASB

Cloudflare acquired Vectrix in February 2022. Vectrix’s CASB offers functionality we are excited to add to Cloudflare One. SaaS security is an increasing concern for many security teams. SaaS tools are storing more and more sensitive corporate data, so misconfigurations and external access can be a significant threat. However, securing these platforms can present a significant resource challenge. Manual reviews for misconfigurations or externally shared files are time consuming, yet necessary processes for many customers. CASB reduces the burden on teams by ensuring security standards by scanning SaaS instances and identifying vulnerabilities with just a few clicks.

We want to ensure we maintain the best practices for SaaS security, and like many of our customers, we have many SaaS applications to secure. We are always seeking opportunities to make our processes more efficient, so we are excited to onboard one of our newest Zero Trust products.

Always striving for improvement

Cloudflare takes pride in deploying and testing our own products. Our security team works directly with Product to “dog food” our own products first. It’s our mission to help build a better Internet — and that means providing valuable feedback from our internal teams. As the number one consumer of Cloudflare’s products, the Security team is not only helping keep the company safer, but also contributing to build better products for our customers.

We hope you have enjoyed Cloudflare One week. We really enjoyed sharing our stories with you. To check out our recap of the week, please visit our Cloudflare TV segment.

Kubectl with Cloudflare Zero Trust

Post Syndicated from Terin Stock original https://blog.cloudflare.com/kubectl-with-zero-trust/

Kubectl with Cloudflare Zero Trust

Kubectl with Cloudflare Zero Trust

Cloudflare is a heavy user of Kubernetes for engineering workloads: it’s used to power the backend of our APIs, to handle batch-processing such as analytics aggregation and bot detection, and engineering tools such as our CI/CD pipelines. But between load balancers, API servers, etcd, ingresses, and pods, the surface area exposed by Kubernetes can be rather large.

In this post, we share a little bit about how our engineering team dogfoods Cloudflare Zero Trust to secure Kubernetes — and enables kubectl without proxies.

Our General Approach to Kubernetes Security

As part of our security measures, we heavily limit what can access our clusters over the network. Where a network service is exposed, we add additional protections, such as requiring Cloudflare Access authentication or Mutual TLS (or both) to access ingress resources.

These network restrictions include access to the cluster’s API server. Without access to this, engineers at Cloudflare would not be able to use tools like kubectl to introspect their team’s resources. While we believe Continuous Deployments and GitOps are best practices, allowing developers to use the Kubernetes API aids in troubleshooting and increasing developer velocity. Not having access would have been a deal breaker.

To satisfy our security requirements, we’re using Cloudflare Zero Trust, and we wanted to share how we’re using it, and the process that brought us here.

Before Zero Trust

In the world before Zero Trust, engineers could access the Kubernetes API by connecting to a VPN appliance. While this is common across the industry, and it does allow access to the API, it also dropped engineers as clients into the internal network: they had much more network access than necessary.

We weren’t happy with this situation, but it was the status quo for several years. At the beginning of 2020, we retired our VPN and thus the Kubernetes team needed to find another solution.

Kubernetes with Argo Tunnels

At the time we worked closely with the team developing Cloudflare Tunnels to add support for handling kubectl connections using Access and cloudflared tunnels.

While this worked for our engineering users, it was a significant hurdle to on-boarding new employees. Each Kubernetes cluster required its own tunnel connection from the engineer’s device, which made shuffling between clusters annoying. While kubectl supported connecting through SOCKS proxies, this support was not universal to all tools in the Kubernetes ecosystem.

We continued using this solution internally while we worked towards a better solution.

Kubernetes with Zero Trust

Since the launch of Cloudflare One, we’ve been dogfooding the Zero Trust agent in various configurations. At first we’d been using it to implement secure DNS with 1.1.1.1. As time went on, we began to use it to dogfood additional Zero Trust features.

We’re now leveraging the private network routing in Cloudflare Zero Trust to allow engineers to access the Kubernetes APIs without needing to setup cloudflared tunnels or configure kubectl and other Kubernetes ecosystem tools to use tunnels. This isn’t something specific to Cloudflare, you can do this for your team today!

Kubectl with Cloudflare Zero Trust

Configuring Zero Trust

We use a configuration management tool for our Zero Trust configuration to enable infrastructure-as-code, which we’ve adapted below. However, the same configuration can be achieved using the Cloudflare Zero Trust dashboard.

The first thing we need to do is create a new tunnel. This tunnel will be used to connect the Cloudflare edge network to the Kubernetes API. We run the tunnel endpoints within Kubernetes, using configuration shown later in this post.

resource "cloudflare_argo_tunnel" "k8s_zero_trust_tunnel" {
  account_id = var.account_id
  name       = "k8s_zero_trust_tunnel"
  secret     = var.tunnel_secret
}

The “tunnel_secret” secret should be a 32-byte random number, which you should temporarily save as we’ll reuse it later for the Kubernetes setup later.

After we’ve created the tunnel, we need to create the routes so the Cloudflare network knows what traffic to send through the tunnel.

resource "cloudflare_tunnel_route" "k8s_zero_trust_tunnel_ipv4" {
  account_id = var.account_id
  tunnel_id  = cloudflare_argo_tunnel.k8s_zero_trust_tunnel.id
  network    = "198.51.100.101/32"
  comment    = "Kubernetes API Server (IPv4)"
}
 
resource "cloudflare_tunnel_route" "k8s_zero_trust_tunnel_ipv6" {
  account_id = var.account_id
  tunnel_id  = cloudflare_argo_tunnel.k8s_zero_trust_tunnel.id
  network    = "2001:DB8::101/128"
  comment    = "Kubernetes API Server (IPv6)"
}

We support accessing the Kubernetes API via both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, so we configure routes for both. If you’re connecting to your API server via a hostname, these IP addresses should match what is returned via a DNS lookup.

Next we’ll configure settings for Cloudflare Gateway so that it’s compatible with the API servers and clients.

resource "cloudflare_teams_list" "k8s_apiserver_ips" {
  account_id = var.account_id
  name       = "Kubernetes API IPs"
  type       = "IP"
  items      = ["198.51.100.101/32", "2001:DB8::101/128"]
}
 
resource "cloudflare_teams_rule" "k8s_apiserver_zero_trust_http" {
  account_id  = var.account_id
  name        = "Don't inspect Kubernetes API"
  description = "Allow connections from kubectl to API"
  precedence  = 10000
  action      = "off"
  enabled     = true
  filters     = ["http"]
  traffic     = format("any(http.conn.dst_ip[*] in $%s)", replace(cloudflare_teams_list.k8s_apiserver_ips.id, "-", ""))
}

As we use mutual TLS between clients and the API server, and not all the traffic between kubectl and the API servers are HTTP, we’ve disabled HTTP inspection for these connections.

You can pair these rules with additional Zero Trust rules, such as device attestation, session lifetimes, and user and group access policies to further customize your security.

Deploying Tunnels

Once you have your tunnels created and configured, you can deploy their endpoints into your network. We’ve chosen to deploy the tunnels as pods, as this allows us to use Kubernetes’s deployment strategies for rolling out upgrades and handling node failures.

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: tunnel-zt
  namespace: example
  labels:
    tunnel: api-zt
data:
  config.yaml: |
    tunnel: 8e343b13-a087-48ea-825f-9783931ff2a5
    credentials-file: /opt/zt/creds/creds.json
    metrics: 0.0.0.0:8081
    warp-routing:
        enabled: true

This creates a Kubernetes ConfigMap with a basic configuration that enables WARP routing for the tunnel ID specified. You can get this tunnel ID from your configuration management system, the Cloudflare Zero Trust dashboard, or by running the following command from another device logged into the same account.

cloudflared tunnel list

Next, we’ll need to create a secret for our tunnel credentials. While you should use a secret management system, for simplicity we’ll create one directly here.

jq -cn --arg accountTag $CF_ACCOUNT_TAG \
       --arg tunnelID $CF_TUNNEL_ID \
       --arg tunnelName $CF_TUNNEL_NAME \
       --arg tunnelSecret $CF_TUNNEL_SECRET \
   '{AccountTag: $accountTag, TunnelID: $tunnelID, TunnelName: $tunnelName, TunnelSecret: $tunnelSecret}' | \
kubectl create secret generic -n example tunnel-creds --from-file=creds.json=/dev/stdin

This creates a new secret “tunnel-creds” in the “example” namespace with the credentials file the tunnel expects.

Now we can deploy the tunnels themselves. We deploy multiple replicas to ensure some are always available, even while nodes are being drained.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  labels:
    tunnel: api-zt
  name: tunnel-api-zt
  namespace: example
spec:
  replicas: 3
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      tunnel: api-zt
  strategy:
    rollingUpdate:
      maxSurge: 0
      maxUnavailable: 1
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        tunnel: api-zt
    spec:
      containers:
        - args:
            - tunnel
            - --config
            - /opt/zt/config/config.yaml
            - run
          env:
            - name: GOMAXPROCS
              value: "2"
            - name: TZ
              value: UTC
          image: cloudflare/cloudflared:2022.5.3
          livenessProbe:
            failureThreshold: 1
            httpGet:
              path: /ready
              port: 8081
            initialDelaySeconds: 10
            periodSeconds: 10
          name: tunnel
          ports:
            - containerPort: 8081
              name: http-metrics
          resources:
            limits:
              cpu: "1"
              memory: 100Mi
          volumeMounts:
            - mountPath: /opt/zt/config
              name: config
              readOnly: true
            - mountPath: /opt/zt/creds
              name: creds
              readOnly: true
      volumes:
        - secret:
            name: tunnel-creds
          name: creds
        - configMap:
            name: tunnel-api-zt
          name: config

Using Kubectl with Cloudflare Zero Trust

Kubectl with Cloudflare Zero Trust

After deploying the Cloudflare Zero Trust agent, members of your team can now access the Kubernetes API without needing to set up any special SOCKS tunnels!

kubectl version --short
Client Version: v1.24.1
Server Version: v1.24.1

What’s next?

If you try this out, send us your feedback! We’re continuing to improve Zero Trust for non-HTTP workflows.

Decommissioning your VDI

Post Syndicated from James Chang original https://blog.cloudflare.com/decommissioning-virtual-desktop/

Decommissioning your VDI

Decommissioning your VDI

This blog offers Cloudflare’s perspective on how remote browser isolation can help organizations offload internal web application use cases currently secured by virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). VDI has historically been useful to secure remote work, particularly when users relied on desktop applications. However, as web-based apps have become more popular than desktop apps, the drawbacks of VDI – high costs, unresponsive user experience, and complexity – have become harder to ignore. In response, we offer practical recommendations and a phased approach to transition away from VDI, so that organizations can lower cost and unlock productivity by improving employee experiences and simplifying administrative overhead.

Modern Virtual Desktop usage

Background on Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure describes running desktop environments on virtual computers hosted in a data center. When users access resources within VDI, video streams from those virtual desktops are delivered securely to endpoint devices over a network. Today, VDI is predominantly hosted on-premise in data centers and either managed directly by organizations themselves or by third-party Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) providers. In spite of web application usage growing in favor of desktop applications, DaaS is growing, with Gartner® recently projecting DaaS spending to double by 2024.

Both flavors of VDI promise benefits to support remote work. For security, VDI offers a way to centralize configuration for many dispersed users and to keep sensitive data far away from devices. Business executives are often attracted to VDI because of potential cost savings over purchasing and distributing devices to every user. The theory is that when processing is shifted to centralized servers, IT teams can save money shipping out fewer managed laptops and instead support bring-your-own-device (BYOD). When hardware is needed, they can purchase less expensive devices and even extend the lifespan of older devices.

Challenges with VDI

High costs

The reality of VDI is often quite different. In particular, it ends up being much more costly than organizations anticipate for both capital and operational expenditures. Gartner® projects that “by 2024, more than 90% of desktop virtualization projects deployed primarily to save cost will fail to meet their objectives.”

The reasons are multiple. On-premise VDI comes with significant upfront capital expenditures (CapEx) in servers. DaaS deployments require organizations to make opaque decisions about virtual machines (e.g. number, region, service levels, etc.) and their specifications (e.g. persistent vs. pooled, always-on vs. on-demand, etc.). In either scenario, the operational expenditures (OpEx) from maintenance and failing to rightsize capacity can lead to surprises and overruns. For both flavors, the more organizations commit to virtualization, the more they are locked into high ongoing compute expenses, particularly as workforces grow remotely.

Poor user experience

VDI also delivers a subpar user experience. Expectations for frictionless IT experiences have only increased during remote work, and users can still tell the difference between accessing apps directly versus from within a virtual desktop. VDI environments that are not rightsized can lead to clunky, latent, and unresponsive performance. Poor experiences can negatively impact productivity, security (as users seek workarounds outside of VDI), and employee retention (as users grow disaffected).

Complexity

Overall, VDI is notoriously complex. Initial setup is multi-faceted and labor-intensive, with steps including investing in servers and end user licenses, planning VM requirements and capacity, virtualizing apps, setting up network connectivity, and rolling out VDI thin clients. Establishing security policies is often the last step, and for this reason, can sometimes be overlooked, leading to security gaps.

Moving VDI into full production not only requires cross-functional coordination across typical teams like IT, security, and infrastructure & operations, but also typically requires highly specialized talent, often known as virtual desktop administrators. These skills are hard to find and retain, which can be risky to rely on during this current high-turnover labor market.

Even still, administrators often need to build their own logging, auditing, inspection, and identity-based access policies on top of these virtualized environments. This means additional overhead of configuring separate services like secure web gateways.

Some organizations deploy VDI primarily to avoid the shipping costs, logistical hassles, and regulatory headaches of sending out managed laptops to their global workforce. But with VDI, what seemed like a fix for one problem can quickly create more overhead and frustration. Wrestling with VDI’s complexity is likely not worthwhile, particularly if users only need to access a select few internal web services.

Offloading Virtual Desktop use cases with Remote Browser Isolation

To avoid these frictions, organizations are exploring ways to shift use cases away from VDI, particularly when on-prem. Most applications that workforces rely on today are accessible via the browser and are hosted in public or hybrid cloud or SaaS environments, and even occasionally in legacy data centers. As a result, modern services like remote browser isolation (RBI) increasingly make sense as alternatives to begin offloading VDI workloads and shift security to the cloud.

Like VDI, Cloudflare Browser Isolation minimizes attack surface by running all app and web code away from endpoints — in this case, on Cloudflare’s global network. In the process, Cloudflare can secure data-in-use within a browser from untrusted users and devices, plus insulate those endpoints from threats like ransomware, phishing and even zero-day attacks. Within an isolated browser, administrators can set policies to protect sensitive data on any web-based or SaaS app, just as they would with VDI. Sample controls include restrictions on file uploads / downloads, copy and paste, keyboard inputs, and printing functionality.

This comparable security comes with more achievable business benefits, starting with helping employees be more productive:

  1. End users benefit from a faster and more transparent experience than with VDI. Our browser isolation is designed to run across our 270+ locations, so that isolated sessions are served as close to end users as possible. Unlike with VDI, there is no backhauling user traffic to centralized data centers. Plus, Cloudflare’s Network Vector Rendering (NVR) approach ensures that the in-app experience feels like a native, local browser – without bandwidth intensive pixel pushing techniques.
  2. Administrators benefit because they can skip all the up-front planning, ongoing overhead, and scaling pains associated with VDI. Instead, administrators turn on isolation policies from a single dashboard and let Cloudflare handle scaling to users and devices. Plus, native integrations with ZTNA, SWG, CASB, and other security services make it easy to begin modernizing VDI-adjacent use cases.

On the cost side, expenses associated with browser isolation are overall lower, smoother, and more predictable than with VDI. In fact, Gartner® recently highlighted that “RBI is cheaper than using VDI for isolation if the only application being isolated is the browser.”

Unlike on-prem VDI, there are no capital expenditures on VM capacity, and unlike DaaS subscriptions, Cloudflare offers simple, seat-based pricing with no add-on fees for configurations. Organizations also can skip purchasing standalone point solutions because Cloudflare’s RBI comes natively integrated with other services in the Cloudflare Zero Trust platform. Most notably, we do not charge for cloud consumption, which is a common source of VDI surprise.

Transitioning to Cloudflare Browser Isolation

Decommissioning your VDI
Note: Above diagram includes this table below
Decommissioning your VDI

Customer story: PensionBee

PensionBee, a leading online pension provider in the UK, recognized this opportunity to offload virtual desktop use cases and switch to RBI. As a reaction to the pandemic, PensionBee initially onboarded a DaaS solution (Amazon WorkSpaces) to help employees access internal resources remotely. Specifically, CTO Jonathan Lister Parsons was most concerned about securing Salesforce, where PensionBee held its customers’ sensitive pension data.

The DaaS supported access controls similar to PensionBee configured for employees when they previously were in the office (e.g. allowlisting the IPs of the virtual desktops). But shortly after rollout, Lister Parsons began developing concerns about the unresponsive user experience. In this recent webinar, he in fact guesstimated that “users are generally about 10% less productive when they’re using the DaaS to do their work.” This negative experience increased the support burden on PensionBee’s IT staff to the point where they had to build an automated tool to reboot an employee’s DaaS service whenever it was acting up.

“From a usability perspective, it’s clearly better if employees can have a native browsing experience that people are used to compared to a remote desktop. That’s sort of a no-brainer,” Lister Parsons said. “But typically, it’s been hard to deliver that while keeping security in place, costs low, and setup complexity down.”

When Lister Parsons encountered Cloudflare Browser Isolation, he was impressed with the service’s performance and lightweight user experience. Because PensionBee employees accessed the vast majority of their apps (including Salesforce) via a browser, RBI was a strong fit. Cloudflare’s controls over copy/paste and file downloads reduced the risk of customer pension details in Salesforce reaching local devices.

“We started using Cloudflare Zero Trust with Browser Isolation to help provide the best security for our customers’ data and protect employees from malware,” he said. “It worked so well I forgot it was on.”

PensionBee is just one of many organizations developing a roadmap for this transition from VDI. In the next section, we provide Cloudflare’s recommendations for planning and executing that journey.

Practical recommendations

Pre-implementation planning

Understanding where to start this transition some forethought. Specifically, cross-functional teams – across groups like IT, security, and infrastructure & operations (IO) – should develop a collective understanding of how VDI is used today, what use cases should be offloaded first, and what impact any changes will have across both end users and administrators.

In our own consultations, we start by asking about the needs and expectations of end users because their consistent adoption will dictate an initiative’s success. Based on that foundation, we then typically help organizations map out and prioritize the applications and data they need to secure. Last but not least, we strategize around the ‘how:’ what administrators and expertise will be needed not only for the initial configuration of new services, but also for the ongoing improvement. Below are select questions we ask customers to consider across those key dimensions to help them navigate their VDI transition.

Questions to consider

Decommissioning your VDI

Migration from VDI to RBI

Organizations can leverage Cloudflare Browser Isolation and other Zero Trust services to begin offloading VDI use cases and realize cost savings and productivity gains within days of rollout. Our recommended three-phase approach focuses on securing the most critical services with the least disruption to user experience, while also prioritizing quick time-to-value.

Phase 1: Configure clientless web isolation for web-based applications

Using our clientless web isolation approach, administrators can send users to their private web application served in an isolated browser environment with just a hyperlink – without any software needed on endpoints. Then, administrators can build data protection rules preventing risky user actions within these isolated browser-based apps. Plus, because administrators avoid rolling out endpoint clients, scaling access to employees, contractors, or third parties even on unmanaged devices is as easy as sending a link.

These isolated links can exist in parallel with your existing VDI, enabling a graceful migration to this new approach longer term. Comparing the different experiences side by side can help your internal stakeholders evangelize the RBI-based approach over time. Cross-functional communication is critical throughout this phased rollout: for example, in prioritizing what web apps to isolate before configuration, and after configuration, articulating how those changes will affect end users.

Phase 2: Shift SSH- and VNC-based apps from VDI to Cloudflare

Clientless isolation is a great fit to secure web apps. This next phase helps secure non-web apps within VDI environments, which are commonly accessed via an SSH or VNC connection. For example, privileged administrators often use SSH to control remote desktops and fulfill service requests. Other less technical employees may need the VNC’s graphical user interface to work in legacy apps inaccessible via a modern operating system.

Cloudflare enables access to these SSH and VNC environments through a browser – again without requiring any software installed on endpoints. Both the SSH and VNC setups are similar in that administrators create a secure outbound-only connection between a machine and Cloudflare’s network before a terminal is rendered in a browser. By sending traffic to our network, Cloudflare can authenticate access to apps based on identity check and other granular policies and can provide detailed audits of each user session. (You can read more about the SSH and VNC experience in prior blog posts.)

We recommend first securing SSH apps to support privileged administrators, who can provide valuable feedback. Then, move to support the broader range of users who rely on VNC. Administrators will set up connections and policies using our ZTNA service from the same management panel used for RBI. Altogether, this browser-based experience should reduce latency and have users feeling more at home and productive than in their virtualized desktops.

Phase 3: Progress towards Zero Trust security posture

Step 3A: Set up identity verification policies per application
With phases 1 and 2, you have been using Cloudflare to progressively secure access to web and non-app apps for select VDI use cases. In phase 3, build on that foundation by adopting ZTNA for all your applications, not just ones accessed through VDI.

Administrators use the same Cloudflare policy builder to add more granular conditional access rules in line with Zero Trust security best practices, including checking for an identity provider (IdP). Cloudflare integrates with multiple IdPs simultaneously and can federate multiple instances of the same IdP, enabling flexibility to support any variety of users. After setting up IdP verification, we see administrators often enhance security by requiring MFA. These types of identity checks can also be set up within VDI environments, which can build confidence in adopting Zero Trust before deprecating VDI entirely.

Step 3B: Rebuild confidence in user devices by layering in device posture checks
So far, the practical steps we’ve recommended do not require any Cloudflare software on endpoints – which optimizes for deployment speed in offloading VDI use cases. But longer term, there are security, visibility, and productivity benefits to deploying Cloudflare’s device client where it makes sense.

Cloudflare’s device client (aka WARP) works across all major operating systems and is optimized for flexible deployment. For managed devices, use any script-based method with popular mobile device management (MDM) software, and self-enrollment is a useful option for third-party users. With WARP deployed, administrators can enhance application access policies by first checking for the presence of specific programs or files, disk encryption status, the right OS version, and other additional attributes. Plus, if your organization uses endpoint protection (EPP) providers like Crowdstrike, SentinelOne, and more, verify access by first checking for the presence of that software or examining device health.

Altogether, adding device posture signals both levels up security and enables more granular visibility for both managed and BYOD devices. As with identity verification, administrators can start by enabling device posture checks for users still using virtual desktops. Over time, as administrators build more confidence in user devices, they should begin routing users on managed devices to apps directly, as opposed to through the slower VDI experience.

Step 3C: Progressively shift security services away from virtualized environments to Zero Trust
Rethinking application access use cases in prior phases has reduced reliance on complex VDI. By now, Administrators should already be building comfort with Zero Trust policies, as enabled by Cloudflare. Our final recommendation in this article is to continue that journey away from virtualization and towards Zero Trust Network Access.

Instead of sending any users into virtualized apps in virtualized desktops, organizations can reduce their overhead entirely and embrace cloud-delivered ZTNA to protect one-to-one connections between all users and all apps in any cloud environment. The more apps secured with Cloudflare vs. VDI, the greater consistency of controls, visibility, and end user experience.

Virtualization has provided a powerful technology to bridge the gap between our hardware-centric legacy investments and IT’s cloud-first future. At this point, however, reliance on virtualization puts undue pressure on your administrators and risks diminishing end user productivity. As apps, users, and data accelerate their migration to the cloud, it only makes sense to shift security controls there too with cloud-native, not virtualized services.

As longer term steps, organizations can explore taking advantage of Cloudflare’s other natively-integrated services, such as our Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), and email security. Other blogs this week outline how to transition to these Cloudflare services from other legacy technologies.

Summary table

Decommissioning your VDI

Best practices and progress metrics

Below are sample best practices we recommend achieving as smooth a transition as possible, followed by sample metrics to track progress on your initiative:

  • Be attuned to end user experiences: Whatever replaces VDI needs to perform better than what came before. When trying to change user habits and drive adoption, administrators must closely track what users like and dislike about the new services.
  • Prioritize cross-functional collaboration: Sunsetting VDI will inevitably involve coordination across diverse teams across IT, security, infrastructure, and virtual desktop administrators. It is critical to establish shared ways of working and trust to overcome any road bumps.
  • Roll out incrementally and learn: Test out each step with a subset of users and apps before rolling out more widely to figure out what works (and does not). Start by testing out clientless web isolation for select apps to gain buy-in from users and executives.

Sample progress metrics

Decommissioning your VDI

Explore your VDI transition

Cloudflare Zero Trust makes it easy to begin sunsetting your VDI, beginning with leveraging our clientless browser isolation to secure web apps.

To learn more about how to move towards Zero Trust and away from virtualized desktops, request a consultation today.Replacing your VDI is a great project to fit into your overall Zero Trust roadmap. For a full summary of Cloudflare One Week and what’s new, tune in to our recap webinar.

Verify Apple devices with no installed software

Post Syndicated from Kenny Johnson original https://blog.cloudflare.com/private-attestation-token-device-posture/

Verify Apple devices with no installed software

Verify Apple devices with no installed software

One of the foundations of Zero Trust is determining if a user’s device is “healthy” — that it has its operating system up-to-date with the latest security patches, that it’s not jailbroken, that it doesn’t have malware installed, and so on. Traditionally, determining this has required installing software directly onto a user’s device.

Earlier this month, Cloudflare participated in the announcement of an open source standard called a Private Attestation Token. Device manufacturers who support the standard can now supply a Private Attestation Token with any request made by one of their devices. On the IT Administration side, Private Attestation Tokens means that security teams can verify a user’s device before they access a sensitive application — without the need to install any software or collect a user’s device data.

At WWDC 2022, Apple announced Private Attestation Tokens. Today, we’re announcing that Cloudflare Access will support verifying a Private Attestation token. This means that security teams that rely on Cloudflare Access can verify a user’s Apple device before they access a sensitive application — no additional software required.

Determining a “healthy” device

There are many solutions on the market that help security teams determine if a device is “healthy” and corporately managed. What the majority of these solutions have in common is that they require software to be installed directly on the user’s machine. This comes with challenges associated with client software including compatibility issues, version management, and end user support. Many companies have dedicated Mobile Device Management (MDM) tools to manage the software installed on employee machines.

MDM is a proven model, but it is also a challenge to manage — taking a dedicated team in many cases. What’s more, installing client or MDM software is not always possible for contractors, vendors or employees using personal machines. Security teams have to resort to VDI or VPN solutions for external users to securely access corporate applications.

How Private Attestation Tokens verify a device

Private Attestation Tokens leverage the Privacy Pass Protocol, which Cloudflare authored with major device manufacturers, to attest to a device’s health and integrity.

In order for Private Attestation Tokens to work, four parties agree to work in concert with a common framework to generate and exchange anonymous, unforgeable tokens. Without all four parties in the process, PATs won’t work.

  1. An Origin. A website, application, or API that receives requests from a client. When a website receives a request to their origin, the origin must know to look for and request a token from the client making the request. For Cloudflare customers, Cloudflare acts as the origin (on behalf of customers) and handles the requesting and processing of tokens.
  2. A Client. Whatever tool the visitor is using to attempt to access the Origin. This will usually be a web browser or mobile application. In our example, let’s say the client is a mobile Safari Browser.
  3. An Attester. The Attester is who the client asks to prove something (i.e that a mobile device has a valid IMEI) before a token can be issued. In our example below, the Attester is Apple, the device vendor.
  4. An Issuer. The issuer is the only one in the process that actually generates, or issues, a token. The Attester makes an API call to whatever Issuer the Origin has chosen to trust,  instructing the Issuer to produce a token. In our case, Cloudflare will also be the Issuer.
Verify Apple devices with no installed software

We are then able to rely on the attestation from the device manufacturer as a form of validation that a device is in a “healthy” enough state to be allowed access to a sensitive application.

Checking device health without client software

Private Attestation Tokens do not require any additional software to be installed on the user’s device. This is because the “attestation” of device health and validity is attested directly by the device operating system’s manufacturer — in this case, Apple.

This means that a security team can use Cloudflare Access and Private Attestation Tokens to verify if a user is accessing from a “healthy” Apple device before allowing access to a sensitive corporate application. Some checks as part of the attestation include:

  • Is the device on the latest OS version?
  • Is the device jailbroken?
  • Is the window attempting to log in, in focus?
  • And much more.

Over time, we are working with other device manufacturers to expand device support and what is verified as part of the device attestation process. The attributes that are attested will also continue to expand over time, which means the device verification in Access will only strengthen.

In the next few months, we will move Private Attestation Support in Cloudflare Access to a closed beta. The first version will work for iOS devices and support will expand from there. The only change required will be an updated Access policy, no software will need to be installed. If you would like to be part of the beta program, sign up here today!

Area 1 threat indicators now available in Cloudflare Zero Trust

Post Syndicated from Jesse Kipp original https://blog.cloudflare.com/phishing-threat-indicators-in-zero-trust/

Area 1 threat indicators now available in Cloudflare Zero Trust

Area 1 threat indicators now available in Cloudflare Zero Trust

Over the last several years, both Area 1 and Cloudflare built pipelines for ingesting threat indicator data, for use within our products. During the acquisition process we compared notes, and we discovered that the overlap of indicators between our two respective systems was smaller than we expected. This presented us with an opportunity: as one of our first tasks in bringing the two companies together, we have started bringing Area 1’s threat indicator data into the Cloudflare suite of products. This means that all the products today that use indicator data from Cloudflare’s own pipeline now get the benefit of Area 1’s data, too.

Area 1 threat indicators now available in Cloudflare Zero Trust

Area 1 built a data pipeline focused on identifying new and active phishing threats, which now supplements the Phishing category available today in Gateway. If you have a policy that references this category, you’re already benefiting from this additional threat coverage.

How Cloudflare identifies potential phishing threats

Cloudflare is able to combine the data, procedures and techniques developed independently by both the Cloudflare team and the Area 1 team prior to acquisition. Customers are able to benefit from the work of both teams across the suite of Cloudflare products.

Cloudflare curates a set of data feeds both from our own network traffic, OSINT sources, and numerous partnerships, and applies custom false positive control. Customers who rely on Cloudflare are spared the software development effort as well as the operational workload to distribute and update these feeds. Cloudflare handles this automatically, with updates happening as often as every minute.

Cloudflare is able to go beyond this and work to proactively identify phishing infrastructure in multiple ways. With the Area 1 acquisition, Cloudflare is now able to apply the adversary-focused threat research approach of Area1 across our network. A team of threat researchers track state-sponsored and financially motivated threat actors, newly disclosed CVEs, and current phishing trends.

Cloudflare now operates mail exchange servers for hundreds of organizations around the world, in addition to its DNS resolvers, Zero Trust suite, and network services. Each of these products generates data that is used to enhance the security of all of Cloudflare’s products. For example, as part of mail delivery, the mail engine performs domain lookups, scores potential phishing indicators via machine learning, and fetches URLs. Data which can now be used through Cloudflare’s offerings.

How Cloudflare Area 1 identifies potential phishing threats

The Cloudflare Area 1 team operates a suite of web crawling tools designed to identify phishing pages, capture phishing kits, and highlight attacker infrastructure. In addition, Cloudflare Area 1 threat models assess campaigns based on signals gathered from threat actor campaigns; and the associated IOCs of these campaign messages are further used to enrich Cloudflare Area 1 threat data for future campaign discovery. Together these techniques give Cloudflare Area 1 a leg up on identifying the indicators of compromise for an attacker prior to their attacks against our customers. As part of this proactive approach, Cloudflare Area 1 also houses a team of threat researchers that track state-sponsored and financially motivated threat actors, newly disclosed CVEs, and current phishing trends. Through this research, analysts regularly insert phishing indicators into an extensive indicator management system that may be used for our email product or any other product that may query it.

Cloudflare Area 1 also collects information about phishing threats during our normal operation as the mail exchange server for hundreds of organizations across the world. As part of that role, the mail engine performs domain lookups, scores potential phishing indicators via machine learning, and fetches URLs. For those emails found to be malicious, the indicators associated with the email are inserted into our indicator management system as part of a feedback loop for subsequent message evaluation.

How Cloudflare data will be used to improve phishing detection

In order to support Cloudflare products, including Gateway and Page Shield, Cloudflare has a data pipeline that ingests data from partnerships, OSINT sources, as well as threat intelligence generated in-house at Cloudflare. We are always working to curate a threat intelligence data set that is relevant to our customers and actionable in the products Cloudflare supports. This is our North star: what data can we provide that enhances our customer’s security without requiring our customers to manage the complexity of data, relationships, and configuration. We offer a variety of security threat categories, but some major focus areas include:

  • Malware distribution
  • Malware and Botnet Command & Control
  • Phishing,
  • New and newly seen domains

Phishing is a threat regardless of how the potential phishing link gets entry into an organization, whether via email, SMS, calendar invite or shared document, or other means. As such, detecting and blocking phishing domains has been an area of active development for Cloudflare’s threat data team since almost its inception.

Looking forward, we will be able to incorporate that work into Cloudflare Area 1’s phishing email detection process. Cloudflare’s list of phishing domains can help identify malicious email when those domains appear in the sender, delivery headers, message body or links of an email.

1+1 = 3: Greater dataset sharing between Cloudflare and Area 1

Threat actors have long had an unfair advantage — and that advantage is rooted in the knowledge of their target, and the time they have to set up specific campaigns against their targets. That dimension of time allows threat actors to set up the right infrastructure, perform reconnaissance, stage campaigns, perform test probes, observe their results, iterate, improve and then launch their ‘production’ campaigns. This precise element of time gives us the opportunity to discover, assess and proactively filter out campaign infrastructure prior to campaigns reaching critical mass. But to do that effectively, we need visibility and knowledge of threat activity across the public IP space.

With Cloudflare’s extensive network and global insight into the origins of DNS, email or web traffic, combined with Cloudflare Area 1’s datasets of campaign tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), seed infrastructure and threat models — we are now better positioned than ever to help organizations secure themselves against sophisticated threat actor activity, and regain the advantage that for so long has been heavily weighted towards the bad guys.

If you’d like to extend Zero Trust to your email security to block advanced threats, contact your Customer Success manager, or request a Phishing Risk Assessment here.

Cloudflare mitigates 26 million request per second DDoS attack

Post Syndicated from Omer Yoachimik original https://blog.cloudflare.com/26m-rps-ddos/

Cloudflare mitigates 26 million request per second DDoS attack

Last week, Cloudflare automatically detected and mitigated a 26 million request per second DDoS attack — the largest HTTPS DDoS attack on record.

The attack targeted a customer website using Cloudflare’s Free plan. Similar to the previous 15M rps attack, this attack also originated mostly from Cloud Service Providers as opposed to Residential Internet Service Providers, indicating the use of hijacked virtual machines and powerful servers to generate the attack — as opposed to much weaker Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

Cloudflare mitigates 26 million request per second DDoS attack

Record-breaking attacks

Over the past year, we’ve witnessed one record-breaking attack after the other. Back in August 2021, we disclosed a 17.2M rps HTTP DDoS attack, and more recently in April, a 15M rps HTTPS DDoS attack. All were automatically detected and mitigated by our HTTP DDoS Managed Ruleset which is powered by our autonomous edge DDoS protection system.

The 26M rps DDoS attack originated from a small but powerful botnet of 5,067 devices. On average, each node generated approximately 5,200 rps at peak. To contrast the size of this botnet, we’ve been tracking another much larger but less powerful botnet of over 730,000 devices. The latter, larger botnet wasn’t able to generate more than one million requests per second, i.e. roughly 1.3 requests per second on average per device. Putting it plainly, this botnet was, on average, 4,000 times stronger due to its use of virtual machines and servers.

Also, worth noting that this attack was over HTTPS. HTTPS DDoS attacks are more expensive in terms of required computational resources because of the higher cost of establishing a secure TLS encrypted connection. Therefore, it costs the attacker more to launch the attack, and for the victim to mitigate it. We’ve seen very large attacks in the past over (unencrypted) HTTP, but this attack stands out because of the resources it required at its scale.

Within less than 30 seconds, this botnet generated more than 212 million HTTPS requests from over 1,500 networks in 121 countries. The top countries were Indonesia, the United States, Brazil and Russia. About 3% of the attack came through Tor nodes.

Cloudflare mitigates 26 million request per second DDoS attack

The top source networks were the French-based OVH (Autonomous System Number 16276), the Indonesian Telkomnet (ASN 7713), the US-based iboss (ASN 137922) and the Libyan Ajeel (ASN 37284).

Cloudflare mitigates 26 million request per second DDoS attack

The DDoS threat landscape

It’s important to understand the attack landscape when thinking about DDoS protection. When looking at our recent DDoS Trends report, we can see that most of the attacks are small, e.g. cyber vandalism. However, even small attacks can severely impact unprotected Internet properties. On the other hand, large attacks are growing in size and frequency — but remain short and rapid. Attackers concentrate their botnet’s power to try and wreak havoc with a single quick knockout blow — trying to avoid detection.

DDoS attacks might be initiated by humans, but they are generated by machines. By the time humans can respond to the attack, it may be over. And even if the attack was quick, the network and application failure events can extend long after the attack is over — costing you revenue and reputation. For this reason, it is recommended to protect your Internet properties with an automated always-on protection service that does not rely on humans to detect and mitigate attacks.

Helping build a better Internet

At Cloudflare, everything we do is guided by our mission to help build a better Internet. The DDoS team’s vision is derived from this mission: our goal is to make the impact of DDoS attacks a thing of the past. The level of protection that we offer is unmetered and unlimited — It is not bounded by the size of the attack, the number of the attacks, or the duration of the attacks. This is especially important these days because as we’ve recently seen, attacks are getting larger and more frequent.

Not using Cloudflare yet? Start now with our Free and Pro plans to protect your websites, or contact us for comprehensive DDoS protection for your entire network using Magic Transit.

How to secure an enterprise scale ACM Private CA hierarchy for automotive and manufacturing

Post Syndicated from Anthony Pasquariello original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-secure-an-enterprise-scale-acm-private-ca-hierarchy-for-automotive-and-manufacturing/

In this post, we show how you can use the AWS Certificate Manager Private Certificate Authority (ACM Private CA) to help follow security best practices when you build a CA hierarchy. This blog post walks through certificate authority (CA) lifecycle management topics, including an architecture overview, centralized security, separation of duties, certificate issuance auditing, and certificate sharing by means of templates. These topics provide best practices surrounding your ACM Private CA hierarchy so that you can build the right CA hierarchy for your organization.

With ACM Private CA, you can create private certificate authority hierarchies, including root and subordinate CAs, without the upfront investment and ongoing maintenance costs of operating your own private CA. You can issue certificates for authenticating internal users, computers, applications, services, servers or other devices, and code signing.

This post includes the following Amazon Web Services (AWS) services:

Solution overview

In this blog post, you’ll see an example automotive manufacturing company and their supplier companies. Each will have associated AWS accounts, which we will call Manufacturer Account(s) and Supplier Account(s), respectively.

Automotive manufacturing companies usually have modules that come from different suppliers. Modules, in the automotive context, are embedded systems that control electrical systems in the vehicle. These modules might be interconnected throughout the in-vehicle network or provide connectivity external to the vehicle, for example, for navigation or sending telemetry to off-board systems.

The architecture needs to allow the Manufacturer to retain control of their CA hierarchy, while giving their external Suppliers limited access to sign the certificates on these modules with the Manufacturer’s CA hierarchy. The architecture we provide here gives you the basic information you need to cover the following objectives:

  1. Creation of accounts that logically separate CAs in a hierarchy
  2. IAM role creation for specific personas to manage the CA lifecycle
  3. Auditing the CA hierarchy by using audit reports
  4. Cross-account sharing by using AWS RAM with certificate template scoping

Architecture overview

Figure 1 shows the solution architecture.

Figure 1: Multi-account certificate authority hierarchy using ACM Private CA

Figure 1: Multi-account certificate authority hierarchy using ACM Private CA

The Manufacturer has two categories of AWS accounts:

  1. A dedicated account to hold the Manufacturer’s root CA
  2. An account to hold their subordinate CA

Note: The diagram shows two subordinate CAs in the Manufacturer account. However, depending on your security needs, you can have a subordinate CA per account per supplier.

Additionally, each Supplier has one AWS account. These accounts will have the Manufacturer’s subordinate CA shared by using AWS RAM. The Manufacturer will have a subordinate CA for each Supplier.

Logically separate accounts

In order to minimize the scope of impact and scope users to actions within their duties, it’s critical that you logically separate AWS accounts based on workload within the CA hierarchy. The following section shows a recommendation for how to do that.

AWS account that holds the root CA

You, the Manufacturer, should place the ACM Private root CA within its own dedicated AWS account to segment and tightly control access to the root CA. This limits access at the account level and only uses the dedicated account for a single purpose: holding the root CA for your organization. This account will only have access from IAM principals that maintain the CA hierarchy through a federation service like AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) or direct federation to IAM through an existing identity provider. This account also has AWS CloudTrail enabled and configured for business-specific alerting, including actions like creation, updating, or deletion of the root CA.

AWS account that holds the subordinate CAs

You, the Manufacturer, will have a dedicated account where the entire CA hierarchy below the root will be located. You should have a separate subordinate CA for each Supplier, and in some cases a separate subordinate CA for each hardware module the Supplier is building. The subordinate CAs can issue certificates for specific hardware modules within the Supplier account.

This Manufacturer account shares each subordinate CA to the respective Supplier’s AWS account by using AWS RAM. This provides joint control to the shared subordinate CA, creating isolation between individual Suppliers. AWS RAM allows Suppliers to control certificate issuance and revocation if this is allowed by the Manufacturer. Each Supplier is only shared certificate provisioning access through AWS RAM configuration, which means that you can tightly monitor and revoke access through AWS RAM. Given this sharing through AWS RAM, the Suppliers don’t have access to modify or delete the CA hierarchy itself and can only provision certificates from it.

Supplier AWS account(s)

These AWS accounts are owned by each respective Supplier. For example, you might partner with radio, navigation system, and telemetry suppliers. Each Supplier would have their own AWS account, which they control. The Supplier accepts an invitation from the manufacturer through AWS RAM, sharing the subordinate CA. The subordinate is allowed to take only certain actions, based on how the Manufacturer configured the share (more on this later in the post).

Separation of duties by means of IAM role creation

In order to follow least privilege best practices when you create a CA hierarchy with ACM Private CA, you must create IAM roles that are specific to each job function. The recommended method is to separate administrator and certificate issuer roles.

For this automotive manufacturing use case, we recommend the following roles:

  1. Manufacturer IAM roles:
    • A CA admin role with CA disable permission
    • A CA admin role with CA delete permission
  2. Supplier certificate issuer IAM role:

Manufacturer IAM role overview

In this flow, one IAM role is able to disable the CA, and a second principal can delete the CA. This enables two-person control for this highly privileged action—meaning that you need a two-person quorum to rotate the CA certificate.

Day-to-day CA admin policy (with CA disable)

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "acm-pca:ImportCertificateAuthorityCertificate",
                "acm-pca:DeletePolicy",
                "acm-pca:PutPolicy",
                "acm-pca:TagCertificateAuthority",
                "acm-pca:ListTags",
                "acm-pca:GetCertificate",
                "acm-pca:CreateCertificateAuthority",
                "acm-pca:ListCertificateAuthorities",
                "acm-pca:UntagCertificateAuthority",
                "acm-pca:GetCertificateAuthorityCertificate",
                "acm-pca:RevokeCertificate",
                "acm-pca:UpdateCertificateAuthority",
                "acm-pca:GetPolicy",
                "acm-pca:IssueCertificate",
                "acm-pca:DescribeCertificateAuthorityAuditReport",
                "acm-pca:CreateCertificateAuthorityAuditReport",
                "acm-pca:RestoreCertificateAuthority",
                "acm-pca:GetCertificateAuthorityCsr",
                "acm-pca:DeletePermission",
                "acm-pca:DescribeCertificateAuthority",
                "acm-pca:CreatePermission",
                "acm-pca:ListPermissions"
            ],
            "Resource": “*”
        },
        {
            "Effect": "Deny",
            "Action": [
                "acm-pca:DeleteCertificateAuthority"
            ],
            "Resource": <Enter Root CA ARN Here>
        }
    ]
}

Privileged CA admin policy (with CA delete)

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "acm-pca:ImportCertificateAuthorityCertificate",
                "acm-pca:DeletePolicy",
                "acm-pca:PutPolicy",
                "acm-pca:TagCertificateAuthority",
                "acm-pca:ListTags",
                "acm-pca:GetCertificate",
                "acm-pca:UntagCertificateAuthority",
                "acm-pca:GetCertificateAuthorityCertificate",
                "acm-pca:RevokeCertificate",
                "acm-pca:GetPolicy",
    "acm-pca:CreateCertificateAuthority",
                "acm-pca:ListCertificateAuthorities",
                "acm-pca:DescribeCertificateAuthorityAuditReport",
                "acm-pca:CreateCertificateAuthorityAuditReport",
                "acm-pca:RestoreCertificateAuthority",
                "acm-pca:GetCertificateAuthorityCsr",
                "acm-pca:DeletePermission",
    "acm-pca:IssueCertificate",
                "acm-pca:DescribeCertificateAuthority",
                "acm-pca:CreatePermission",
                "acm-pca:ListPermissions",
                "acm-pca:DeleteCertificateAuthority"
            ],
            "Resource": “*”
        },
        {
            "Effect": "Deny",
            "Action": [
                "acm-pca:UpdateCertificateAuthority"
            ],
            "Resource": <Enter Root CA ARN Here>
        }
    ]
}

We recommend that you, the Manufacturer, create a two-person process for highly privileged events like CA certificate rotation ceremonies. The preceding policies serve two purposes. First, they allow you to designate separation of management duties between day-to-day CA admin tasks and infrequent root CA rotation ceremonies. The day-to-day CA admin policy allows all ACM Private CA actions except the ability to delete the root CA. This is because the day-to-day CA admin should not be deleting the root CA. Meanwhile, the privileged CA admin policy has the ability to call DeleteCertificateAuthority. However, in order to call DeleteCertificateAuthority, you first need to have the day-to-day CA admin role disable the root CA.

This means that both roles listed here are necessary to perform a root CA deletion for a rotation or replacement ceremony. This arrangement creates a way to control the deletion of the CA resource by requiring two separate actors to disable and delete. It’s crucial that the two roles are assumed by two different people at the identity provider. Having one person assume both of these roles negates the increased security created by each role.

You might also consider enforcing tagging of CAs at the organization level so that each new CA has relevant tags. The blog post Securing resource tags used for authorization using a service control policy in AWS Organizations illustrates in detail how to secure tags using service control policies (SCPs), so that only authorized users can modify tags.

Supplier IAM role overview

Your Suppliers should also follow least privilege when creating IAM roles within their own accounts. However, as we’ll see in the Cross-account sharing by using AWS RAM section, even if the Suppliers don’t follow best practices, the Manufacturer’s ACM Private CA hierarchy is still isolated and secure.

That being said, here are common IAM roles that your Suppliers should create within their own accounts:

  1. Developers who provision certificates for development and QA workloads
  2. Developers who provision certificates for production

These certificate issuing roles give the Supplier the ability to issue end-entity certificates from the CA hierarchy. In this use case, the Supplier needs two different levels of permissions: non-production certificates and production certificates. To simplify the roles within IAM, the Supplier decided to use ABAC. These ABAC policies allow operations when the principal’s tag matches the resource tag. Because the Supplier has many similar policies, each with a different set of users, they use ABAC to create a single IAM policy that uses principal tags rather than creating multiple slightly different IAM policies.

Certificate issuing policy that uses ABAC

{
	"Version": "2012-10-17",
	"Statement": [
	{
		"Effect": "Allow",
		"Action": [
			"acm-pca:IssueCertificate",
			"acm-pca:ListTags",
			"acm-pca:GetCertificate",
			"acm-pca:ListCertificateAuthorities"
		],
		"Resource": "*",
		"Condition": {
			"StringEquals": {
				"aws:ResourceTag/access-project": "${aws:PrincipalTag/access-project}",
				"aws:ResourceTag/access-team": "${aws:PrincipalTag/access-team}"
			}
		}
	}
}

This single policy enables all personas to be scoped to least privilege access. If you look at the Condition portion of the IAM policy, you can see the power of ABAC. This condition verifies that the PrincipalTag matches the ResourceTag. The Supplier is federating into IAM roles through AWS SSO and tagging the Supplier’s principals within its selected identity providers.

Because you as the Manufacturer have tagged the subordinate CAs that are shared with the Supplier, the Supplier can use identity provider (IdP) attributes as tags to simplify the Supplier’s IAM strategy. In this example, the Supplier configures each relevant user in the IdP with the attribute (tag) key: access-team. This tag matches the tagging strategy used by the Manufacturer. Here’s the mapping for each persona within the use case:

  • Dev environment:
    • access-team: DevTeam
  • Production environment:
    • access-team: ProdTeam

You can choose to add or remove tags depending on your use case, and the preceding scenario serves as a simple example. This offloads the need to create new IAM policies as the number of subordinate CAs grow. If you decide to use ABAC, make sure that you require both principal tagging and resource tagging upon creation of each, because these tags become your authorization mechanism.

CA lifecycle: Audit report published by the Manufacturer

In terms of auditing and monitoring, we recommend that the Manufacturer have a mechanism to track how many certificates were issued for a specific Supplier or module. Within the Manufacturer accounts, you can generate audit reports through the console or CLI. This allows you, the manufacturer, to gather metrics on certificate issuance and revocation. Following is an example of a certificate issuance.

Figure 2: Audit report output for certificate issuance

Figure 2: Audit report output for certificate issuance

For more information on generating an audit report, see Using audit reports with your private CA.

Cross-account sharing by using AWS RAM

With AWS RAM, you can share CAs with another account. We recommend that you, as a Manufacturer, use AWS RAM to share CAs with Suppliers so that they can issue certificates without administrator access to the CA. This arrangement allows you as the Manufacturer to more easily limit and revoke access if you change Suppliers. The Suppliers can create certificates through the ACM console or through the CLI, API, or AWS CloudFormation. Manufacturers are only sharing the ability to create, manage, bind, and export certificates from the CA hierarchy. The CA hierarchy itself is contained within the Manufacturers’ accounts, and not within the Suppliers’ accounts. By using AWS RAM, the Suppliers don’t have any administrator access to the CA hierarchy. From a cost perspective, you can centrally control and monitor the costs of your private CA hierarchy without having to deal with cost-sharing across Suppliers.

Refer to How to use AWS RAM to share your ACM Private CA cross-account for a full walkthrough on how to use RAM with ACM Private CA.

Certificate templates with AWS RAM managed permissions

AWS RAM has the ability to create managed permissions in order to define the actions that can be performed on shared resources. For each shareable resource type, you can use AWS RAM managed permissions to define which permissions to grant to whom for shared resource types that support additional managed permissions. This means that when you use AWS RAM to share a resource (in this case ACM Private CA), you can now specify which IAM actions can take place on that resource. AWS RAM managed permissions integrate with the following ACM Private CA certificate templates:

  • Permission 1: BlankEndEntityCertificate_APICSRPassthrough
  • Permission 2: EndEntityClientAuthCertificate
  • Permission 3: EndEntityServerAuthCertificate
  • Permission 4: subordinatesubordinateCACertificate_PathLen0
  • Permission 5: RevokeCertificate

These five certificate templates allow a Manufacturer to scope its Suppliers to the certificate template provisioning level. This means that you can limit which certificate templates can be issued by the Suppliers.

Let’s assume you have a Supplier that is supplying a module that has infotainment media capability, and you, the manufacturer, want the Supplier to provision the end-entity client certificate but you don’t want them to be able to revoke that certificate. You can use AWS RAM managed permissions to scope that Supplier’s shared private CA to allow the EndEntityClientAuthCertificate issuance template, which implicitly denies RevokeCertificate template actions. This further scopes down what the Supplier is authorized to issue on the shared CA, gives the responsibility for revoking infotainment device certificates to the Manufacturer, but still allows the Supplier to load devices with a certificate upon creation.

Example of creating a resource share in AWS RAM by using the AWS CLI

This walkthrough shows you the general process of sharing a private CA by using AWS RAM and then accepting that shared resource in the partner account.

  1. Create your shared resource in AWS RAM from the Manufacturer subordinate CA account. Notice that in the example that follows, we selected one of the certificate templates within the managed permissions option. This limits the shared CA so that it can only issue certain types of certificate templates.

    Note: Replace the <variable> placeholders with your own values. 

    aws ram create-resource-share
		--name Shared_Private_CA
		--resource-arns arn:aws:acm-pca:<region:111122223333>:certificate-authority/<xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-example>
		--permission-arns "arn:aws:ram::aws:permission/<AWSRAMBlankEndEntityCertificateAPICSRPassthroughIssuanceCertificateAuthority>"
		--principals <444455556666>

  2. From the Supplier account, the Supplier administrator will accept the resource. Follow How to use AWS RAM to share your ACM Private CA cross-account to complete the shared resource acceptance and issue an end entity certificate.

Conclusion

In this blog post, you learned about the various considerations for building a secure public key infrastructure (PKI) hierarchy by using ACM Private CA through an example customer’s prescriptive setup. You learned how you can use AWS RAM to share CAs across accounts easily and securely. You also learned about sharing specific CAs through the ability to define permissions to specific principals across accounts, allowing for granular control of permissions on principals that might act on those resources.

The main takeaways of this post are how to create least privileged roles within IAM in order to scope down the activities of each persona and limit the potential scope of impact for your organization’s private CA hierarchy. Although these best practices are specific to manufacturer business requirements, you can alter them based on your business needs. With the managed permissions in AWS RAM, you can further scope down the actions that principals can perform with your CA by limiting the certificate templates allowed on that CA when you share it. Using all of these tools, you can help your PKI hierarchy to have a high level of security. To learn more, see the other ACM Private CA posts on the AWS Security Blog.

 
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Anthony Pasquariello

Anthony Pasquariello

Anthony is a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS based in New York City. He specializes in modernization and security for our advanced enterprise customers. Anthony enjoys writing and speaking about all things cloud. He’s pursuing an MBA, and received his MS and BS in Electrical & Computer Engineering.

Omar Zoma

Omar Zoma

Omar is a senior AWS Security Solutions Architect that lives in metro Detroit. Omar is passionate about helping customers solve cloud and vehicle security problems at a global scale. In his free time, Omar trains hundreds of students a year in security and cloud through universities and training programs.