Chris Farris

I’ve spoken a lot about Security Invariants, but all of them have been implemented using Organizational Policies. That’s great, but organizational policies don’t apply to the Organizational Management Account (aka “payer”). So how does one implement invariants in a payer account?

AWS would tell you that you shouldn’t be giving anyone access to the payer account, so the need for invariants should be minimal. However, that doesn’t reflect the reality that AWS never protected its customers from themselves and prevented the enabling of Organizations or Control Tower in an account with existing workloads. I would say this is a failure of Customer Obsession and demonstrates Security is not the Top Priority. AWS would hide behind shared responsibility and blame the customer.

Regardless, there are many cases where workloads are in a payer account, and as a security person, you need to live with those workloads while protecting the rest of the AWS Organization. So, how do we build invariants into a payer account when SCPs and RCPs don’t apply?

Enter Permission Boundaries.

I’ve finally settled on the wording for Farris’s Three Laws of Cloud Security Auto Remediation:

• A bot must never harm stateful data or allow stateful data to come to harm.
• A bot must act with utmost haste so functionality doesn’t become dependent on a misconfiguration.
• A bot must announce its existence and tell a carbon-based life form what it did and why.

I think these reflect the key tenants of auto-remediation while staying true to the original source of the Three Laws.

In previous posts, I took AWS to task for not making the customer’s security Job Zero. This offended some sensibilities, so let me lay out my 95 13 Thesis against the current AWS Culture and how it is neither Customer-Obsessed, nor makes security job zero.

It’s once again pre:Invent, that magical season where AWS announces new features related to their legacy products (cloud) before they jump all-in on Generative AI magician gimmicks at re:Invent in Las Vegas. Once again, I will be in attendance at re:Invent, although I start to question my life choices every time I get off the plane in Vegas and am hit by the dry air, cigarette smoke, and insanely bright lights. Oh, right, I agreed to do a breakout session with Rich Mogull: DEV401 - Security invariants: From enterprise chaos to cloud order. We’re in Mandalay Bay (which is on the ass end of the strip) and in a silent disco setup, so I won’t be offended if you don’t attend, but if you do, Rich and I will probably set up for lunch somewhere afterward and talk about practical cloud security.

This is also my 5th year doing a pre:Invent round up. I almost decided not to do one. I’m in Germany this Thanksgiving week giving thanks that I’m not in the US for a bit. But at least it is conditioning me for the cigarette smoke onslaught I’ll experience in the casinos.

In order to profit effectively from a ransomware attack, a threat actor needs to have something to offer in return for payment. This blog post outlines a process to encrypt AWS resources and then revoke access to the secret material until the ransom is paid.

Apparently, this post caused some consternation at AWS, and perhaps this technique is too effective to publish here. So, the original post has been revised to remove the actual scripts, include some mitigations, and provide commentary on how both Public Cloud (AWS Included) and Generative AI are dangerous tools in the hands of the general public and need more regulation.

Cloud Hygiene is a Cloud Security problem, and we need to cleanup the pollution in our cloud environments

In September 2024, I returned to Stockholm to give a talk at Sec-T. The Slides are here, and the YouTube Video is here.

In the last year or so talking to organizations of all sizes, shapes, and security budgets, it’s become clear there is a deeper problem than just “developers don’t know how to not make a bucket public”. How we as an industry use the public cloud is fundamentally unsafe. We wouldn’t give any random 16-year-old kid with a driver’s license a 787 to fly. Yet, with the public cloud, anyone with a credit card can sign up for one of the most technically complex creations the IT Industry has ever created. Engineers fresh out of school are given access to enterprise cloud tenants and told to deploy their applications. At no point do the cloud providers take reasonable measures to ensure you are qualified to operate the cloud safely, nor are their default auto-pilot settings all that safe.

Sir Winston Churchill, introducing the Universal Cloud Threat Model to the House of Commons, June 1940.

The fine folks at HackCon invited me to Oslo to speak at their security conference. You can find the cloud security ramblings elsewhere on this site; this post is another in my series of practical advice for traveling outside the US.

HackCon was held in Oslo, Norway (cool) in February (wait, what?), and I’m happy to report I made it back home with all my fingers and toes and didn’t freeze to death.

Multicloud is Madness!!!!

Your organization is doing a poor job protecting the one cloud you have. Why in heaven’s name would you want to deploy into another cloud? In this two-part blog post, we’ll cover details from my HackCon 2024 talk “Chris Farris in the MultiCloud of Madness” (slides). Part one is here, and it covers all the weirdness between the three major hyperscalers - AWS, Azure, and GCP. The second part will provide checklists to help you establish Minimally Viable Cloud Governance in each cloud.