Today we’re starting a blog series focused on how to integrate Qualys solutions into DevSecOps for securing cloud infrastructures. In this initial post, we’ll discuss the importance of assessing vulnerabilities and misconfigurations on AWS pipelines.

When developing golden Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), DevOps teams should run continuous and automated checks to eliminate vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in them. It’s a critical security and compliance practice that Qualys recommends its customers adopt. 

To that end, Qualys partnered with Amazon to integrate the AWS Golden Amazon Machine Image Pipeline reference architecture with Qualys scanners for vulnerability and configuration compliance assessment.

The result: Qualys has just published a GitHub repository and documentation for implementing Qualys scanning of instances in a golden AMI pipeline. This will help customers detect and fix critical vulnerabilities and compliance issues in the image creation pipeline, before they reach production environments.

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Qualys’ library of built-in policies makes it easy to comply with the security standards and regulations that are most commonly used and adhered to. Qualys provides a wide range of policies, including many that have been certified by CIS as well as the ones based on security guidelines from OS and application vendors and other industry best practices.

In order to keep up with the latest changes in security control requirements and new technologies, Qualys publishes new content to the Policy Library every month.

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This release of the Qualys Cloud Platform version 2.36 includes updates and new features for AssetView (Cloud Assets and Cloud Agents) and Web Application Scanning, highlights as follows.

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Qualys is extending the Cloud Agent capabilities for users of the Policy Compliance (PC) application by letting them define controls.

Until now, the Cloud Agent could only assess Qualys PC’s “out of the box” controls. By adding support for user defined controls (UDC), Qualys PC users now can use Cloud Agents to evaluate those types of controls. UDCs allows users to create their own controls dynamically, as needed, without having to submit control requests to Qualys development.

The UDC controls you’ve already defined in your Qualys Policy Compliance account for compliance scanning will also be evaluated by Qualys Cloud Agent with no action required from you.

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Qualys Cloud Platform (VM, PC) version 8.17 contains various feature enhancements in Qualys Vulnerability Management and Qualys Policy Compliance. In addition, this release also lowers the time required before pausing or canceling an ongoing scan. Previously, scheduled scans could be cancelled or paused after a minimum of one hour from its start time.

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Update March 13, 2019: SSL Labs Renegotiation Test is re-enabled on the production instance.

Update March 12, 2019: SSL Labs Renegotiation Test is re-enabled on the development instance, and will be live on the production instance this week.

Update February 20, 2019: To give more time to fix, we will re-enable the SSL Labs Renegotiation Test on March 11, 2019 (two additional weeks).

The Apache Security Team fixed a bug which triggers whenever a client attempts renegotiation with Apache HTTP Server 2.4.37 and OpenSSL 1.1.1. This bug causes the Apache httpd service to consume 100% CPU. Details of the bug can be found at: https://bz.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=63052

Local testing by Qualys confirms that the SSL Labs renegotiation test triggers this bug for the above-mentioned server configuration, and can be used to cause the Apache httpd service on a target system to consume 100% CPU.

To allow Apache users time to apply the fix, SSL Labs has disabled the Renegotiation Test for one month, and we will re-enable it on February 25, 2019. While the test is disabled, users will not see the following in SSL Labs reports:

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Apache Security Team for working with us on this issue.

This new release of the Qualys Cloud Platform (VM, PC), version 8.16, contains several new improvements in Qualys Vulnerability Management and Qualys Policy Compliance, which includes new password security option, increased limit for virtual hosts that can be added to a subscription, added support for Scanning ESXi Hosts on vCenter, and more.

Read on for release highlights.

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Qualys’ library of built-in policies makes it easy to comply with the security standards and regulations that are most commonly used and adhered to. Qualys provides a wide range of policies, including many that have been certified by CIS as well as the ones based on security guidelines from OS and application vendors and other industry best practices.

In order to keep up with the latest changes in security control requirements and new technologies, Qualys publishes new content to the Policy Library every month.

The September and October releases include the following new policies and updates:

• New CIS Benchmark for Palo Alto Firewall 8, IBM DB2 9.x, IBM DB2 10.x, and Oracle 12c
• New Industry and Best Practices policies for IBM DB2 11.x, MariaDB 10.x, Microsoft Windows, and Microsoft SQL Server 2017
• Updates to several existing library policies

Qualys’ Certification Page at CIS has been updated.

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Cookies are ubiquitous in today’s modern web applications. If an attacker can acquire a user’s session cookie by exploiting a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability, by sniffing an unencrypted HTTP connection, or by some other means, then they can potentially hijack a user’s valid session. Obviously, this can have negative implications for an organization and its users, including theft of sensitive application data or unauthorized/harmful actions.

Qualys Web Application Scanning reports when it discovers a cookie delivered over an HTTPS channel without the “secure” attribute set. This detection is useful for verifying correct coding practices for individual web applications & developers, and across your entire organization. Cookies marked with the secure attribute will never be sent over an unencrypted (non-HTTPS) connection, which keeps them safe from prying eyes that may be sniffing network traffic.

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Among the IT innovations that businesses are using to digitally transform operations, containers might be the most disruptive and revolutionary.

“They’re a real game changer,” Qualys Chief Product Officer Sumedh Thakar said at QSC 2018 in Las Vegas.

DevOps teams have embraced containers because they boost speed and flexibility in app development and delivery, and are ideal for microservices. In fact, by 2020 more than 50% of organizations will run containerized applications in production, up from under 20% in 2017, according to Gartner. Thus, security teams must prioritize protecting the applications that DevOps teams create with this OS virtualization method.

“We see container security as a significant new paradigm coming at us, which will bring a lot of change,” Qualys CEO Philippe Courtot said.

But to ensure the security and compliance of container-based code, organizations can’t rely on conventional application security products. “Your existing tools aren’t going to work,” said Asif Awan, Qualys’ Container Security CTO. Unsurprisingly, organizations cite security as the biggest challenge when deploying containers, according to Forrester.

“Security automation is a simple term but to get a handle over that entire automated and ever-accelerating CI/CD (continuous integration and delivery) pipeline is becoming more and more difficult,” Awan said.

Responding to this need, Qualys offers a comprehensive security solution that monitors and protects containerized applications from the inside.  In order to do that, Qualys technology collects granular behavior data about the application, providing deep visibility and enforcing normal application behavior for runtime protection.

Read on to learn about Qualys’ container security approach.

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