This week, Fugue announced unified infrastructure as code (IaC) and cloud runtime security. For the first time, cloud engineering and security teams can automate security across the development lifecycle using the same policies.
In this blog post, we’ll talk a bit about how Rego evaluation works, and how it affects performance. Rego is a DSL for authoring policy. It is not restricted to a single kind of policy (e.g., RBAC) but instead is very general-purpose, making it possible to share policies across different services and stacks. We’ve found Rego to be ideal for cloud infrastructure security in Fugue, and infrastructure as code security in our open source project, Regula.
At Fugue, we’re pretty fond of Open Policy Agent (OPA), and we’ve written a lot of Rego code to keep cloud resources secure. So we’ve put together the most valuable lessons we’ve learned in the process. You can also use OPA and Rego languages to enable policy as code to automatically enforce coded policies.
We recently open sourced our tool Regula, which allows you to check your Terraform infrastructure as code for compliance prior to deployment. Regula can be used locally or as part of a CI/CD system, independently of Fugue or with Fugue.
In the cloud, developers now own the security posture of the enterprise because the cloud is fully software-defined and programmable. Getting the programming of cloud infrastructure wrong leads to misconfiguration, which is the number one cause of cloud-based data breaches.
Today we announced Regula, an open source tool for evaluating Terraform infrastructure as code for potential security misconfigurations and compliance violations. Regula uses the open source Open Policy Agent(OPA) policy framework and Rego query language, which have gained significant traction in the Kubernetes community and scale to cloud infrastructure policy assessments as well (Fugue’s SaaS product performs more than 100 million policy evaluations using OPA every day).
On January 1, 2020, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), California’s answer to GDPR, goes into effect. Like GDPR, the CCPA is delivering anxiety and dread to executives, marketers, compliance officers, and engineers everywhere. As we learned from numerous conversations at the AWS re:Invent 2019 conference last week, engineers responsible for building and managing cloud-based systems and data are focused on CCPA and what it means.
Adopting the Rego policy language and the Open Policy Agent (OPA) engine for Fugue’s cloud security SaaS product has paid real dividends for us and our customers. It enables Fugue users to easily create custom policies for their cloud infrastructure environments using open source tools, and it’s helped us implement out-of-the-box policy as code support for complex compliance standards, including CIS Foundations Benchmarks, GDPR, HIPAA, ISO 27001, NIST 800-53, PCI, and SOC 2 (and our own Fugue Best Practices to identify advanced cloud misconfiguration risks).
Today we released the Fugue Best Practices Framework to help software engineering teams identify and remediate the kinds of dangerous cloud resource misconfigurations used in recent data breaches that aren’t addressed by common compliance frameworks (see A Technical Analysis of the Capital One Cloud Misconfiguration Breach).
Just like the challenges of managing large cloud infrastructure operations led to the development of infrastructure as code, ensuring the security and compliance of those environments led to policy as code. Cloud infrastructure environments are simply too vast, complex and dynamic to address with traditional security approaches such as manual audits and checklists.