DevSecOps Pune Meetup 4

9th March 2019

This is our 4th DevSecOps meetup. More and More and More swag sponsors added to the list. New sponsors: Elastic, Sonatype, Synk along with previous sponsors i.e. Polyverse and Cloudneeti already into the list. The meetup head count was usual and exact. We have been hitting the correct and intended audience.

Qualys Pune was the venue for the meetup. This is the 2nd time we organized the meetup at Qualys. We started at 10.30 am. We had a huge list of topics this time and I was pretty sure not all of them are going to get discussed since the most voted topics were very interesting. The following topics got discussed:

• Machine Learning for Security: This topic got discussed for a good 40 minutes although none of us was an ML engineer and only understood theoretical ML concepts. The topic was chosen more for a discussion as the person suggester of the topic just had the curiosity to see if this can be done. The topic unfolded as people discussed and understood how ML works and how is it being used in the industry. Different tools like TensorFlow, Pandas, etc got discussed. Once we had a clear picture of ML, we moved to understand what security breaches we experienced in our Ops lives in industry. Based on our experience, we framed logic as to how ML algorithm could be written by Data Science engineers by studying security auth logs and application logs. We also discussed how ELK stack could be used to prove a security attack on system and further. We agreed to the part that as an Ops person we can only best provide inputs and prove security issues in systems. An ML engineer should be the best person to provide inputs on what ML algorithms could be used to mitigate security issues.

•  Ansible for DevSecOps CI/CD pipeline: Ansible was suggested multiple times in the past meetups as well but always went not noticed and never got discussed. In this session, we started with Ansible and went on an on for a good 1 hour. We understood how Ansible is best used in different organizations. We also discussed how a bad code in Ansible can mess up and not make any difference between olden days shell script. We discussed Idempotency feature of Ansible. We also discussed as to how Ansible is being used by some firms for Provisioning, Configuration Management and Deployment altogether. We agreed how many used Puppet for multiple jobs and later moving to a different tool was difficult for them. Hence using different tools for specific different jobs could be useful. We discussed a typical CI/CD workflow with Terraform for provisioning, Ansible for CM and Fabric/Capistrano or different language specific deployment tools for easy deployments and rollbacks. We also did a small white board presentation on how CI/CD can be used for all 3 purposes. We also discussed DR strategies, Cloud managed services like auto-scaling services etc.

• Git for securing code : The suggester was a Developer and knew exactly how was not being used in the best manner to ensure security and highlighted some best ways like code review practices, git hooks to be used in Jenkins, linting analysis using pre-commit hooks, static code analysis with SonarQube before merge. We discussed this in details already in CI/CD pipeline above as well.

• Burpsuite :  Burpsuite was a tool that many knew but never got a chance to use as such. The suggester of the topic had extensive experience using it and spoke about multiple possibilities and usecases that could be achieved using Burpsuite. He also highlighted on how precautions need to be  taken before using this tool for testing giving examples of one of his projects. Burpsuite indeed was very interesting for many members and we decided to have a demo session on this.

Takeaways from this session for speakers to prepare were:

•  Session required on ML in security
• Demo on CI/CD in DevSecOps
• Demo on Burpsuite

Many topics that did not get discussed were:

• Nexus scan in Jenkins pipeline
• SonarQube for secure code analysis
• Pentesting with Python
• IOT Security
• Metasploit for pentesting
• Cloud security
• Prowler
• Automobile software release cycle and missing lacking devops chain
• Maven
• Regulations

In the end Shirish wanted to highlight the recent All Intel Chips Open To New 'Spoiler' Non-Spectre Attack

Some clicks :)

Infrastructure Monitoring with Nagios

Image Credits : xmodulo

Server management is a real pain and the pain keeps getting worse with more and more server getting added to the infrastructure. So how do organizations sustain with huge server farms, datacenters in place? How can super admins promise an SLA of 99.99% uptime with a very low response and resolution time? Quiet obviously the answer is server monitoring solutions. It could have been so tedious for a human to monitor servers 24x7 especially when most of the systems are stable and its only once in a while some manual intervention is needed.

So what is it that needs to be really monitored? It really depends from one organization to other. For a  web development platform, response time of the page may matter a lot. The kind of traffic, 4xx's 5xx's could be a concern too. Disk Space, CPU, Memory, Swap space, particular processes and services running, DB server replication, read writes, no. of connections, query execution time and many more parameters together. Most of these checks are required by all organizations. Out of the many monitoring tools out there, one of the most used is Nagios.

Nagios is an open source software application that helps in monitoring systems, network and Infrastructure. Nagios is on top of the Linux and hence, whatever you could do with Linux could also be done with Nagios. The best part of using Nagios is the plugin based architecture and 100's and 1000's of plugins that it supports to literally allow you to monitor anything.

Nagios comes with multiple notable features that makes it distinguishing. It uses the standard protocols i.e TCP, UDP, ICMP for monitoring servers across network. You can perform multiple resource checks on any host using the NRPE addon, the checks varies from CPU, Disk RAM and many more. Not just resource checks, you could also add event handlers that perform certain actions when certain events are noticed. Checks are performed at the specified intervals, by default the interval is 5 minutes. There are 2 types of checks, Active - The one that are nags initiated. Passive - The one that are initiated externally.

Nagios consists of various objects that needs to be defined and used.

1. Hosts : Hosts are the systems/ servers that need to be monitored in the infrastructure. Nagios also provides the facility to group set of hosts together to give a better monitoring experience. Say you can group all web servers together in a "WebServers" host group. Typically a host definition may look like : "define host{
   use                             linux-box 
   host_name                       test_host 
   alias                           CentOS 6 
   address                         5.175.142.66 
   }"
2. Services : Services are the checks that needs to be performed. There are a wide range of service checks that can be performed on any host. Just like host group, service checks can also be grouped together. E.g you may need to check the CPU utilization of all servers together, you may group it that way. A service definition may look like : "define service{
           use                     generic-service
           host_name               test_host
           service_description     CPU Load
           check_command           check_nrpe!check_load 
           }"
3. Contacts : Contacts are the people who need to be contacted if a notification needs to be sent for any event that occurs. You can configure contacts to send emails, samosas, or even custom messages to any service that allows messaging. Contacts can also be grouped together into a contact group. E.g there is a notification about come process getting shut down on QA server that the Admin may not necessarily be bothered about, in such a case the notification can only be sent to QA group. A contact definition will look like : "[define contact{
           name                            generic-contact
           service_notification_period     24x7
           host_notification_period        24x7
           service_notification_options    w,u,c,r,f,s
           host_notification_options       d,u,r,f,s
           service_notification_commands   notify-service-by-email
           host_notification_commands      notify-host-by-email
           register                        0   
   
           }"
4. Commands : Commands define the exact command that will be executed on the remote hosts while executing a particular check. These are the simplest way to get particular check executed, you may also pass bash commands to perform any particular check. A command definition may look like : "define command{
           command_name check_nrpe
           command_line $USER1$/check_nrpe -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -c $ARG1$
           }"
5. Time Period : If a downtime is scheduled at a particular time regularly and you don't want Nagios to send you any alert at these hours, you can achieve this by adding a time period definition. This looks like : "define timeperiod{
           timeperiod_name 24x7-except-night-12-2
           alias           24x7 Except 00:00 - 02:00
           sunday          02:00-23:59
           monday          02:00-23:59
           tuesday         02:00-23:59
           wednesday       02:00-23:59
           thursday        02:00-23:59
           friday          02:00-23:59
           saturday        02:00-23:59
   }"

You can also set a monitoring schedule for a particular object if you do not want to add it to the existing service/hosts check. This allows you to explicitly look at a particular check.

Sometimes writing the definition can become a real pain using the same definition for all services and hosts can be a real pain even if you decide to copy-paste the definitions. Templates come for help here. You can define a template with all the necessary details of definition and simply use the same template everywhere in the configs. A typical template definition look like :

define host{

        name                            generic-host    

        notifications_enabled           1               

        event_handler_enabled           1               

        flap_detection_enabled          1               

        process_perf_data               1               

        retain_status_information       1               

        retain_nonstatus_information    1               

        notification_period             24x7            

        register                        0               

        }

define contact{

        name                            generic-contact         

        service_notification_period     24x7                    

        host_notification_period        24x7                    

        service_notification_options    w,u,c,r,f,s             

        host_notification_options       d,u,r,f,s               

        service_notification_commands   notify-service-by-email 

        host_notification_commands      notify-host-by-email    

        register                        0                        

        }

Monitoring in Nagios is parallel, i.e a number of hosts and service checks will go simultaneously in parallel. This could be resource consuming but this is always better than sequential monitoring as you can be sure that all your servers are doing well and don't have to wait too long for any kind of update. The add ons for Nagios are simple to make and add to the Nagios community. The configs are all split and simple to understand too. Nagios has a huge documentation and help examples for quickly getting started. 

Happy Monitoring!!

Looking for Free Windows OS? ReactOS is here.

Some rights reserved by Plum Lady

I keep looking for free stuff available online. In the early days when my searches were only limited to torrents, keygens, patches etc, didn't get much of a exposure to free legal stuff. FOSS came for rescue and then many different things lined up. Thanks to Ubuntu!!! Its been more than 3 years that i quit windows for daily use... But what haunts me at times is the when there is some software that i need to use desperately and its setup is only available for Windows. Wine helps many a times but not always. At times i felt, if Windows could be free too ... :(

Then on one fine day i wanted to make a doc. I use Libre generally. But this one needed to be highly compatible since i was suppose to send it to some windows user. I got Office 2007 installed in Wine. I used it for quite sometime and then it started throwing some weird error and got closed time and again. At this instance the first thing is googled is Free and open source windows like OS. While there were many linux pages pulled up that i already knew about, this one caught my attention. "Free and Open Source Windows like OS - ReactOS ".

So, what is ReactOS? Its an effort to provide Free and Open Source alternative to Windows. The term "React" also comes from a reaction of dissatisfaction of Microsoft's monopolistic position(source Wikipedia).

ReactOS is an Open Source implementation of NT family of windows. A part of the implementation has been assisted from Wine. The OS is still in its alpha stage and has been selected as a best project from Forge Magazine.

Many alternatives for the set up are available i.e VM images, iso images etc for everyone to have maximum access. The site has all kind of download options available. If in case you happen to find some issue in the installation, you can always report it to the team in their JIRA. The installations are both automated and manual for testing purpose.

You can even contribute to the community as a Dev, QA, Release or Tech Writer. Wishing to get this one released soon. :) 

Free and Open Source Alternatives for most of the paid softwares on Windows Machine

 Some rights reserved by opensource.com

I have recently been using windows more than usual for official use. Being an Ubuntu user i am not much used to either use a trial version of any paid software or pay for any software. I googled a lot for my daily use softwares to make my life comfortable and found that almost for every paid software there was an alternative in the Free and Open Source World. Here is what i found:

• Operating System : Widows (Paid) -> ReactOS (Alternative) I have a different blog written for this.
• Office Utility : Microsoft Office (Paid) -> Libre Office, Open Office(Alternative). For years i only knew about Open Office as an open source alternative. However after going through the threads on Ubuntu forums as to why was Libre Office considered over Open Office as a default Office utility for the OS i came to know that Libre Office development was far too faster than that of Open Office. I even saw the results myself to verify this fact. I would recommend Libre Office for the same reason.
• Video/Music Player : Windows Media Player (Most Probably Paid - I have hardly heard of Microsoft ever releasing anything free of cost :D) -> VLC media Player, Media Player Classic(Alternative).
• Remote File Sharing : WinSCP, FileZilla, Putty
• IDE for C# Programming : Microsoft Visual Studio (Paid) -> Sharp Develop (Alternative) (Although i was looking for Command line utility as i am only used to VIM as such, but found this one and made a note of it.
• File Compression : WinRAR, WinZIP(Paid) -> 7zip(Alternative)
• PDF Reader : Adobe Acrobat Reader(Freeware+Commercial) -> Foxit(Alternative)
• Email Client : Outlook(Paid) -> Thunderbird(Alternative)
• VM : VMWare(Paid) -> VirtualBox(Alternative)
• Reference Management : Zotero (Zotero is another good add-on cum software for Reference Management. You can save your websites and URL/PDF preferences online so that whenever you clean your cache on browsers and you desperately needed some link and you cleared your cache and reinstalled new browser. You can check your Zotero and get URL/PDF back as all these preferences are stored online in your separate account.)
• Cloud Storage : GoogleDrive/Dropbox