Cloud native systems empower organizations to build, deploy, and run scalable workloads in dynamic environments.

While such environments support an agile development framework, these also bring a fresh set of security challenges that can’t be solved with traditional IT security practices. Though portability, autoscaling, and automation are key features of an efficient cloud native ecosystem, the same features also lead to potential gaps that are susceptible to be exploited by attack vectors.

In this article, we delve into the security landscape of a cloud native system, while exploring the elements and strategies to enforce security in such frameworks.

Cloud native security overview

Cloud native applications lack fixed perimeters present in traditional IT. As a result, static firewalls rarely solve their purpose to secure applications that run on multi-cloud, on-premises, or off-premises cloud instances.

The flexible, scalable, and elastic nature of cloud environments additionally reduces the speed and accuracy with which security teams can diagnose security incidents. Combined with these are the rapid delivery and release cycles that make it complex to manage and provision security policies manually.

These factors collectively present challenges that require a non-traditional, focused approach to mitigate security events of cloud native systems.

Pillars of cloud native security

An effective cloud native security model addresses threats across every level of a workflow—simply remember the 4 Cs:

Code

Analyzing, debugging, and cleaning up source code is the first step to identify and fix vulnerabilities such as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and SQL Injection during the build phase of a software development lifecycle (SDLC).

Some commonly used testing mechanisms to securing source code include:

• Static Code Analysis (SCA)
• Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST)
• Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

Container

Containers host application workloads and are considered one of the most critical elements of a cloud native setup.

It is extremely critical to not only secure application workloads of a cloud native ecosystem, but also to secure the containers that host these workloads. Some common approaches to securing containers include:

• Minimizing the use of privileged containers
• Strengthening container isolation
• Continuous vulnerability scanning for container images
• Certificate signing for images

(Explore security in Docker & Kubernetes.)

Cluster

Containers running at scale are deployed on physical/virtual machine clusters. A cluster typically includes various components, such as worker/master nodes, control plane, policies, and services.

Securing cluster components commonly require the following practices:

• Administering robust Pod and Network security policies
• RBAC authorization
• Optimum cluster resource management
• Securing Ingress using TLS secure keys

Cloud

The cloud layer acts as the interface that communicates with the external world, including users, third-party plugins, and APIs. Vulnerabilities on a cloud layer are bound to cause a major impact on all services, processes and applications that are hosted within it.

It is extremely critical for security teams to adopt security best practices and develop a threat model that focuses particularly on the cloud infrastructure layer and its components. Some commons practices to secure the cloud layer includes:

• Encrypting ETCD data at REST (Kubernetes)
• Frequently rotating and renewing CA certificates
• Limiting the use of privileged access
• Disabling public access