About a year ago, we created a security roadmap for the Assimilation Project. It’s time to update it and see how we’ve progressed since then – hence our Assimilation 2016 Security Roadmap. The Assimilation Security software concentrates on low-noise automated security tools. We expect to enhance our capabilities in best practice analyses, checksum integrity analyses, patch […]
I’m excited to be giving my first ever talk at a security conference at the 2016 BSides Las Vegas Security Conference. The title of the talk is Managing Security with the OWASP Assimilation Project. It’s on August 2nd 2016 at 11 AM.
In the 1.1.7 release of the Assimilation System Management Suite, we added a completely new type of query – the subgraph query. What’s really cool about subgraph queries is that they are exactly what’s needed for visualization. So, this article is about Subgraph Queries and Visualization – what they are, how they relate to each other and why this is totally cool.
Recently, Security Week featured a great article by Emily Ratliff about “Unknown Unknowns” which explains really well how it is that the things you don’t know are those most likely to bite you. This kind of advice about what you don’t know biting you is ancient and dates back thousands of years before computers were invented.
We’re proud to announce Assimilation Release 1.1.7. This release of the Assimilation System Management Suite has two major emphases – adding support for Docker and Vagrant, and adding subgraph queries for visualization. These are exciting features which provide capabilities which extend the reach and usefulness of the Assimilation Suite.
One of the keys to good software is good testing. There are well-known testing suites for back end code – things like junit and py.test. There are also good front-end testing tools – things like Selenium. But for testing distributed systems there aren’t so many well-known tools – because the problem is quite different, and harder. In this blog post we’ll cover the “Fuzzy Monkey” methodology used for testing three different successful distributed systems (including the Assimilation Suite) – its history and how and why it works.
In June, I’ll be giving a talk at SLC DevOpsDays 2016 (Salt Lake City) – about the intersection of DevOps and security. This is a challenging space, since security has trouble keeping up with “normal” IT, and one of the common goals of DevOps is greater velocity – more changes faster. At SLC DevOpsDays 2016, I’ll be giving practical how-to talk, where you can learn how to begin securing your systems in 15 minutes, andwill cover two new features I’ve never demonstrated or talked about before – detailed Docker discovery, and subgraph queries. Although I have a blog post on Docker discovery, I haven’t talked about our new canned subgraph queries. They help you understand and visualize how all your servers and networks are related to each other.
Docker is one of the hottest up-and-coming IT trends around. Sometimes when you see a trend, it turns out to be more hype than reality. Since we use Docker in the Assimilation Suite for building and for testing, we’ve had a chance to examine Docker in some detail. Although there is plenty of hype around Docker, there is also a good bit of reality to the excitement around it as well. Since our current release provides minimal support for Docker containers, we’re excited to announce that our next release will fully support Docker. This article provides an overview of how we are adding full Docker support to the Assimilation Suite.
I just got back from the 2016 DevOpsDaysRox conference last week. I’d like to talk a little about my presentation on the Assimilation suite from the cybersecurity perspective, and how what I learned and heard at the conference will influence future Assimilation development – particularly regarding Docker. After the conference, Docker even entered my dreams, morphing into how best to support it in Assimilation. It was a bit surreal, but so was giving my talk – which I’ll explain a bit later in this article.
Last Thursday, I had the privilege of speaking at DevOpsDaysRox (Rockies) at the Fortrust data center in Denver. A bit weird speaking in undeveloped space in a data center, but somehow fitting for a DevOps conference. The talk was about 10 minutes worth of talk (slides on speakerdeck), and about 20 minutes worth of live demonstration. The live demonstration covered some of the same things that I’ve covered in our blog before.
In this blog post, we’ll examine a few security best practices around group, password and shadow files – and evaluate the IT Best Practices rules and see why and how they have to be modified slightly for Debian-based systems when we implement them in the Assimilation suite.
