Cloud-Native Security Governance for Misconfiguration Remediation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Cloud native applications face security vulnerabilities that DevOps teams struggle to address effectively, increasing susceptibility to malicious attacks, necessitating automated governance policy-based security solutions to reduce misconfigurations.
Innovation Solution
Automated governance policies categorize and implement configuration changes to resolve security misconfigurations, distinguishing between changes that affect user productivity or end-user access, and generate policies to manage future misconfigurations.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If DevOps teams manually address security vulnerabilities, then security expertise is utilized, but the number of security vulnerabilities increases and susceptibility to malicious attacks increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system enables automated self-service for security vulnerability resolution by implementing governance policies that automatically categorize and remediate misconfigurations without requiring manual security team intervention. The system autonomously identifies, categorizes, and resolves security issues based on predefined policies.
Solution Approach 2:
Manual security review and remediation processes are replaced with automated computational systems that use machine learning models and governance policies to identify and resolve security vulnerabilities. The mechanical manual process is substituted with an automated digital system.
2Reliability
If configuration changes are automatically implemented to resolve misconfigurations, then security vulnerabilities are reduced, but user productivity may be reduced and access may be compromised
Solution Approach 1:
Different governance policies are applied to different categories of configuration changes based on their impact characteristics. High-impact changes that may affect user access are handled differently (requiring approval) compared to low-impact changes (automatically implemented), creating localized quality in the automation approach.
Solution Approach 2:
The system dynamically adjusts the level of automation based on the categorized impact of configuration changes. The governance policy framework allows the system to flexibly switch between fully automated remediation and manual approval workflows depending on the specific change being evaluated.
3Measurement precision
If testing occurs at a relatively late phase of the SDLC, then comprehensive testing can be performed, but bottlenecks occur when issues are discovered and sent back to development
Solution Approach 1:
Security testing and misconfiguration detection are performed earlier in the SDLC through automated governance policies that continuously monitor and evaluate configuration changes. This preliminary action prevents security issues from reaching later testing phases, eliminating the need for iterative back-and-forth between testing and development.
Solution Approach 2:
Security validation operates continuously throughout the SDLC rather than as a discrete late-phase activity. The automated governance policy system continuously monitors configurations, enabling real-time detection and immediate remediation without interrupting the development flow.
Data Source
AI summary
Techniques are described herein that are capable of providing automated governance policy-based security for a cloud native application. Recently unused security misconfigurations of a cloud native application are identified. A first configuration change that resolves a first recently unused security misconfiguration is automatically implemented as a result of the first configuration change being capable of reducing productivity of a user and having a likelihood of reducing security of the cloud native application that is greater than or equal to a likelihood threshold. A second configuration change that resolves a second recently unused security misconfiguration is automatically implemented, and a governance policy, which defines a security action to perform with regard to a future attempt to implement the second recently unused security misconfiguration, is automatically generated, as a result of the second configuration change being capable of compromising access of an end user to a version of the cloud native application.