Aqua Team - Aqua

Six Free Tools to Make Your Container Deployments Easier

Like many of you working in Docker-space, over time I’ve come across a ton of third-party tools that improve management, cleanup, orchestration, development and other container processes.

6 (More) Free Docker Tools to Make Container Deployments Easier

There’s nothing wrong with seeking help, and that’s especially true for container processes. Third-party Docker tools that help with testing, images, backups and other important procedures are invaluable, even more so when they’re free.

Dirty COW Vulnerability: Impact on Containers

There has been plenty of buzz lately regarding an old-new privilege escalation vulnerability, adorably named “Dirty COW” after the Copy-On-Write memory protection in the Linux kernel. The whole thing started roughly eleven years ago, when a kernel developer left a race condition issue opened: “This is an ancient bug that was actually attempted to be …

CIS Benchmark for Kubernetes 1.6

The Center for Internet Security (CIS) published a new benchmark last week for Kubernetes 1.6. As the adoption of container technologies grows rapidly, orchestrators have become a key enabler, since large-scale deployments can’t be managed efficiently by humans.

HIPAA Compliance for Containers: Impact Analysis and Best Practices

Since 1996, the HIPAA act has mandated how personal health information (PHI) should be secured and protected from prying eyes. HIPAA requirements changed how companies in the healthcare industry treat patient data, as well as the processes governing it, the applications that handle it, and the infrastructure that runs those applications. In the U.S, following HIPAA …

Multi-Tenant Security Management for Containers

Aqua CNAPP is focused on making the platform more scalable for our customer deployments, which include some of the world’s largest container setups.

Protecting PII in Container Environments for PCI and GDPR Compliance

The term Personally Identifiable Information (PII) will be familiar to organizations who are required to comply with regulatory standards such as PCI-DSS. NIST Special Publication 800-122[4] defines PII as “any information about an individual maintained by an agency, including (1) any information that can be used to distinguish or trace an individual’s identity, such as …

Securing Container Workloads on AWS with Aqua

Many of our customers run container workloads on AWS – hardly surprising given Amazon’s lead position in the cloud market. But AWS also offers some distinct advantages to those running containers, including a set of highly-integrated services that take the pain away from managing deployments.

10 Essential Container CI/CD Tools

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) are two of the biggest trends in software development. As companies move to release higher quality software at a faster pace, developers and engineers need new approaches to building, testing, and delivering products. As a result, many companies are turning to Docker to build, test, and deploy their applications.

Securing Serverless: Persistent Security for Ephemeral Environments

Cloud native workloads terminology is used a lot these days to describe new technologies and deployment models of applications in the cloud universe. Serverless is a notable example of such cloud native-workloads: it prioritizes simplicity and agility over compatibility, control, and performance SLAs. It’s a revolutionary concept that abstracts away infrastructure concerns and provides a …

Streamline Image Vulnerability Management for OpenShift Image Streams

In traditional cloud native environments, actions such as building and deploying applications will usually involve working directly with images hosted in one or more registries. Customers wishing to track changes in those images, in order to identify security and compliance issues, would need to set up an automatic process of constantly scanning them by connecting …

Istio: The Enterprise Upgrade Path to Microservices

Istio, Google’s open source project for large scale, containerized application management was released in May 2017 and has undergone rapid development since then, culminating in the landmark 1.0 release in July 2018. In this blog post we will be exploring what Istio is, how it works and how to adopt it. In subsequent articles in …

Istio Security: Zero-Trust Networking

This is the second in our series of blog posts on Istio, and will focus on Istio’s security features: what they are, how they work and how they help protect your workloads and your data. Building, deploying and maintaining secure, cloud native software requires multiple overlapping solutions at different stages of the software development lifecycle. …

Istio: Canary Deployments, Dynamic Routing & Tracing

In this series of blog posts we had an introduction to Istio, and an overview of its security features. This post completes the series with a look at how we can leverage Istio’s traffic control features to provide increased observability and control over the operation and deployment of our applications.

Securing Serverless Functions with Aqua

Serverless is generating significant interest and hype, backed up by real-world adoption, and creating a need for better security controls. I’ve been working with our customers to create the right approach and tooling to protect their FaaS environments ,and from this research, given the extremely short duration of function execution (in many cases, sub-second) and …

Securing AWS App Mesh With Aqua

We’re excited to be launch partners for AWS App Mesh, officially announced today at the Santa Clara AWS Summit. Aqua provides fine-grained protection to microservices-based applications that use AWS App Mesh, by ensuring that the microservices infrastructure conforms to the organization’s security policy, and by providing visibility and control over App Mesh network traffic.

Knative: The Serverless Environment for Kubernetes Fans

Knative is the newest member of serverless environments that is gaining significant interest and generating a great deal of hype in the Kubernetes/Cloud Native community. It’s an open source framework that was designed to enable the development and deployment of container-based serverless applications that are easy to transport between cloud providers.

Vulnerabilities in the Container Ecosystem: A Brief History

Now that containers have been around for a few years and have had their share of disclosed vulnerabilities, it’s time to revisit some of the more interesting ones and see if there’s a recurring theme or any underlying trend to highlight.

Aqua Operator: Automating Security for Kubernetes

Aqua recently developed a Kubernetes Operator that was successfully tested and validated by Red Hat standards for integration and supportability. Before we tell you about our new OpenShift-certified Operator, let’s get some context about what an Operator is.

Mitigating Container Image Vulnerabilities with Aqua Vulnerability Shield™

Managing known vulnerabilities in container images has been one of the first issues to get the attention of organizations that adopt containers. Knowing what vulnerabilities (CVEs) lurk in your image code is important, but fixing or patching the images that contain vulnerabilities has been a challenge, since it’s not always easy, speedy, or even possible …

Performance-Optimized Runtime Protection for Serverless Functions

In order to protect serverless functions while they are running, you need to consider the very short execution times and ensure that you’re not slowing down applications or increasing cloud usage costs. In Aqua CSP 4.2, we’ve now introduced advanced runtime protection that does just that, while complementing our existing risk assessment, function scanning, and …

Docker Image Scanning in your Codefresh Pipeline with Aqua

There are many benefits to implementing CI/CD platforms, such as enabling fast and frequent release cycles of software and applications, but with great speed comes great responsibility. It is crucial to add security controls around container image creation and deployment to ensure that your applications are properly secure before they are deployed.

Securing Hybrid Cloud Workloads on Google Anthos

There are major shifts happening around container technology. We have seen ongoing improvements in automation tooling and changes as fully containerized workloads move into production. Companies are often running more than one production Kubernetes cluster at a time. DevOps and operations teams, subsequently, have an additional burden because they must control and manage these clusters, …

Cloud Native Security Best Practices: Vulnerability Management

After four years of securing cloud native applications, our team at Aqua has learned a thing or two about applying best practices in the real world. We’ve seen many organizations succeed in establishing a sound process and tooling to achieve their security goals, and we’ve also seen those who struggle to prioritize and manage their …

What You Need to Know About AWS Lambda Functions Risk Mitigation

With serverless functions architecture gaining in popularity, it is also becoming clear that the architecture is not without its security drawbacks. Overly permissive permissions, vulnerability in the functions’ code, and embedded secrets could all be exploited. Despite being event-triggered and ephemeral by nature, serverless functions can still be subject to unauthorized activity such as event …

Using Kubernetes Admission Controller for Image Assurance

With cloud native technologies quickly evolving and with their high adoption rate, security practices are falling behind, are not being fully applied, and in some cases, applied too late. As a result, customers pay a high, albeit avoidable price. Aqua Cloud Native Security Platform uniquely addresses these challenges and in this blog we will discuss …

Visualize and Prioritize Risks in Kubernetes with Aqua Risk Explorer

If you’re running workloads on Kubernetes, one of the toughest things to understand is where you have security gaps. Yes, there are CIS benchmarks and configurations to tweak, but they are generalized and won’t highlight the risks in workloads that are actually running in your clusters. The Aqua Risk Explorer’s dynamic display of workloads and …

Role-Based Access Control in Modern Cloud Native Security

Enterprise environments often consist of multiple teams working on different cloud native projects and applications. Each such team will work on its own assets, such as container images or functions, and use separate CI pipelines. Yet, in the end, they will often run on the same cloud infrastructure. When it comes to managing security for …

Securing Container Workloads on AWS Bottlerocket

We’ve been working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to extend the Aqua cloud native security platform to support AWS Bottlerocket — a purpose-built, Linux-based, open source OS for running containers on virtual machines or bare metal hosts — which is now GA. This combined effort ensures that AWS customers who use this new OS will …

Protecting Cloud VMs for Full-Stack Cloud Native Security

The management of Virtual Machines (VMs) in the cloud is not like anything else in your cloud native environment. Traditional host-based security methods used for VMs running on physical servers relied on agents to perform functions that simply do not exist in cloud native environments. In addition, cloud instances frequently have OS-level vulnerabilities, configuration violations, …

Taking Advantage of Object Labels while Controlling the Human Factor

The use of object labels has grown into an industry best practice, as labels allow you to apply metadata to objects like images, deployments, containers, volumes, networks, and more. They can be short and technical, but they can also be more descriptive. However, even with the use of automation for creating labels, although effective, it …

Operationalize Your Cloud Native Security with Aqua’s New Dashboard

Utilizing advanced cloud native tools without the ability to effectively unify, track, and display current conditions can create significant gaps in your security coverage. By ensuring complete visibility into your security posture across your environment, you can quickly identify key issues and prioritize them for resolution. Our latest installment of Aqua Enterprise includes a unified …

Aqua Secures Container Image Support in AWS Lambda

Amazon continues to build new capabilities into its serverless operational mode and has launched container image support in AWS Lambda. It enables packaging and deploying Lambda functions as container images. Building on our strong partnership with AWS and our desire to offer the most complete cloud-native security solution, Aqua Security now includes advanced security capabilities …

Secure your Digital Transformation on Amazon EKS-Distro with Aqua

The cloud is fundamental for digital transformation, but for many organizations, a hybrid approach is preferred. This ideally allows you to use the very same foundational tools on-prem as your destination in the cloud. Well, now you can do just that with Amazon EKS-Distro (EKS-D), a new Kubernetes distribution that enables you to run the …

What is vmlinux.h and Why is It Important for Your eBPF Programs?

eBPF is a powerful and exciting technology that allows developers to add custom code to strategic points in the Linux kernel and interact with it by writing simple C or Go programs. The eBPF programs you write and run can inspect data in the memory of processes they attach to. In order to do so, …

Vulnerability Management in Container Images from Build to Runtime

When it comes to containerized workloads, resolving the underlying image’s security vulnerabilities is paramount to ensuring the safety of your environment. Getting security risk information into the hands of developers quickly and efficiently is key to keeping development cycles as short as possible while maintaining a strong application security posture. What risk information can you …

Securing Flexible Amazon ECS Anywhere Deployments with Aqua

Today, AWS announced the general availability of ECS Anywhere; a simple but powerful extension of AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS) to manage containers wherever they run – Aqua has been working closely with AWS to deliver a unified security experience for ECS Anywhere so enterprises can embrace the cloud native deployment models that make the …

Provision Aqua on AWS CloudFormation Public Registry with IaC Automation

The availability of AWS CloudFormation Public Registry makes it possible to manage Aqua components using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) workflows just as easily as AWS resource types. You can now seamlessly automate how you deploy and update Aqua as native resource types across multiple accounts and regions.

Taking IaC Security to the Next Level: Why TFsec Joined Aqua

Coming from a software engineering background, we built tfsec to help developers like us scan their infrastructure-as-code (IaC) templates and prevent cloud misconfigurations from being deployed. Teams at the world’s leading organizations are now leveraging tfsec to “shift left” and introduce security earlier in the development cycle. When we were presented with the chance to …

How Forum Engineering Secures its AI Solution with Aqua

Digital transformation is fundamentally changing how organizations compete and engage with customers, even redefining traditional labor-intensive industries. A great example of this is Forum Engineering, a staffing company from Japan, which developed an AI-based Software-as-a-Service solution to stay ahead of the competition. The challenges of securing this innovative offering required a platform that can protect …

It’s About Time for Runtime: 2021 Cloud Native Security Survey

While container environments grow in size and complexity, many misconceptions persist about securing cloud native applications. Our latest survey reveals a huge knowledge gap around runtime security, with 97% of cloud native security practitioners still unaware of crucial container security principles. Here are the insights we gained into the challenges that DevOps and security teams …

How Thoughtworks Manages Cloud Security and Container Vulnerabilities

Many companies, in an effort to modernize their software and cloud tech stacks, are beginning to confront the challenges of managing security across multiple cross-functional, yet independent, teams – each with diverse tech stacks. One such example is Thoughtworks, a leading global technology consultancy that works with enterprises to enable them to keep pace with …

A Brief Guide to Supply Chain Security Best Practices

With the rise in attacks targeting the supply chain of cloud native applications, it’s important to understand how you can prepare for and stifle risks that enter your environments through third-party packages and tools. This post outlines the top software supply chain security best practices that should be included in any organization’s cloud native strategies.

Software Supply Chain Attacks: 2021 in Review

As CI/CD pipelines have become an increasingly popular attack vector, 2021 saw a huge rise in software supply chain attacks. With their number more than tripling in the past year, securing the software delivery process is one of the most urgent needs. In our latest study, we examine the top supply chain security threats that …

Run Secure Applications on OpenShift with IBM Power Systems

As an important component of end-to-end application modernization and hybrid cloud adoption, Aqua Security integrates with OpenShift on Power to provide tools to help customers further secure the full lifecycle of Red Hat OpenShift containerized workloads.

Kubernetes Version 1.26: An Overview

Kubernetes Version 1.26 was released with 37 new enhancements including 11 Stable, 10 Beta, 16 Alpha, and 12 features deprecated or removed. In this blog, we will highlight its most notable features and show how using Trivy will help you find deprecated Kubernetes resources.

Cloud Security Trends for 2023 Part One

As we think about what Cloud Native security will look like in 2023, we can’t avoid thinking about the old cat-and-mouse game cliché of cyber security. Every year new attacks emerge while new security solutions are created and old security fixes are upgraded. Threat actors constantly append new methods to the old ones, using them …

Should You Use SLSA or CIS Software Supply Chain Security Guidelines?

With recent software supply chain attacks on the rise, CISOs being held personally liable, and the United States government requiring minimum security software standards for any products and services they procure, the development industry is refocusing on software development strategies that make security a priority. But with so many reputable sources creating guidance, which is …

Unleashing Scale for Hybrid Cloud: Aqua to Protect Containerized Environments on LinuxONE 4 Express

We are excited to announce the upcoming support of the Aqua Cloud Native Application Platform (CNAPP) on IBM Z and LinuxONE, alongside IBM’s unveiling of its new LinuxONE 4 Express system. Support of the Aqua Cloud Native Application Platform (CNAPP) on IBM Z and LinuxONE will be available in 1Q 2024.

CVE-2024-3094: Newly Discovered Backdoor in XZ tools

The xz-utils is a popular compression tool used widely across Linux systems, indicating its critical role in the software ecosystem. The xz-utils backdoor, discovered on March 29, 2024, exposes systems to potential backdoor access and remote code execution. It specifically targets versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 of xz-utils on systems using glibc, systemd, and patched OpenSSH. …

Linguistic Lumberjack: Understanding CVE-2024-4323 in Fluent Bit

Linguistic Lumberjack is a new critical severity vulnerability (CVE-2024-4323) that affects Fluent Bit versions 2.0.7 through 3.0.3. The vulnerability involves a memory corruption error, potentially leading to denial of service, information disclosure, or remote code execution.

Compliance to Implementation: Exploring DORA and NIS 2 Frameworks

The importance of cybersecurity and operational resilience in the financial sector has never been more pronounced. The European Union (EU) has been at the forefront of addressing these critical issues, enacting comprehensive legislations to safeguard the digital infrastructure and ensure the continuity of financial services. Two pivotal pieces of legislation in this domain are the …