Brussels / 30 & 31 January 2016

schedule

Hardening Your Config Management

Security and Attack Vectors in Config Management


Configuration management is a great tool for helping with hardening and securing servers. But with any addition of new technology comes a new attack vector: Who watches the watchers?

Security is painful. Luckily the invention of configuration management tools has made this process easier, by allowing repeatable configuration for common hardening. However there comes a catch-22: How do we harden the configuration management itself?

When you have a tool that enables you to change systems at a fundamental level, it's a fairly tempting target for malicious agents, and one that would cause a lot of problems if compromised.

We'll be discussing some general patterns we can use to mitigate these problems: - Whitelisting "master" API's - Encrypting sensitive data - Adding a security element to code review

And we'll talk about some application specific options for some of most popular tools out there, such as Puppet, Chef, Ansible, cfengine and Salt.

Speakers

Peter Souter

Links