In the Code Build Deploy & Run (CBDR) framework, securing the Deploy Lifecycle can help you prevent privileged containers, poisoned pipelines, compliance violations, and exposed branches before deploying your workloads.
This blog discusses how you can utilize Prisma Cloud’s Compute Workload Protection functionality to secure resources within your Deploy Lifecycle after the initial setup. You can leverage knowledge in the next steps after installing Defenders, creating policies and rules.
First, we will explore the radar section and discuss the environment before moving on to the best practices and recommendations for Defenders.
Navigate to Radars > Cloud.
Figure 1: Radars > Cloud_Palo-Alto-Networks
This gives you a holistic view of where and what type of cloud accounts you have (Cloud Discovery must be enabled at the time of onboarding). This is a general overview of the number of resources you have in the cloud platform and how many resources have defense coverage along with the number of resources and the types of resources that are not defended.
The sidebar also contains the vulnerabilities for impacted resources and compliance information. Now you have a complete picture of your environment and its state.
Once you have installed Defenders and have a fair idea about your environment with the help of Radar view you can start managing Defenders under Manage > Defenders. Here you can gain visibility on all the Defenders installed and their statuses. Make sure the Defender status is “connected”. Insights are also provided into how long defenders have been connected or disconnected.
You can filter down specific Defenders using the filter feature. Some common use cases are to see which Defenders use old certificates or to list out all Defenders that need to be upgraded. This would help you filter the defenders that only need upgrades.
The best practice is to upgrade the Defenders to the latest version as Prisma cloud supports up to n-2 versions where “n” is the latest version and “-2” is the previous two versions.
Prisma Cloud can scan container images in public and private repositories on public and private registries. When configuring Prisma Cloud to scan a registry, you can select the scope of Defenders used for performing the scan job.
Prisma Console controls the registry scan with assigned Defenders. The Console scans one registry at a time. If multiple registries are configured to scan, the Prisma Cloud console will scan one registry until complete before moving on to the following registry. This registry scanning behavior is not configurable.
Figure 2: Registry Scan Behavior_Palo-Alto-Networks
Having clear visibility into which vulnerabilities to focus on is crucial to identify four items:
1) The criticality of the alarm
2) The owners of an image resource
3) The actual image resource that is triggering the vulnerability alarm and
4) If there is a fix for the vulnerability.
Without measurability, vulnerability is impossible to manage correctly. In addition, scanning images in the CI/CD pipeline is crucial in preventing further vulnerabilities from polluting the environment. It is a good practice to solve vulnerabilities based on the severity level. First solving the most critical vulnerabilities followed by high, medium and low. The results can also show if the same package is triggering alarms across multiple images. Therefore updating one package across multiple images could reduce the vulnerabilities significantly.
It is vital to know who the owners are for cloud resources. Many customers have no visibility into these resources because they do not have an enforcement of tags in their environment. If ownership is not clear, it will become challenging to efficiently manage the environment. Also, tags can be utilized to define scopes in Prisma Cloud in order to block vulnerabilities from polluting the environment.
It is also crucial to have an alerting-to-blocking strategy– review which images and packages are triggering alarms. If the alarms are not being addressed, those issues can be determined if the blocking for that image is a go or no-go for specific business issues.
When defining scopes, having one for alerting only and one for blocking only is important. When converting images to blocking mode causes an outage, you can easily move the image back to the scope of alerting and triage the situation later. Once the image has been moved to blocking mode, the CI pipeline scanning is critical in keeping the environment unpolluted.
The Center for Internet Security (CIS) publishes recommendations for best practices that should be adhered to when setting up machine images, servers, and containers. For convenience, you can access this information within the compliance tab.
Figure 3: Compliance Tab_Palo-Alto-Networks
The Trusted Images feature controls developer access to a specific registry, images or layers. Trusted Images ensure that developers are using verified or approved sources for their images and provide a straightforward way to implement the best practices for container security.
It is recommended to specify the images it trusts. Declare trust using objects called Trust Groups. Trust Groups collect related registries, repositories, and images in a single entity. For writing policy rules, it’s recommended to use registries or repositories for the trusted groups, if they are an organization’s golden standard images.
As a best practice, the default rule, Default - alert all should be maintained, and it should be the last rule in your policy as a “catchall” rule. The default rule matches all clusters and hosts (*). It will alert the images that aren’t captured by any other rule in your policy.
Assuming the default rule is in place, the policy is evaluated as follows:
By deploying Prisma Cloud’s defenders you gain continuous scanning with a single pane of glass. An overview of the runtime environments, resources, and firewalling make it simple to create reports and integrate new technologies into your stack with a peace of mind. Once the Defenders setup is completed, one can protect their environment by creating vulnerability, Compliance policies and creating alerts for the same. Furthermore, using trusted images gives a simple approach to put the best practices for container security into reality while ensuring that developers are utilizing approved sources for their images. Lastly, establish and monitor access control measures for cloud workloads and cloud native applications.
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