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Category: Security

Credential and Secrets Management in R

Published 2020-08-03 by Kevin Feasel

Bernardo Lares walks us through some good practices around managing credentials and secrets in R:

I have several functions that live in my public lares library that use get_creds() to fetch my secrets. Some of them are used as credentials to query databases, send emails with API services such as Mailgun, ping notifications using Slack‘s webhook, interacting with Google Sheets programatically, fetching Facebook and Twitter’s API stuff, Typeform, Github, Hubspot… I even have a portfolio performance report for my personal investments. If you check the code underneath, you won’t find credentials written anywhere but the code will actually work (for me and for anyone that uses the library). So, how can we accomplish this?

Read on to learn how.

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Retrieving Secrets from Azure DevOps Pipelines

Published 2020-08-03 by Kevin Feasel

Gavin Campbell shows how you can pull secrets out of an Azure DevOps Pipeline:

For secrets created in the Azure DevOps UI, whether pipeline-scoped or in a variable group, it is not so simple to retrieve the variables after creation. This might be required for a number of reasons, most often troubleshooting. The need to do this is often an indicator that the project should have been using an Azure Key Vault in the first place.

Previously it was necessary to jump through some hoops to access secret variables, but it turns out this is no longer required. It also appears the recommended approach of mapping secrets to environment variables is currently not working for secret variables from variable groups.

I second the notion of using Key Vault for secrets management.

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Data Privacy in Confluent Platform

Published 2020-07-23 by Kevin Feasel

David Millman shows off the Privitar Kafka Connector:

The initial message structure, in the left column above, is a simple JSON document with five fields. The middle column contains the list of rules that must be applied, defining the policy. On the right is a sample output message generated as a result of the policy being applied to the initial message.

In the Privitar Policy Manager, a user maps the individual fields to the appropriate rule, as shown in the screenshot below. A rule is applied to each of the fields and the schema is read as a single table structure, named testfile. These rules can be applied for every instance of the schema.

Read on for more.

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Secrets Management in Powershell Demos

Published 2020-07-21 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell is happy to stop using Import-Clixml:

I love notebooks and to show some people who had asked about storing secrets, I have created some. So, because I am efficient lazy I have embedded them here for you to see. You can find them in my Jupyter Notebook repository

https://beard.media/dotnetnotebooks

Rob has a follow-up on the topic:

Following on from my last post about the Secret Management module. I was asked another question.

> Can I use this to run applications as my admin account?

A user with a beard

Well, Rob has a notebook for that.

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Securing S3 Buckets

Published 2020-07-20 by Kevin Feasel

Adam Youngberg relates an experience with securing public S3 buckets:

As a response to our initial alert, we took action to identify all of our S3 buckets and the public / non-public status. Since Databricks is a cloud-native company, we had already deployed JupiterOne, a commercial cloud asset management solution that allowed us to quickly query and determine which assets were public. Open-source tools are available, such as Cartography from Lyft, which allow for similar query capabilities. With the outputs of our queries, we were able to quickly identify and triage our public buckets and determine whether they should remain public.

Read on for the process, as well as some issues they experienced in rollout.

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Azure Data Factory and Key Vault References

Published 2020-07-20 by Kevin Feasel

Gerhard Brueckl shows how we can get around a limitation in the Azure Data Factory user interface:

As You can see, the setting “AccessToken” can use a Key Vault reference whereas settings like “Databricks Workspace URL” and “Cluster” do not support them. This is usually fine because the guys at Microsoft also thought about this and support Key Vault references for the settings that are actually security relevant or sensitive. Also, providing the option to use Key Vault references everywhere would flood the GUI. So this is just fine.

But there can be good reasons where you want to get values from the Key Vault also for non-sensitive settings, especially when it comes to CI/CD and multiple environments. From my experience, when you implement a bigger ADF project, you will probably have a Key Vault for your sensitive settings and all other values are provided during the deployment via ARM parameters.

So you will end up with a mix of Key Vault references and ARM template parameters which very likely will be derived from the Key Vault at some point anyway. To solve this, you can modify the JSON of an ADF linked service directly and inject KeyVault references into almost every property!

Click through to see how that works, as well as the ramifications.

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Minimum Permissions Required for Get-DbaDbUser

Published 2020-07-16 by Kevin Feasel

Shane O’Neill walks us through wants to figure out minimum permissions required for the Get-DbaDbUser cmdlet in dbatools:

I’m not going to sugarcoat things – the person that sent me the request has more access than they rightly need. The “public” access worker did not need any of that access so I wasn’t going to just give her the same level.

Plus, we’re supposed to be a workforce that has embraced the DevOps spirit and DevOps is nothing if it doesn’t include Security in it.

So, if I could find a way to give the user enough permission to run the command and not a lot more, then the happier I would be.

Shane takes us through the process so we don’t have to.

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Lessons Learned from a Non-Standard Default Database

Published 2020-07-15 by Kevin Feasel

Richard Swinbank tells a tale of woe:

Migration day went pretty smoothly – it even looked like we’d found and amended every connection string likely to disable a downstream system. The instance from which we were migrating was a bit of a food court, so before signing off I opened SSMS to check on some other system issue… and found I could no longer log in.

Read on to understand why, as well as what Richard did to fix this.

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Project Freta: Detecting Sensor Sabotage

Published 2020-07-14 by Kevin Feasel

Microsoft Research has a new project:

Incubated at Microsoft Research, Project Freta is a roadmap toward trusted sensing for the cloud that can allow enterprises to engage in regular, complete discovery sweeps for undetected malware. The project’s namesake, Warsaw’s Freta Street, was the birthplace of Marie Curie, a pioneer of battlefield imaging. While snapshot-based memory forensics is a field now in its second decade, no commercial cloud has yet provided customers the ability to perform full memory audits of thousands of virtual machines (VMs) without intrusive capture mechanisms and a priori forensic readiness. Just as yesteryear’s film cameras and today’s smartphones have similar megapixels but vastly different ease of use and availability, Project Freta intends to automate and democratize VM forensics to a point where every user and every enterprise can sweep volatile memory for unknown malware with the push of a button—no setup required.

There’s a prototype currently available, as well as information on where they’re taking the project. I wish them the best of luck there.

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Performing a Power BI Risk Assessment

Published 2020-07-09 by Kevin Feasel

David Eldersveld has a set of questions to ask when building Power BI dashboards:

As with any important endeavor, businesses should be in a position to document and have a plan to mitigate any possible risks associated with deploying software. It is no different with Microsoft Power BI.

Note that the purpose of this post is simply an encouragement to evaluate risk exposure and consider how you would overcome potential future issues that could arise from any cause–it is not a caution against using external tools created by the wider Power BI community.

Read the whole thing.

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