New Styra DAS Compliance Packs Foster Collaboration Across Teams

3 min read

It has been well-documented that migrating from monolithic applications to microservices can have a significant impact on aligning software systems to organizational communication lines, but breaking applications into discrete, modular containers also means that the industry needs to “rethink” security. Applying policy to stop attacks, prevent lateral movement, and only allow necessary access within modern containerized applications requires a new way of doing security because the concepts and technologies of the entire cloud-native ecosystem are themselves new.

Indeed as enterprises shift to embrace cloud-native, they often find that securing their new containerized applications and achieving compliance can be a cumbersome, and oftentimes, manual effort. Additional layers of technical controls must be applied with careful consideration for all operational details to achieve (and prove!) compliance with internal or external regulations.

Styra DAS compliance packs

Styra created Open Policy Agent (OPA) and Styra Declarative Authorization Service (DAS) to protect modern applications and the infrastructure they run on. With the release of new Styra DAS compliance packs, including MITRE ATT&CK Framework and CIS Kubernetes Benchmarks, DevSecOps teams now have a turnkey solution to secure their containerized workloads, without spending time researching, identifying and implementing baseline policies. These two new packs incorporate best practices from the OPA community, and come in addition to the existing PCI DSS 3.2, Admission Control Best Practices and Kubernetes Pod Security Policies packs built into Styra DAS. 

These compliance packs save teams time and resources by standardizing policy rules to meet regulatory requirements. That means you can deploy policy as code quickly and confidently, while providing visibility across DevOps, governance, audit or security teams—regardless of language, implementation style or technical ability.

With Styra DAS Compliance Packs, teams get:

  • Proven security policies abstracted into plain language and mapped to standards

  • Detailed logs, audit trail to prove compliance over time

  • One-click impact analysis to ensure that moving to a compliant state won’t break applications or infrastructure 

  • Continuous monitoring of all decisions to feed a SIEM, SOC, etc 

MITRE ATT&CK Matrix for Kubernetes

Styra has mapped a set of OPA-based admission control policies for Kubernetes into a new policy pack, the cyber attack lifecycle described in the MITRE ATT&CK® Matrix for Enterprise covering cloud-based techniques. These policies are organized based on a ten-stage cyber attack lifecycle that describes the techniques that attackers could use to infiltrate, compromise and steal data from within a Kubernetes cluster.

Example policies include:

  • Restrict images (compromised images in registry)

  • Reclaim set to retain (defensive evasion)

  • All Priv/Root policies (privileged container)

  • Naming/Labeling (pod/container name similarity)

  • Ingress (initial access)

  • Egress (lateral movement/Impact)

CIS Benchmarks for K8s

The CIS Benchmark for Kubernetes provides security recommendations for Kubernertes control plane configuration. These recommendations include best practices such as cluster hardening, network management, permissions control and more.  

For teams that use CIS Benchmarks to help drive security efforts and minimize risk of unforeseen configuration errors that could lead to exploits or breach, Styra DAS now provides a collection of policies that address various CIS recommendations.

Example policies include:

  • Ensure that no container in any pod can enable privileged mode

  • Ensure pods may not use the node network namespace

  • Explicitly restrict the ranges of allowable ports in the host network namespace

  • Prohibit a container to create a child process with more privileges than its parent

  • Ensure Pods drop all the linux capabilities that are not required

  • Ensure that a container cannot be started in the Kubernetes ‘default’ namespace

Why Policy Packs for OPA?

Styra DAS builds upon the success of OPA with new packs of policies that are abstracted into plain language and mapped to meaningful security standards. This means governance, security and DevOps teams have the rules, results and audit trail to build security into their Kubernetes clusters, and prove compliance over time. These packs are just the latest implementations of proven policies that come from the OPA community, and should help regulated industries extend security best practices to the new cloud-native world.

Try Styra DAS with CIS Kubernetes Benchmarks and MITRE ATT&CK Framework for K8s compliance packs. Get started with a free trial today!

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