Policy as Code & Service Mesh
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“Policy as Code” (PaC) in cybersecurity refers to the practice of defining and managing security policies through code, essentially writing rules and regulations in a machine-readable format that can be automatically enforced across an organization’s systems, enabling consistent application of security measures and reducing human error by automating policy management.
A service mesh, in the context of security policy, is a dedicated infrastructure layer that manages and secures communication between microservices within a distributed application, providing features like mutual TLS (mTLS) encryption, authentication, authorization, and centralized policy management to ensure secure service-to-service interactions without modifying application code itself; essentially acting as a “sidecar proxy” alongside each microservice to control and monitor all traffic between them, allowing for granular security enforcement across the entire service mesh.
Comprehensive Policy as Code & Service Mesh
- Automated enforcement:
Policies are written in code, allowing systems to automatically check for compliance and take actions based on the defined rules, eliminating the need for manual checks.
- DevSecOps integration:
PaC is often incorporated into the DevOps pipeline, ensuring security policies are applied throughout the development and deployment process.
- Consistency and scalability:
By codifying policies, organizations can easily distribute and apply them across different environments and systems consistently.
- Improved visibility:
With policies written as code, it becomes easier to audit and monitor compliance with security standards.
How it works:
- Policy definition:
Security policies are translated into code using scripting languages like Python, YAML, or specialized policy languages.
- Policy engine:
A dedicated policy engine interprets the code and applies the rules to system actions, making real-time decisions based on the policies.
- Continuous monitoring:
The system continuously monitors for policy violations and can trigger alerts or remediation actions when necessary.
Benefits of Policy as Code:
- Reduced human error:
By automating policy enforcement, the risk of manual mistakes is minimized.
- Faster response time:
Policies can be quickly updated and deployed across the infrastructure.
- Improved compliance:
Consistent application of security policies helps organizations meet regulatory requirements.
- Enhanced security posture:By proactively identifying and addressing policy violations, organizations can strengthen their overall security posture.
Khader Mohammed
Cybersecurity Partner
Why Choose Policy as Code & Service Mesh?
- Proactive defense against emerging threats.
- Tailored solutions that align with your goals and industry.
- Increased organizational resilience and readiness.
- Support for achieving and maintaining regulatory compliance.
Our Policy as Code & Service Mesh Process
Policy as code (PaC) is the use of code to define, automate, enforce, and manage the policies that govern the operation of cloud-native environments and their resources.
With policy as code, policies are written in high-level, human-readable code to make them accessible to all teams—security, operations, development, and administrators.
Benefits of policy as code
When implemented across the entire stack, PaC streamlines DevOps, DevSecOps, and GitOps implementation, as well as continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflows. Below are other key benefits of PaC.
Accuracy
By codifying policies, stakeholders can ensure that rules mean exactly what they should. PaC’s high-level, readable code format guarantees that policies cannot be misinterpreted. Furthermore, the risk of human errors associated with manual processes is eliminated. Another huge benefit? PaC facilitates policy consistency across the entire stack. For instance, if you’ve implemented network configuration policies, you’ll have peace of mind that they’ll remain consistent across containers, virtual machines, and more.
Efficiency
Since policies are spelled out as code, queues or review cycles are abstracted and engineers don’t have to keep all the policies in their heads or manually enforce policies every time the need arises. In addition, by versioning policies in Git repositories, engineering teams can keep track of policy modification history and seamlessly go back to a previous version if a newer one turns out to be problematic. That’s why PaC makes for faster and easier software development, testing, and deployment, speeding up TTM and increasing coding velocity.
Infrastructure and network security
If well implemented, PaC can substantially boost your security posture. With PaC, you can effectively prevent employees from using frameworks, container images, and software obtained from untrusted sources. You can also stop certain resource types from being provisioned, deleted, or parked; ensure storage buckets do not have erroneous public write access; sanitize networks by restricting the use of public IPs; and so much more.
Compliance and reporting
Organizations can gather inventory reports on non-compliant systems that include details of a specific policy or policies violated in real time. This facilitates proactive detection of policy adherence issues or drift, which reduces non-compliance incidents. Additionally, PaC tools make compliance audits less painful, providing you with audit trails of who did what and when.
Understanding Your Security Needs and Goals
- Zero Trust approach:Service mesh promotes a zero-trust security model by verifying identities and encrypting traffic between services, regardless of their network location.
- mTLS encryption:The primary security feature of a service mesh is the use of mutual TLS, where each service authenticates itself to the other before communication can occur.
- Centralized policy management:Security policies like access control and traffic routing can be defined and enforced centrally across the entire service mesh.
- Observability and monitoring:Service meshes provide detailed visibility into service-to-service communication, enabling easier detection of security anomalies and troubleshooting.
- Sidecar proxy architecture:Each microservice runs alongside a lightweight “sidecar” proxy that handles all incoming and outgoing connections, allowing for security checks and policy enforcement at the network layer.
Uncovering Gaps and Vulnerabilities
- Improved data protection:Encryption of inter-service communication protects sensitive data from unauthorized access.
- Enhanced security posture:By enforcing consistent security policies across all services, a service mesh can help organizations achieve a higher security standard.
- Simplified security management:Centralized policy management reduces the complexity of managing security across a distributed system.
Crafting a Tailored Security Strategy
CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management) tools have made it easier for businesses to reduce risks in the cloud. One key component of this has been setting the right policies to safeguard organizations for their cloud infrastructure and applications. It is often overlooked how these policies are created and what goes into customizing them. We use Rego, the language used by OPA (Open Policy Agent), to write these policies because Rego is easy to use and highly scalable. To fully understand Rego, let us go over a few basics.
What is OPA and why should you use Rego
Rego is a policy language that supports Open Policy Agent (OPA) and is used to write policies across the cloud stack. At its core, Rego inspects and transforms data, allowing OPA to make policy decisions. Rego, created by Styra, was built for authorization, and was designed to help users express policy as code.
Implementing Solutions for Stronger Protection
How does policy as code work?
In PaC, policies are usually written using purpose-built declarative languages such as Rego and stored in file formats like YAML, JSON, or any language that is compatible with the underlying policy or rule engine. The rule engine contains guardrails that automatically kick in to verify that none of the implemented rules are violated.
When it comes to cloud computing, all policies are created to address three key concerns. Next, let’s explore these policy concerns and how they fit into the step-by-step process of PaC implementation.
Core policy concerns
Security, compliance, and operational best practices are the foundational concerns of policy as code.
Security best practices
Security best practices are guardrails that security teams can use to prevent breaches, spot potential threats or vulnerabilities early, and resolve security incidents effectively. They include practices that reinforce data privacy, network and infrastructure security, access controls, and data retention. Common examples of security policies are those that limit the source of container images to approved registries only and those that prevent compute instances associated with public IPs from being created.
Compliance requirements
Compliance requirements are data storage, data retention, and client privacy protection standards mandated by regulatory bodies, including GDPR or PCI DSS. Keeping track of several compliance requirements throughout the software development life cycle can be a showstopper, so enterprises can create corresponding policies and automate their enforcement.
For example, SOC 2 mandates how enterprises collect, store, and process clients’ PII— as well as who has access to this sensitive data. A relevant policy would restrict sensitive data access on a need-to-use basis using a strategy like role-based access control (RBAC). Or think about the “no compute instance with a public IP” policy we discussed above; this policy would do double duty by both meeting internal security standards and helping you adhere to SOC 2 requirements.
Operational best practices
Operational best practices ensure your stack runs smoothly. Resource provisioning, scaling, and resource management are just a few operational aspects that teams can tackle with PaC. For instance, policies that encourage engineers to deploy at least two server instances instead of one for redundancy or use medium-sized storage instances to prevent waste and save cost facilitate operational best practices.
Ensuring Continuous Security Improvement
Implementing policy as code
Follow these five steps to implement PaC:
1. Define and codify policies
Multidisciplinary teams define the requirements for software installs, system and security configurations, as well as regulatory compliance. Once all policies reflecting the ideal state of the infrastructure are defined, teams proceed to transmute the policies into code using proprietary code tools or open-source tools such as Open Policy Agent (OPA) and Selefra. (We’ll look at these open-source tools later.)
PaC tools use three inputs to enforce policy compliance: the policy code, which runs the policy compliance checks; data, which is the information that the code verifies machine or engineering teams’ interactions against; and query input, which triggers the policy adherence checks.
2. Automate and test policies
Next, the PaC tool is used to populate the codified policies across the entire stack, including networks, containerization environments, storage instances, CI/CD pipelines, and testing environments. The tool also automates policy code execution and helps to test the policies to prevent policy drift and ensure that all codified policies mean exactly what you intended.
3. Write and upload app code
With PaC in place, DevSecOps teams can proceed to write code and interact with cloud and network infrastructure (e.g., by provisioning cloud resources or applying firewall rules) while adhering to the policies.
4. Automatically scan for violations
At scheduled intervals, or whenever code is executed and/or resources are provisioned, the PaC tool automatically scans for violations by evaluating the query input against the policy code and data. Once the scan is done, it outputs a query result in JSON stating its conclusion: Has there been a violation or not?
5. Roll out software
If a violation is found, it is flagged with recommendations for its correction. Engineering teams then resolve any violations and roll out the software, updates, or configuration changes.
PaC vs. IaC vs. SaC
Policy as code (PaC), infrastructure as code (IaC) and security as code (SaC) are all codified rules governing IT operations. However, IaC leverages PaC rules when provisioning infrastructure, while SaC is an aspect of PaC that can be used to manage infrastructure as code. Below is a bird’s eye comparison of the three concepts.
| Parameters | PaC | IaC | SaC |
|---|---|---|---|
| Definition | A set of rules and criteria for your IT environment that’s written as code | The code used to build and manage infrastructure in adherence to PaC rules | A set of codified security protocols used to integrate security measures into the software development process |
| Focus | Keeping security operations, compliance management, infrastructure provisioning, and data management in line with regulatory and organizational policies | Automating infrastructure provisioning | Shifting security left |
| Use case examples | Admission reviews for Kubernetes, zero-trust implementations, cost savings, sandboxing | Provisioning production, sandboxing, testing and deployment environments, and CI/CD pipelines | Access controls, sandboxing, security testing, and vulnerability scanning |
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Use cases and implementation for policy as code
To make the most of PaC’s benefits, use it in any of these scenarios:
Admission reviews for Kubernetes: Combining policy-as-code with a Kubernetes admission controller allows you to enforce security policies in your Kubernetes clusters, allowing you to prevent resources from being deployed or modified if they violate the policies you configure centrally. For example, you can:
Allow pulling images from specific registries only–Prevent untrusted authors from introducing risks, such as malware or unwanted artifacts, to your images.
Deny deploying pods when container images include critical vulnerabilities
Zero-trust implementation: More and more enterprises are adopting IAM and RBAC to facilitate zero-trust implementation. But in addition to IAM and RBAC, PaC—with its highly versatile policy logic—can support more complex zero-trust applications by limiting role-based access based on time, location, or duration. PaC can also specify the type of configuration changes that various admins who’ve been granted access can make.
Sandboxing: Enterprises can create guardrails—defined as code—that kick in automatically to isolate potentially vulnerable software environments or malicious actions carried out by workloads.
Cost savings: PaC is particularly useful for cost control; you can integrate vendor-supplied APIs to calculate runtime costs and use PaC to cap cloud spend/resource usage. Once you’ve implemented cost-saving measures, PaC validates configuration changes (like increased API calls) and resource-deployment operations (including autoscaling) against existing policies before they are allowed to fly, minimizing surprise bills.
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