Full Report
Mismanaging configurations in your multi-cloud environment can put you at an elevated risk for cyber attacks. In the first installment of our “Stronger Cloud Security in Five” blog series, we outline five best practices for boosting your cloud configuration management.A misconfigured web application firewall. A publicly accessible and unprotected cloud database. An overprivileged user identity. Lax access control to containers. Unchanged default credentials.Those are just some of the many configuration oversights and mistakes that attackers can leverage to breach your cloud environment, hijack user accounts, steal data and more. In addition, having misconfigured cloud resources puts your organization on the wrong side of regulatory compliance, and thus open to costly penalties, fines and litigation. In a vacuum, it would seem simple to button up most cloud misconfigurations. Surely, we can all agree that leaving an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3) storage bucket open to anyone on the internet is a no-no. Yet, the “Tenable Cloud Risk Report 2024,” based on an analysis of millions of cloud resources scanned through the Tenable Cloud Security platform, found that 74% of organizations have publicly exposed cloud storage.The reality is that cloud misconfigurations are prevalent. In fact, misconfigurations and inadequate change controls ranked first on the Cloud Security Alliance’s “Top Threats to Cloud Computing 2024" report. “Given a cloud’s persistent network access and infinite capacity, misconfigurations can have wide-reaching impacts across an organization,” the CSA tells us in that report. Why do even large multinationals – with massive resources and stellar IT, cybersecurity and compliance staff – routinely fail to properly configure their cloud environments?In a nutshell: With cloud environments having myriad moving parts and being so dynamic, managing configurations is complicated if you lack the proper processes and tools. Here are five best practices you can apply immediately to harden your cloud configurations.1 - Centralize and automate the configuration management of your multi-cloud environmentIf your organization is like most others, it uses multiple cloud security providers (CSPs) — each with its own configuration settings and with its own shared responsibility model for divvying up security tasks with customers.That’s why you need a vendor-agnostic, centralized cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) with a strong cloud security posture management (CSPM) component.With CSPM tools, you’ll be able to centrally harden configurations across your multi-cloud environment by consistently and continuously adopting, monitoring and enforcing security policies in areas such as access control and data encryption.Without an automated, centralized system, you won’t have holistic and comprehensive visibility of your configurations across all your clouds and your organization will be at heightened risk of cyber attacks.CSPM allows you to continuously scan all your cloud assets and resources and get an unobstructed view of all your detected misconfigurations. Then you can prioritize and document their remediation in compliance reports for your leaders, auditors and regulators.2 - Implement least-privilege access across your multi-cloud environmentUser and machine identities with excessive privileges pose a major risk in cloud environments because during a breach attackers can leverage those permissions to move deeper into your network. “Initial malicious access attempts on cloud resources frequently target user credentials,” the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) points out in its publication “Use Secure Cloud Identity and Access Management Practices.”Thus, your CNAPP should have a comprehensive cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) component with granular identity and access management (IAM) capabilities. That’ll allow you to audit your multi-cloud identities and ensure they have the minimum access rights and capabilities they need. This is the concept of least privilege.At a high level, you need to continuously discover all of your cloud infrastructure’s human and machine identities; understand their scope of cloud-resource access and permissions; assess identities’ level of risk; and make necessary least-privilege adjustments.3 - Automatically check configurations against compliance frameworks Offering policy-as-code (PaC), your CNAPP should automate the process of codifying policies; regularly checking how compliant your multi-cloud environment is with industry, regulatory and internal compliance frameworks; and of generating in-depth audit reports. It should provide actionable findings and automate the process of fixing insecure and faulty configurations.This will yield multiple benefits for your organization, including:Quieting alert noise Proactively managing compliancePrioritizing remediation based on riskBoosting security operations4 - Secure your Kubernetes clustersTrying to manually assess the security of your Kubernetes clusters and fix configuration issues is a losing proposition, especially because many Kubernetes resources are ephemeral and come with default configurations. As Tenable Senior Principal Product Marketing Manager Lior Zatlavi explains in a blog: "The complexity of Kubernetes, combined with its dynamic and distributed nature, makes it a daunting task to ensure that clusters are secure from threats.” That’s why your CNAPP should have a Kubernetes security posture management (KSPM) tool that gives you:Complete, deep and contextual visibility into your Kubernetes resources, including nodes, namespaces, deployments, servers and service accounts An admission controller that facilitates deployment and management by enforcing policy-as-codeDetection of misconfigurations by scanning Helm chartsUI-driven container workload protection5 - Ingest and enrich log data from your CSPsOrganizations often overlook the importance of monitoring and analyzing the event and activity logs from their cloud environments that their CSPs collect. In fact, logs are critical for configuration management. To gain granular insights into the causes and impacts of cloud misconfigurations and to respond appropriately, you need a CNAPP that enriches the logging data from your CSPs with security data and continuously analyzes risk. This enriched log data will give you context and actionable information to maintain consistent and secure configurations that reduce your risk and keep you compliant.Learn how you can take action to boost your cloud security in just five minutes.
Analysis Summary
# Best Practices: Cloud Security Configuration Management
## Overview
These practices focus on securing cloud environments by managing and enforcing correct configurations across cloud assets, specifically leveraging capabilities provided by Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM), and Kubernetes Security Posture Management (KSPM). The primary goal is to eliminate security risks associated with cloud misconfigurations, which are often overlooked due to the dynamic and complex nature of cloud services.
## Key Recommendations
### Immediate Actions
1. **Deploy a Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) Solution:** Implement a tool that continuously monitors cloud configurations against security benchmarks and best practices to identify immediate misconfigurations.
2. **Establish Baseline Configuration Policies:** Define and enforce essential baseline security policies across all deployed cloud resources (e.g., ensuring all new storage is encrypted, public access is restricted by default).
3. **Review and Restrict Public Access:** Conduct an immediate audit to identify and remove any inadvertently exposed cloud resources (e.g., S3 buckets, public IPs) that permit broad internet access.
### Short-term Improvements (1-3 months)
1. **Integrate Kubernetes Security Posture Management (KSPM):** Deploy KSPM capabilities to gain deep visibility across Kubernetes resources (nodes, namespaces, deployments, service accounts).
2. **Implement Policy-as-Code Enforcement:** Introduce an admission controller within Kubernetes environments to enforce security policies before resources are deployed, preventing misconfigurations at creation time.
3. **Scan Helm Charts for Misconfigurations:** Utilize scanning tools to proactively detect security flaws within Helm charts used for Kubernetes deployments.
4. **Implement Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM):** Begin mapping and addressing excessive or unused permissions assigned to identities (human or machine) across cloud accounts to enforce least privilege.
### Long-term Strategy (3+ months)
1. **Establish Comprehensive Log Ingestion and Enrichment:** Configure the CNAPP to ingest, enrich, and continuously analyze event and activity logs from all Cloud Service Providers (CSPs).
2. **Integrate Security Data with Logs:** Ensure log data is enriched with security context to provide actionable insights necessary for detailed impact analysis regarding configuration drift.
3. **Develop UI-Driven Container Workload Protection:** Implement visualization and management tools within the CNAPP/KSPM suite to provide simplified, ongoing security oversight for containerized workloads.
4. **Integrate Configuration Management into CI/CD Pipelines:** Move policy enforcement left by embedding compliance and security validation checks directly into continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) processes.
## Implementation Guidance
### For Small Organizations
- **Focus on Native Tools First:** Leverage built-in security posture tools provided by your primary CSP (if available) as a starting point before investing heavily in third-party CNAPPs.
- **Prioritize Identity:** Use CIEM principles to immediately restrict unused access rights and ensure Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is mandatory for all human identities.
- **Simple Kubernetes Control:** For smaller Kubernetes setups, focus intensely on hardening the control plane and using admission controllers for essential security checks only.
### For Medium Organizations
- **Adopt CNAPP for Centralization:** Implement a unified CNAPP solution to manage configuration policies, visibility, and risk across multi-cloud environments.
- **Automate Remediation:** Begin integrating automated remediation workflows for high-severity configuration drift identified by the CSPM component.
- **Formalize Least Privilege:** Roll out a structured project using CIEM tools to review and right-size permissions based on actual usage patterns.
### For Large Enterprises
- **Enforce Policy-as-Code Universally:** Mandate the use of Admission Controllers for all Kubernetes deployments and enforce Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) scanning before deployments are provisioned to cloud environments.
- **Mature Log Analysis:** Develop dedicated security information and event management (SIEM) or security analytics capabilities to ingest and cross-reference enriched log data for proactive threat hunting related to configuration changes.
- **Establish Executive Reporting:** Utilize exposure management features (e.g., attack path analysis, risk scoring) to communicate cyber risk accurately to business leadership.
## Configuration Examples
*(The provided text focuses on high-level capabilities rather than specific technical configuration syntax (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation). The core configuration focus is enabling specific CNAPP/KSPM features.)*
* **Enabling Policy Enforcement:** Configure the Kubernetes admission controller to reject any Deployments or Pods that reference unapproved or insecure base images, or that set `securityContext` parameters insecurely (e.g., running as root).
* **Log Enrichment:** Configure the CSP connection within the CNAPP to ingest raw audit logs and automatically join them with identity data and known vulnerability information to flag configuration changes made by compromised or over-privileged accounts.
## Compliance Alignment
- **CIS Benchmarks:** Configuration policies should map directly to relevant CIS Benchmarks for the specific CSPs (AWS, Azure, GCP) and for Kubernetes.
- **NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF):** Focus heavily on the **Protect** function (specifically ID.AM - Account Management and PR.PT - Protective Technology) and the **Detect** function (DE.CM - Continuous Monitoring).
- **ISO 27001/27017:** Align configuration standards with controls related to asset management, access control, and secure operations.
## Common Pitfalls to Avoid
- **Treating Logs as Secondary Data:** Overlooking the critical need to ingest, enrich, and continuously analyze CSP activity logs; logs are vital for understanding the *impact* and *cause* of misconfigurations.
- **Ignoring Kubernetes Ephemerality:** Assuming static security checks are sufficient for Kubernetes; the dynamic nature requires continuous, real-time posture management (KSPM) and admission control.
- **Focusing Only on Inventory:** Simply listing cloud assets without continuously validating their configuration against established security policies (the core function of CSPM).
- **Manual Remediation:** Relying on manual updates to correct security drift; automation via policy-as-code and automated workflows is essential for dynamic cloud environments.
## Resources
- **Kubernetes Security Posture Management (KSPM):** Essential for visibility and policy enforcement within container orchestration.
- **Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM):** Necessary for managing and reducing excessive cloud permissions.
- **Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP):** The recommended umbrella solution for integrating CSPM, CIEM, and KSPM capabilities.