The 5 Pillars of Cloud Security

Did you know that 80% of companies encountered at least one cloud security incident in the past year? Additionally, 27% of organizations reported a public cloud security incident, marking a 10% increase compared to the previous year. It’s a scary number! So, what fundamental principles should you be familiar with to enhance the security of your cloud infrastructure?

I stumbled upon the answers to these questions during my recent discussions with 20 cloud security experts at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2023 event. These conversations provided me with essential insights into the pillars of cloud security that can significantly benefit organizations. Today, I’m excited to share this valuable information with you.

In this blog, we’ll discuss:

1. What is Cloud Security?
2. Top CloudSecurity Concerns
3. 5 Pillars of Cloud Security

Let’s get started!

What is Cloud Security?

Cloud security involves a collaborative effort between cloud providers and individual organizations. The security responsibility is divided, with cloud providers ensuring the overall security of the cloud infrastructure, and organizations taking on the responsibility for securing their applications within the cloud environment. Each cloud provider employs its own shared responsibility model, also known as a joint responsibility model, delineating the specific security responsibilities of the organization. Notably, these models vary among providers.

For instance, consider an application operating on a virtual server in the cloud. The cloud provider is tasked with safeguarding the physical hardware supporting the server, while organizations are accountable for configuring the operating system, implementing patches, and fortifying its security. The onus is on organizations to configure their applications securely and establish secure networks for accessing those applications.

What are the top cloud security concerns?

In recent years, organizations have rapidly embraced cloud computing, opting to host critical applications and sensitive data in cloud environments. However, securing these cloud environments presents distinct challenges compared to securing traditional on-premises setups, and many organizations are currently playing catch-up. They are now confronting formidable obstacles in safeguarding their new cloud environments, including:

1. A shortage of skilled technologists proficient in both cloud computing and security.
2. The need to uphold regulatory compliance standards across diverse cloud environments.
3. The necessity for novel security solutions, processes, and tools to align with the shared responsibility models implemented by cloud providers
4. Potential complexities within single or multi cloud setups, leading to opportunities for misconfigurations and vulnerabilities.
5. The requirement to maintain consistent and accurate records of cloud-based assets, permissions, and credentials across all cloud environments.
6. Monitoring workloads and user activity, including audit logs, poses challenges due to limited visibility, especially in multi cloud environments.

The 5 Pillars of Cloud Security

The following five pillars, frequently referenced as a framework for cloud security and data security, offer a comprehensive strategy for protecting your data and applications in the cloud. This blog post will delve into each of these pillars, providing a detailed exploration of their significance in ensuring a secure cloud environment.

Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Managing identity and access is a critical consideration when transitioning to the cloud. It involves defining who has access to various components within your technology infrastructure and specifying the necessary authorization levels. Questions arise regarding access to specific APIs, servers, or databases, along with the challenge of ensuring the legitimacy of the user attempting access.

Addressing these concerns is not a straightforward task. For instance, while access keys serve as a practical means of regulating resource access, inadequate security measures for these keys can expose sensitive information to potential attackers.

One effective approach to mitigate these risks involves the utilization of secret or key management software, such as HashiCorp Vault. With tools like these, applications can directly load or access the required keys from the Vault, eliminating the need for manual key access. To handle ad hoc access requests securely, employing temporary, single-use keys is recommended to minimize the risk of key theft and malicious use.

Furthermore, maintaining unified identity management is crucial. Inconsistencies and vulnerabilities in this area can create opportunities for attackers to impersonate others and gain unauthorized access to resources. Implementing single sign-on (SSO) for cloud infrastructure access provides a robust solution to ensure a unified and secure identity management system.

Data Security and Privacy

Ensuring data security and privacy is imperative from various standpoints, notably regulatory compliance (e.g., GDPR and CCPA) and the establishment of customer trust. The complexities introduced by the cloud, akin to challenges in identity and access management, often arise due to differences in ownership and storage locations.

Data stored in the cloud lacks inherent security; it necessitates proper configuration. Granting access to developers for debugging purposes, though essential, can introduce potential security and privacy vulnerabilities. Even read-only access has been a significant contributor to data breaches. To enhance data security, implementing least privileged access and advocating for the use of one-time access and two-factor authentication (2FA) in debugging scenarios can be effective. Employing appropriate tools, such as auditing, central logging, and observability, further contributes to a secure environment.

Another prevalent concern involves the exposure of storage media. Misconfigurations of storage components, like S3 buckets, may lead to unauthorized access. Mitigating this risk involves adopting the “tenancy model on cloud” to ensure data segregation. Additionally, leveraging cloud-native encryption services safeguards data at rest and shared data across systems. Utilizing S3 security scanning tools proves valuable in identifying and rectifying common misconfigurations.

Network and Infrastructure Security

Another challenge associated with transitioning to the cloud is the inevitable blurring of network boundaries. While a comprehensive set of controls and firewalling options should be available, their careful configuration and prioritization over insecure defaults are essential.

Several additional challenges may arise, such as the visibility of your cloud inventory, ad-hoc provisioning, insecure channels for data exchange, and insufficient segmentation. Often, these challenges manifest when there is a rushed setup of the cloud without well-defined processes.

Fortunately, there are practices that can be employed to mitigate common attack scenarios, including:

Denial of Service (DoS) and Attack Surface/Perimeter Security: In the cloud, countering these issues is achievable through the implementation of controls like DoS protection, Web Application Firewall (WAF), network policies, and firewalls to prevent common network threats.

Network Intrusion: Securing the perimeter alone is insufficient in the cloud. Once an attacker infiltrates the network, default access can be exploited. Effectively addressing this involves network segmentation to enforce the principle of least privilege and minimize lateral movement by the attacker. Alternatively, setting up a VPN and deploying critical workloads there ensures restricted access, and internal communication should be secured end-to-end.

Application Security

When contemplating the migration of an existing application to the cloud, security becomes a paramount consideration in the process of transferring data and establishing access to supporting APIs and data stores.

Equally important is addressing the intricate challenge of securing serverless components, containers, clusters, and, notably, supply chains. These elements are particularly susceptible to exploitation due to the diverse user base and the dynamically changing environment they operate within.

To address vulnerabilities specific to applications on the cloud, the following measures should be implemented:

Supply Chain Attacks: Securing the software supply chain in the cloud necessitates ensuring the integrity of every step in the supply chain. Relevant supply chain events should be linked to native cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM), and permissions must be restricted to authorized activities only.

Container Escape Vulnerabilities: While contemporary container runtimes like containerd and CRI-O are robust, vulnerabilities such as CVE 2022-0185 and others may allow attacker code to escape the container and run on the host. Mitigating this risk involves using secure baseline images with continuous image scanning. Regular image updates should be ensured, and the use of privileged containers should be avoided.

Security Operations

Security operations play a crucial role in defending against an expanding threat landscape by providing unified and continuous monitoring and response in the cloud. However, a primary challenge lies in the ability to effectively gather relevant security and audit events and interpret them in a timely manner.

While these tasks can be demanding for any security team, there are essential practices to ensure the smooth operation of security operations:

Crypto Mining and Bot Attacks: Attackers may compromise exposed cloud components, utilizing compute resources for crypto coin mining or executing a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. Implementing tools like Datadog and Splunk ensures unified management for both cloud and multi-cloud workloads. By leveraging such controls, observability is extended beyond applications to encompass infrastructure and broader business operations.

Configuration Drift: This occurs when frequent changes in configurations result in inconsistencies between lower and higher environments. Considering lower environments as a lesser security risk is a significant oversight. To address this, it is crucial to treat every environment as a production-level box. Securing the baseline configuration and continuously scanning and reviewing all environments become paramount to mitigating configuration drift.

Conclusion

Managing security in the cloud becomes intricate with a broad scope. Adopting a structured approach is essential to tackle challenges properly and effectively. Employing a step-by-step process not only facilitates addressing issues but also aids in keeping complexity under control. By adhering to the five pillars of cloud security alongside the three fundamental principles, you can construct a comprehensive cloud security strategy for your organization’s cloud journey.