Automated Cloud Native Incident Response with Kubernetes and Service Mesh

At Kubecon EU 2023 our very own Francesco Beltramini, Head of Technical Solutions at ControlPlane, and Matt Turner, Software Engineer at Tetrate gave a talk on a modern approach to cloud native incident response, utilising automation and improved response frameworks.

Cloud native incident response differs from traditional security incident response (IR) thanks to the short-lived, ephemeral nature of cloud native workloads and the advanced technology stack they inhabit. Traditional responses to cyber security incidents may not fully leverage the automation and capabilities cloud native platforms like Kubernetes and service meshes provide.

The Need for Cloud Native Incident Response

With cloud native technologies, organisations deal with new challenges in their incident response processes. While still valuable, traditional security incident response approaches can become too reactive and cumbersome when dealing with the dynamic and fast-paced nature of cloud native deployments.

A shift towards automation, combined with cloud native platforms like Kubernetes and capabilities like Istio, provides an opportunity for a more proactive and scalable incident response approach. By combining that with security orchestration and automation response (SOAR) strategies, teams can better manage threats and mitigate risks before they escalate.

Incident Response 101: A Quick Overview

Before we dive into cloud native specifics, it’s essential to understand the fundamentals of incident response, often framed by well-known models like the NIST Incident Response Framework. This model breaks down IR into four key stages:

1. Preparation: Establishing incident response teams, creating playbooks, defining processes, and ensuring proper infrastructure observability.
2. Detection and Analysis: Identifying potential security incidents through monitoring tools and categorising events as false or true positives.
3. Containment, Eradication, and Recovery: Containing the attack, removing the threat from the environment, and recovering any affected services.
4. Post-Incident Activity: Reviewing the incident to improve future defences and updating processes to prevent similar attacks.

Moving from Reactive to Proactive: The Kill Chain Perspective

Historically, incident response has been reactive - waiting for an attack to be identified before taking action. However, organisations have increasingly recognised the need to adopt a more proactive, intelligence-driven approach. This involves leveraging threat intelligence to understand attackers’ tactics and techniques and attempting to stop them before they reach their objectives.

A helpful framework for understanding and preventing attacks is the Cyber Kill Chain, which breaks down an attacker’s actions into seven steps:

1. Reconnaissance
2. Weaponisation
3. Delivery
4. Exploitation
5. Installation
6. Command and Control (C2)
7. Actions on Objectives

The challenge is that attackers have thousands of ways to execute each step. However, the MITRE ATT&CK framework helps by cataloguing attackers’ tactics and techniques, allowing security teams to anticipate, detect, and disrupt the attack chain more effectively.

Introducing Cloud Native Incident Response

Cloud native capabilities like Kubernetes and service meshes offer unique advantages for incident response, enabling rapid, scalable, and automated actions. By extending traditional incident response processes to cloud native environments, organisations can improve reaction times and reduce the time it takes to respond to and contain incidents.

Key Benefits of Cloud Native Platforms

• Automation and Extensibility: Kubernetes and service meshes, such as Istio, provide APIs and extensible architectures that allow for seamless automation of response actions.
• Declarative Infrastructure: Tools like GitOps provide an audit trail and the ability to automate deployments and responses reproducibly, ensuring security policies are consistently applied.
• Advanced Networking Control: Service meshes enable fine-grained control over traffic at the application layer, offering powerful ways to monitor, block, and manage traffic based on protocol-specific attributes like HTTP methods or headers.

Enhancing the NIST Framework with Cloud Native Tools

Cloud native technologies have the potential to enhance traditional incident response models. For example, you can introduce a new step in the NIST framework - proactive containment - to help mitigate threats before they escalate into full-blown incidents. With Kubernetes, this might mean automatically freezing the orchestration of suspicious workloads to prevent a deployment. This could stop the workloads from changing before an investigation occurs which may then mean blocking traffic between confirmed compromised and healthy pods without disrupting service.

Cloud Native Incident Response Stages

1. Preparation

Preparation in a cloud native environment means more than having skilled teams and documented processes. It also ensures your infrastructure is properly observed, with capabilities like Envoy (used by Istio) providing traffic analysis, logs, and alerts.

2. Detection and Analysis

Kubernetes and Istio provide a wealth of information that can be used to detect anomalies. Envoy’s traffic logs, combined with traditional sensors like firewalls and intrusion detection systems (IDS), provide comprehensive visibility into your network traffic. As suspicious activities are detected, teams can begin to investigate.

3. Containment (Proactive Containment)

Once suspicious activity is detected, Kubernetes allows for proactive containment. For example, if a pod behaves suspiciously, you can freeze its orchestration by removing it from the deployment, stopping it from scaling or updating. East-West traffic (internal microservice communication) can be blocked using Istio’s authorisation policies to prevent lateral movement within the cluster while allowing North-South traffic to monitor incoming threats and gather additional intelligence.

4. Eradication and Recovery

Eradication in Kubernetes can be straightforward. Once compromised pods are identified, they can be deleted or restarted without impacting the overall system, as Kubernetes automatically replaces them. Similarly, firewall and Web Application Firewall (WAF) rules can be updated to block further attacks based on indicators of compromise (IoCs) identified during analysis.

5. Post-Incident Activity

After the incident is resolved, traditional post-incident reviews apply. However, the automation and audit capabilities inherent in cloud native platforms like GitOps make it easier to trace back the incident and ensure that all steps taken during the response are appropriately documented.

Automating Incident Response with Kubernetes Operators

In a cloud native environment, automation is vital. To fully leverage Kubernetes, you can automate much of the incident response process using Kubernetes Operators. These custom controllers extend Kubernetes’ functionality and manage complex, stateful applications. For example, an operator can monitor for suspicious activity and automatically take the necessary actions, such as blocking traffic, respawning workloads in hardened environments, or capturing forensic data for further analysis.

Conclusion

Automating incident response in a cloud native environment transforms organisations’ management of security threats. By combining tools like Kubernetes and Istio with frameworks like the NIST Incident Response Model and the MITRE ATT&CK framework, security teams can move from reactive to proactive defence strategies.

The cloud native approach ensures that responses to services are fast, scalable, and often non-disruptive, providing a significant advantage in managing modern security threats.

For those interested in further reading on cloud native security, Hacking Kubernetes by the ControlPlane team is a valuable resource. It offers insights into how to secure and, if necessary, break into Kubernetes clusters. By leveraging these advanced techniques, organisations can build more resilient and secure infrastructures for the future.

Likewise, if you’d like to explore how to automate incident response in your cloud native environments, feel free to reach out to us for a consultation. We’d be happy to help secure your infrastructure and bridge the gap between Cloud and security operations!