As government and private sector applications move to "the cloud," system analysts have few ways of measuring their exposure to known and unknown security risks. ATCorp has announced the availability of CSAS, a software tool that helps software developers and analysts discover actual vulnerabilities and configuration problems in their systems. It allows analysts to evaluate the overall risks those vulnerabilities pose in their specific applications, and mitigate those risks as warranted.
CSAS 's approach applies to multiple applications:
Cloud application security analysis
Track system requirements
Software testing and validation
Impact/fault tree analysis to relate possible modes of attack
Attack reconstruction
Tracking of software vulnerability in complex applications
Key Ingredients
Unlike competing assessment systems, CSAS provides a framework for mapping high-level security concerns, such as the protection of sensitive data. CSAS's models also help compute metrics such as minimum remediation cost or attack complexity.
CSAS integrates into existing workflows by employing standards such as the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) and tools such as the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD). CSAS's tools can query Amazon Web Services (AWS) and OpenStack cloud configurations, as well as examine configuration data on individual cloud machine instances and external databases.
CSAS provides a number of benefits including:
Provides more thorough & repeatable analysis, through a structured, hierarchical framework for security models
Saves time: performs on-line tests to determine which modeled vulnerabilities are actually present
Improves and extends existing host-based security analysis techniques to the cloud and distributed systems
Saves labor, pinpoints problems faster; automates routine compliance testing to ensure risks have not been introduced due to configuration changes by the cloud provider or newly-discovered software vulnerabilities
Improves system designs: assists with design tradeoffs
Improves analytics: computes other tree-derived metrics, such as costs, impact, requirement analysis, or compliance
CSAS is available as a standalone graphical application for security analysts, a command-line edition for automated processing, and a version aimed at software developers that integrates with the Eclipse development environment.
