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Rory McCune

Rory was a Cloud Native Security Advocate at Aqua. He has worked in the Information and IT Security arena for the last 20 years in a variety of roles. He is an active member of the container security community having delivered presentations at a variety of IT and Information security conferences. He has also presented at major containerization conferences and is an author of the CIS Benchmarks for Docker and Kubernetes and main author of the Mastering Container Security training course which has been delivered at numerous industry conferences including Blackhat USA.

Blog Posts by Rory McCune

Kubernetes Version 1.21: What You Need to Know

As with every new Kubernetes release there are a great number of new features, however there are a couple of key changes which could have impacts to security and are worth looking at in more details. In addition to the deprecation of PodSecurityPolicies, we’ll also look at some newly promoted features being put in place …

The Challenges of Uniquely Identifying Your Images

One of the challenges of container security is ensuring that the image you’re getting is exactly what you expect it to be. Both from a security and consistency perspective, it’s important to ensure there are no surprises in what you’re downloading. Docker image tags, whilst convenient, can’t always be relied on to point to a …

Why You Shouldn’t Use Config Maps to Store Sensitive Data in K8s

One of the challenges of managing containerized environments is how to store sensitive information that’s needed for the operation of the applications running in those environments. Kubernetes provides a built-in secrets object type, but a common comment about them is that, from a technical standpoint, they’re just the same as other object types like Config …

Codecov Breach: Lessons Learned from the CI Poisoning Attack

A recent security incident disclosed by Codecov has again placed the spotlight on supply chain attacks. Looking at the details of the incident and how the system operated, it’s clear that organizations should make changes to how they use third party services as part of their Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines. So what can you do …

Improving Your Kubernetes Authorization: Don’t Use system:masters

When you’re operating Kubernetes clusters, an important area of focus is in ensuring your authorization model is correct and provides users with the least privileges needed for them to carry out their roles. As such, blanket cluster-admin privileges should never be used and in particular the in-built system:masters group should be avoided.

Improving Kubernetes Security: Upgrade Clusters to Avoid Exposure

With the move to cloud native development comes potentially increased risk of services that are exposed to the Internet and can easily be discovered by attackers. When combined with the fast pace of change in Kubernetes versions, there’s real risk of being one vulnerability away from a security incident. Recently I carried out some research …

What’s New in the Docker and Kubernetes CIS Benchmarks

One of the challenges with container security and its standards is keeping current with new releases and products. New versions of the Docker and Kubernetes CIS Benchmarks were released recently to capture changes in the new versions of those projects, both to keep things current and to expand coverage to help people keep their environments …

How Do Containers Contain? Container Isolation Techniques

If you work with containers long enough, you already know that containers should not be considered as security boundaries. In this blog, we’ll explore how different container isolation techniques intend to provide a solution to this problem, and whether their strengths and weaknesses make them a practical choice.

Shifting Left: Infrastructure as Code security with Trivy

One of the great security benefits of the move to cloud native development is the increased use of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to describe computing environments. Once things are described as code, we can shift left and secure our environments before they’re deployed. As a major new feature, the latest version of Trivy, Aqua’s open …

Kubernetes Version 1.22: Security Features You Need to Know

Even with Kubernetes’ new, longer release cycle in place, it doesn’t seem long since the last version came along with all its new features, but 1.22 is upon us. As ever, there’s an interesting mix of new features that are starting their maturation process as alpha releases and other features that are graduating to beta …

Top 10 Kubernetes Application Security Hardening Techniques

One of the main challenges developers face is how to manage security risks when deploying applications to Kubernetes clusters. A great way to address this early is by applying security hardening to the application manifests during the development process. In this post, we run down 10 ways that developers can apply hardening to their applications.

A Security Review of Docker Official Images: Which Do You Trust?

A key element in building secure containerized applications is to ensure that the base image that you use is well-maintained and secure. A common piece of advice is to use the Docker Official Images for this purpose. However, our research reveals that you need to be careful when using these images, as some are no …

Tracee Runtime Security Series: Easy Installation on Kubernetes

Despite best efforts to harden Kubernetes environments, prevention will never be enough and attackers are finding ways to evade shift-left and other preventative capabilities. It is critical to be able to detect and respond in real time to attacks within Kubernetes clusters. Tracee, an open source runtime security tool, is a great way to get up …

Tracee Runtime Security Series: Centralizing Alerts with Aqua Postee

A great way to get started with runtime security in your Kubernetes environments is using Tracee, an open source runtime security and forensics tool for Linux. But as with any alerting and monitoring service, it’s necessary to send alerts to a central point to help operations teams keep track of what’s happening across their environments. …

Golang Scanning with Trivy: Detect Vulnerabilities Accurately

A standard piece of security advice is to reduce the size of your container images, usually by using statically compiled binaries in a scratch or distroless container. However, that complicates container vulnerability scanning, because it becomes impossible to determine the versions of software installed in a container image. Fortunately, if you’re using Trivy, a popular …

Tracee Runtime Security Series: Writing Custom Tracee Rules

As an open source runtime security tool, Tracee provides a base rule set that can detect a variety of attacks. However, there’s often the need to add new rules either to contribute to the project or to provide specific rules for your environment. Because Tracee allows for new rules to be written in Rego and …

Kubernetes Version 1.23: What’s New for Security?

Like clockwork, a new Kubernetes release is upon us, with loads of interesting new features. A couple of the key features in Kubernetes 1.23 are hitting the beta level and will be enabled by default. In this post, we’ll explain what they mean for security, both in terms of improving cluster security and what you …

CVE-2021-44228 aka Log4Shell Vulnerability Explained

Log4Shell, a new, critical zero-day vulnerability that crashed onto the scene last Friday, shows how issues that are hidden in seemingly basic functionality can have major repercussions for enterprise security. When the dust settles from the immediate incident response and remediation, organizations should assess how they can improve their detection and responses, because this vulnerability …

CVE-2021-45046: Second Log4j Security Vulnerability Discovered

Dec 17 update: The CVSSv3 score for CVE-2021-45046 has been raised from 3.7 to 9.0. While many organizations are still dealing with the discovery and mitigation process for the previous Log4j CVE, the project has announced that another vulnerability CVE-2021-45046 has been discovered due to an incomplete fix in Log4j 2.15.0. In response, a new …

CVE-2021-44832: New Arbitrary Code Execution Vulnerability in Log4j

This holiday season, adversaries aren’t taking a vacation, massively exploiting multiple vulnerabilities in Log4j, a highly popular Java logging library. Amid the ongoing efforts of organizations to patch their vulnerable systems, a new Log4j vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2021-44832, has been discovered. It allows for an arbitrary code execution via JDBC Appender when an attacker can …

RBAC Virtual Verbs: Teaching Kubernetes to Educate Dolphins

Kubernetes’ role-based access control (RBAC) system is a cornerstone of cluster security. Most clusters use RBAC to determine which users have access to specific operations, and its core elements are well covered in the Kubernetes documentation. However, there are some less well-known features that could be relevant when creating or using tools designed to ensure …

Securing GitHub Actions with Trivy and Cosign

One of the advantages of automated CI/CD pipelines is that they’re a great place to implement regular security controls and checks. Using GitHub Actions, it’s easy to improve the security of your containers by automating vulnerability scanning and digital signing of container images on a regular basis. In this post, we’ll go over how to …

Privilege Escalation from Node/Proxy Rights in Kubernetes RBAC

One of the side effects of Kubernetes’ rich API and extensive functionality is that sometimes there are security implications to granting users permissions. Security architects should be aware of these side effects when designing platforms that use Kubernetes. In recent research with Iain Smart of NCC Group, we looked at how granting rights to node/proxy …

Dirty Pipe Linux Vulnerability: Overwriting Files in Container Images

A new CVE in the Linux kernel was released this week. CVE-2022-0847, aka “Dirty Pipe”, is a vulnerability that allows users on a Linux system to overwrite the contents of files that they can read but shouldn’t be able to write to. Looking at this vulnerability from the perspective of hosts using containerization software such …

Linux Kernel Vulnerability: Escaping Containers by Abusing Cgroups

CVE-2022-0492, a recently disclosed high-severity Linux vulnerability that relates to a weakness in the handling of release_agent in cgroups, could allow for container escape under some circumstances. Fortunately, in common container configurations, the various layers of security hardening will block the effective execution of this vulnerability.

CVE-2022-0811: CRI-O Vulnerability Could Allow Container Escape

A newly discovered vulnerability in the container runtime tool CRI-O could allow for attackers who are able to create pods in a Kubernetes or OpenShift cluster that uses the software, to break out to the underlying cluster node, effectively escalating their privileges. While, as ever, the best way to address this issue is to apply …

Scan IaC Code in Dev with Trivy’s Extensions for VS Code and JetBrains

When developing new software, a key element of improving security is providing security feedback as early and seamlessly as possible. One way to do this is embed security tools directly into the development environment. Recently, Aqua’s open source scanner Trivy has added this functionality, integrating with popular developer tools Visual Studio Code and JetBrains to …

CVE-2022-23648 in Containerd’s CRI Plugin Could Allow for Container Breakout

A recently discovered CVE in containerd allows attackers who can run a custom image in a cluster to break out to the underlying node and, in some cases, escalate privileges to cluster-admin level. This CVE is interesting for several reasons. First, the vulnerability shows up in the container image, not in the Kubernetes manifests, so …

New Zero-day RCE Vulnerability Spring4Shell: What You Should Know

A new critical zero-day vulnerability has been discovered in Spring, a popular open source framework widely used in modern Java applications. The issue could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the vulnerable system. The vulnerability has been assigned CVE-2022-22965, and Spring has already released a patch.

Kubernetes RBAC: How to Avoid Privilege Escalation via Certificate Signing

Following on from our previous post on the risks of privilege escalation in Kubernetes via the node/proxy resource, we’re going to take a look at how users who have rights to the certificate signing request (CSR) API in Kubernetes might be able to use them to escalate their privileges in a cluster. In addition to …

What’s New in Kubernetes Version 1.24

With another Kubernetes release upon us, there are, as ever, a load of new features to consider. These include features to help companies use Windows containers securely and improvements in Kubernetes’ supply chain security. In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the more significant features of this release.

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Aqua Security stops cloud native attacks across the application lifecycle and is the only company with a $1M Cloud Native Protection Warranty to guarantee it. As the pioneer in cloud native security, Aqua helps customers reduce risk while building the future of their businesses. The Aqua Platform is the industry's most integrated Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP), protecting the application lifecycle from code to cloud and back. Founded in 2015, Aqua is headquartered in Boston, MA and Ramat Gan, IL with Fortune 1000 customers in over 40 countries.

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