By many estimates global cyber crime is expected to reach a mind boggling $1.63 trillion by 2029. The number of alerts generated from different tools has made it hard for organizations. The overwhelming volume of alerts generated by various security tools has led to alert fatigue, burdening organizations and making it difficult for them to prioritize and address the most critical security issues affecting their operations. The cornerstones in application security are the Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) and Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP).

Challenges with Disparate Security Tools

1. One of the key security issues is that hackers take advantage of missing context when disparate  tools are tools to create an  attack path that is easily missed in terms of detection but causes severe grievance.
2. The average enterprise deals with numerous point solutions, each generating hundreds of findings, leading to vulnerability overload and wasted resources.
3. Application Security Orchestration and Correlation (ASOC) emerged to manage this by integrating multiple tools into a single dashboard.
4. ASPM goes further by providing end-to-end application risk management across the entire software lifecycle.
5. The security market is shifting towards unified platforms that merge various scanning capabilities, reducing the need for disparate solutions.
6. CNAPP and ASPM are increasingly aligned, reflecting the industry’s move toward all-encompassing security posture management solutions.
7. Future security tooling will be frictionless for developers, seamlessly integrated, and easy to operate, with ASPM being a central platform for vulnerability management and remediation.

Integrated ASPM + CNAPP 

Overall security management in software development, deployment, and operationalization. Gartner considers that by 2026 at least 40% of organizations whose primary business relies on proprietary software will adopt an ASPM solution. These have to include:

• Expanded Security Coverage: Ensuring all types of code go through proper security tools and processes.
• Automated Correlation: Correlating security findings so your analysts aren’t chasing rabbit holes.
• Root Cause Fixes: Identifying root causes, thus enabling teams to correct issues right where they occur and prevent recurrence. 
• Automated remediation: Facilitates automated remediation by automatically routing the fixes to the right teams and automating as much remediation as possible. 

DevSecOps practices, security, and compliance contribute to the speed of safe delivery. Continuous scanning of applications for misconfigurations and vulnerabilities will ensure customer data protection—an integral part of fostering consumer trust, which means revenue to a company.

Application Security Scanning Categories

AccuKnox integrates with both popular open source and commercial scanners – to provide a comprehensive and consolidated security view of risks in the SDLC

1. SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle): Ensures secure Git settings and CI configurations.
2. SCA (Software Composition Analysis): Identifies vulnerabilities in open-source dependencies.
3. SAST (Static Application Security Testing): Detects exploitable code vulnerabilities.
4. IaC (Infrastructure as Code): Scans configurations like Terraform and Kubernetes deployments.
5. Container Scanning: Examines Dockerfiles and runtime environments for security issues.
6. Secret Scanning: Identifies exposed sensitive information in the codebase.
7. DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing): Analyzes running applications for security flaws.
8. CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management): Monitors and secures cloud environments.

Problem Statements

#1 – Handling alerts effectively is crucial, especially when dealing with duplicate alerts that waste time and resources. AccuKnox streamlines alert management by deduplicating alerts, reducing noise, and allowing teams to focus on genuine issues.

#2 – Determining the right time and the right person to address an issue is often delayed, leading to inefficiencies. ASPM facilitates timely issue assignment by aligning with a shift-left approach, ensuring that alerts are directed to the appropriate personas, such as developers, with actionable context within the ticket itself.

#3 – In dynamic environments, pinpointing the root cause of an alert is challenging. ASPM identifies the true root cause by shifting far-left to the coding stage, enabling teams to address the bulk of issues before they escalate.

Now imagine that this alert reaches the on-call engineer. First, he checks if he is the owner of the alert. If not, proactive probing of organizational systems and asking or sending emails to colleagues regarding this issue will be initiated to track the responsible contact down. After ownership has been affirmed, you identify the urgency of the problem and search for the root cause—infrastructure as code, a code issue, or something different altogether, like a configuration error. You might call it a false positive, or you might delay action due to resource limitations. On the other hand, you might immediately take action to remediate the problem. And that is a problem!

Overall Problem Statement and AccuKnox’s Solution

Deal with vulnerabilities in containers, mainly emanating from the image. Images start with Dockerfiles, and those start with the code owner. Solving problems right from the root, AccuKnox maps how code makes its way to production for developer-led remediation. It cuts backlogs by 90%, integrates easily across all environments, offers read-only API access for observation capabilities, and automatically remediates through shift-left strategies and ticket generation.

What Makes an Ideal ASPM?

An integrated ASPM and CNAPP solution should offer the following key features:

1. Full Coverage: Scan all 8 components, including SDLC, SCA, SAST, IaC, container scanning, secret scanning, DAST, and CSPM.
2. Remediation Detailed Guidance: Detailed guidance on the remediation of a vulnerability. This can sometimes include specific lines of code that should be altered.
3. Workflow flexibility: Rich and customizable workflows on top of strong, ready-made workflows for common use cases.
4. Tool Integration: Integrates with data from third-party scanners and adds some application context to add value on top of the existing set of tools.
5. Deep Integrations: Easily integrate with all your existing application security scanners, development environments, and cloud security tools. All such integrations need to be tested properly and consider both on-premise and cloud environments that might be used across your development process.
6. Complete Visibility within the Full SDLC: Complete-stage visibility into the full SDLC. On one hand, it should show how your current security tools will ensure the whole SDLC, right from the very inception of the code up to deployment.
7. Pipeline Visibility: Visualize these identified risks, showing their very origin and mapping their downstream effects. This clarity in the user interface is critical to effective risk management.
8. Enforce Policies:  Enforce custom policies that block insecure builds or code commits. These proactive measures can help prevent vulnerabilities from getting through to your production environment.
9. Prioritization and Triage: Proper prioritization is key to the effective management of residual risks and exploitation of vulnerabilities. For this reason, your ASPM solution needs to offer various flexible options for prioritization based on exploitability, business impact, and root cause, among others within your organization.
10. Root Cause Analysis: Use root cause analysis in tracing vulnerabilities down to their origin, whether in runtime or earlier in the SDLC. This, in effect, equips teams to resolve root causes rather than symptoms only, thereby minimizing recurring vulnerabilities.
11. Remediation Orchestration: Via configuration of work streams and campaigns to forward appropriate fixes to the right team members, using custom logic to guide the process of how vulnerabilities are mitigated.
12. Advanced Code to Cloud Telemetry: This should be deeply integrated with cloud providers to enable high efficiency in correlating pre-production and runtime issues. This is essential for telemetry that brings back risks to the cloud production environment, relating them to code-level instances.
13. Secure Source Code: Feed input into application build processes to enable ASPM to identify directly the risks in your source code management system, such as the risks that come about through misconfigurations or hard-coded secrets.

ASPM + CNAPP Joint Value Proposition

AccuKnox provides a unified context from code to cloud runtime that is actionable and prevents hackers from taking advantage with zero day attacks. With CNAPP, it provides real-time visibility, so applications, infrastructure, and resources are in a continuous monitoring phase.

• Automation of Security Threat Detection: CNAPP uses advanced analytics along with machine learning for real-time security threat detection.
• Efficient Remediation: Because it integrates natively into DevJson workflows, CNAPP offers automation and context-based remediation for vulnerabilities.
• Compliance Enforcement: CNAPP enforces compliance on the organization by enforcing the best practices and security policy in the cloud.
• Full coverage: It should feature 8-in-1 scanning capabilities, including SDLC, SCA, SAST, IaC, container scanning, secret scanning, DAST, and CSPM.
• Remediation Guide: Clearly state the steps to remediate the vulnerability, including which lines of code need to be changed.
• Workflow Flexibility: Rich, customizable workflows and strong predefined workflows for common use cases.
• Tool Integration: This merges with complementary scanner data, adding an application context and unique added value besides what’s already offered by existing tools.

When implementing robust security measures within your CI/CD pipeline, leveraging AccuKnox’s GitHub Actions for container and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) scanning can significantly enhance your security posture. 

• AccuKnox Container Scan automates container image security, ensuring that vulnerabilities are detected and remediated before deployment. 
• AccuKnox IaC Security Checks streamline the process of securing your infrastructure by automating IaC security assessments.

These tools integrate seamlessly with popular security scanners such as Sonatype, Aqua Trivy, Veracode, Blackduck, CheckMarx and Snyk providing comprehensive coverage across your development lifecycle. 

Example Use-Cases that AccuKnox addresses for Customers

Use Case 1: Integrating IaC Scanning for AWS S3 Buckets into the CI/CD 

The AccuKnox IaC scanner will be integrated into CI/CD to enable automatic scanning of Terraform code and configurations of S3 buckets within the AWS security best practices. That tool will automatically detect misconfiguration in Terraform files and enforce security guidelines on AWS infrastructure. It scans every change pushed into the repository for misconfigurations so they don’t get deployed, hence hardening the security posture throughout your AWS environment.

Use Case 2: Enhanced Container Security through CI/CD Integration

This ensures that AccuKnox’s container environments are secure through the integration of container scanning with CI/CD pipelines. This will scan a Docker image before deploying it to find vulnerabilities and list its critical issues to block insecure images from going into production. This would also update base images to newer, more secure versions and re-scan to ensure only very safe images are being deployed. The GitHub Actions integration provides automatic detection and remediation guidance for vulnerabilities in your container deployments. 

Use Case 3: Eliminating SQL injection vulnerabilities (SAST)

AccuKnox integrated with SonarQube and GitHub Actions would provide a solution for identifying and remediating SQL injection vulnerabilities. The general workflow would be—vulnerability identification within a sample Java application, setting up SonarQube to analyze the codes from time to time, and explaining to developers one way to replace insecure SQL queries with safe statements in case such an issue is identified so that rescanned code will not have any SQL injection risks.

This further emphasizes the importance of putting security tools into the CI/CD process to secure the quality of the code.

Achieve Unified Context and  Zero Trust security by  integrating ASPM & CNAPP

AccuKnox provides flexibility to organizations by combining results from various open source and commercial security scanners. In the ASPM Security solution, unlike other tools, AccuKnox provides flexibility to integrate a variety of open source and commercial security scanning tools through built-in parsers to provide you with a composite security posture of your infrastructure. This is mainly done for the following two contexts:

• Remove dependencies and scoped results from one tool
• Bring in contextual understanding of vulnerabilities and prioritization based on that

We also correlate and normalize results from a variety of security scanning tools and provide detailed results of vulnerabilities across infrastructure.

Takeaways

• ASPM + CNAPP integration is key to Code to Run-time Security. It provides unified visibility across applications and cloud infrastructure, ensuring comprehensive security oversight. 
• This contextual view combines the application and cloud security concerns to identify risks that need to be mitigated first and foremost. 
• It ensures continuous auditing and compliance by the monitoring of cloud-native environments vis-à-vis standards and regulations. 
• This will allow better threat detection by pivoting data from ASPM and CNAPP for maximum precision with minimum false positives. 
• With automated remediation, security fixes and policy enforcement can be enabled once for the entire cloud stack. Security is integrated with the development processes in DevOps, embedding considerations at each step along the way. 
• The solution grows with ever-increasing complexity in both cloud-native applications and infrastructures. 
• It makes management so much easier since it centralizes the security operations of applications and cloud resources, reducing complexity.