DevOps and DevSecOps teams can now more quickly deliver secure cloud-native apps by using Kubernetes Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) to define, manage, and automate application security policies throughout the CI/CD pipeline.

With the released timed to KubeCon, NeuVector – which focuses on container security throughout the full application lifecycle – has announced the industry’s first “Security Policy as Code” capability for Kubernetes services.

 The new release gives DevOps teams a way to automate container security using Kubernetes Customer Resource Definitions (CRDs) to define and manage application security policy throughout both development and production.

What this means is that DevOps (and DevSecOps) teams can more quickly deliver secure cloud-native apps through security policies that can be defined, managed and automated during the DevOps process. NeuVector has been continuing to expand its container security platform, most recently adding data loss prevention (DLP) and multi-cluster/multi-cloud management capabilities.

Gary Duan, NeuVector’s Chief Technology Officer, discussed the new release: “By introducing our industry-first Security Policy as Code for Kubernetes workloads, we’re excited to provide DevOps and DevSecOps teams with even more control to automate safe behaviors and ensure their applications remain secure from ever-increasing threat vectors. We continue to build out new capabilities sought by customers – such as DLP, multi-cluster management, and, with today’s release, CRD support. Our mission is acutely focused on raising the bar for container security by offering a complete cloud-native solution for the entire application lifecycle.”

With Security Policy as Code, DevOps teams can now implement robust security policies using CRDs to deploy customized resource configurations via developer-friendly YAML files. NeuVector also enables DevOps teams to create CRDs that capture the full profile of application behavior – and do so in a Kubernetes-native way. The result is security policy enforcement that:

1. Captures the entire application behavior, including network rules, protocols, processes, and file activities that are allowed – or ‘whitelisted’ – for the application.
2. Only permits allowed network connections between services – enforced by application protocol (layer 7) inspection.
3. Allows or prevents external or ingress connections as warranted.
4. Sets the “protection mode” of the application to either Monitor mode (alerting only) or Protect mode (blocking all suspicious activity).
5. Supports integration with Open Policy Agent(OPA) and other security policy management tools.
6. Allows DevOps and security teams to define application policies at different hierarchies such as per-service rules defined by DevOps and global rules defined by centralized security teams.
7. Is RBAC-enabled, enforcing the creation and updates of security policy as allowed natively by Kubernetes service accounts and roles.

8.Is extensible, to support future expansion of security policy as code to admission control rules, DLP rules, response rules and other NeuVector enforcement policies.

Using Security Policy as Code and CRDs, DevOps teams can define and allow the run-time application behavior they expect by implementing specific security rules for network connections, process activity, file access patterns, and other run-time policies. Because these security policies are defined as code, they are version-tracked and built for automation. This helps DevOps teams who are migrating security policies across Kubernetes clusters (or from staging to production environments), and when managing versions of security policies tied to specific application versions. DevOps teams can also enforce global security policies this way, and further specify policies for each Kubernetes workload as needed.

NeuVector’s behavioral learning technology brings the ability to learn and define appropriate application behavior in testing or staging environments, and to export that security policy as a CRD YAML file that developers and DevOps teams can review and edit before deploying in production. Combined with NeuVector’s full lifecycle vulnerability scanning and ConfigMap-based deployment capabilities, CRD support from NeuVector adds to security automation during the entire CI/CD pipeline and into production environments.

“Security continues to shift left, and our Platform teams are eager to manage security policy as code,” said Sean McCormick, VP of Engineering at Element. “Doing so enables us to automate security further upstream – simplifying and hardening policy enforcement. With its Security Policy as Code support, NeuVector gives us a more granular capacity to centrally manage our security policies without needing to configure them through a UI. This is a significant improvement for Element, allowing us to maintain policy consistency across all customer and development environments.”