Defense in depth with Calico Cloud

Last month, we announced the launch of our active cloud-native application runtime security. Calico Cloud’s active runtime security helps security teams secure their containerized workloads with a holistic approach to threat detection, prevention, and mitigation.

As security teams look to secure these workloads, it’s also critical that they employ a defense-in-depth strategy. Calico Cloud’s active runtime security can detect, prevent, and mitigate threats across the entire cyber kill chain for containerized workloads.

What is the cyber kill chain?

The cyber kill chain is a framework used to track the steps a threat actor might take as they attempt to execute a cyber attack on your organization. The cyber kill chain was originally developed by Lockheed Martin to adapt the military concept that details the structure of an attack for cybersecurity threats. Today, this framework is used by security teams from a wide range of organizations to understand and respond to cybersecurity threats.

The Lockheed Martin cyber kill chain consists of seven stages:

• Reconnaissance: An attacker assesses potential targets and tactics for an attack
• Weaponization: An attacker prepares the attack by obtaining or setting up the appropriate infrastructure
• Delivery: An attacker launches their attack
• Exploitation: An attacker gains access to their Continue reading

Zero-trust for cloud-native workloads

There has been a huge uptick in microservices adoption in the data analytics domain, primarily aided by machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) projects. Some of the reasons why containers are popular among ML developers is the ease of portability, scalability, and quick access to data using services—specifically network services. The rise of cloud-native applications, especially for big data in the analytics sector, makes these applications a prime target for cyber crime.

Preventing threat actors from breaching the network and accessing critical data or applications is a daunting task for one team or individual to take on alone. DevOps and security engineers, SREs, and platform architects all need to work together to facilitate the process. These teams are usually presented with two challenges:

• Since the fundamental architecture model of microservices is distributed, it is imperative that east-west traffic is present. With most common deployments using a multi-cloud or hybrid model, there is no real network perimeter.
• One or more microservices will access external services such as 3rd-party cloud services, APIs, and applications, resulting in multiple ingress/egress points for north-south traffic.

This article talks about what organizations need to know about zero trust for cloud-native workloads, and how zero trust Continue reading

How to maximize K3s resource efficiency using Calico’s eBPF data plane

Amazon’s custom-built Graviton processor allows users to create ARM instances in the AWS public cloud, and Rancher K3s is an excellent way to run Kubernetes in these instances. By allowing a lightweight implementation of Kubernetes optimized for ARM with a single binary, K3s simplifies the cluster initialization process down to executing a simple command.

In an earlier article, I discussed how ARM architecture is becoming a rival to x86 in cloud computing, and steps that can be taken to leverage this situation and be prepared for this new era. Following the same narrative, in this article I’ll look at an example of the Calico eBPF data plane running on AWS, using Terraform to bootstrap our install to AWS, and Rancher K3s to deploy the cluster.

A few changes to Calico are needed for ARM compatibility, including updating parts, enabling eBPF, and compiling operators for the ARM64 environment:.

• Tigera Operator – Tigera Operator is the recommended way to install Calico.
• go-build – go-build is a container environment packed with all the utilities that Calico requires in its compilation process.
• Calico-node – Calico-node is the pod that hosts Felix (i.e. it is the brain that carries control plane decisions fto Continue reading

What a more holistic approach to cloud-native security and observability looks like

The rise of cloud native and containerization, along with the automation of the CI/CD pipeline, introduced fundamental changes to existing application development, deployment, and security paradigms. Because cloud native is so different from traditional architectures, both in how workloads are developed and how they need to be secured, there is a need to rethink our approach to security in these environments.

As stated in this article, security for cloud-native applications should take a holistic approach where security is not an isolated concern, but rather a shared responsibility. Collaboration is the name of the game here. In order to secure cloud-native deployments, the application, DevOps, and security teams need to work together to make sure security happens earlier in the development cycle and is more closely associated with the development process.

Since Kubernetes is the most popular container orchestrator and many in the industry tend to associate it with cloud native, let’s look at this holistic approach by breaking it down into a framework for securing Kubernetes-native environments.

Framework

At a high level, the framework for securing cloud-native environments consists of three stages: build, deploy, and runtime.

Build

In the build stage, developers write code and the code gets compiled, Continue reading

Calico Cloud: Active Build and Runtime Security for Cloud-Native Applications

Calico Cloud has just celebrated its 1-year anniversary! And what better way to celebrate than to launch new features and capabilities that help users address their most urgent cloud security needs.

Over the past year, the Tigera team has seen rapid adoption of Calico Cloud for security and observability of cloud-native applications. With this new release, Calico Cloud becomes the first in the industry to offer the most comprehensive active cloud-native application security that goes beyond detecting threats to limit exposure and automatically mitigate risks in real time.

With news of new zero-day threats emerging almost every day (e.g. Argo CD, Chrome Browser), the current security approach needs to evolve. We need active build, deploy, and runtime security, all together, instead of using a siloed approach. Security threats, vulnerabilities, and risks for all three areas should be addressed together, by the same security platform, rather than using multiple disjointed tools. Calico Cloud does just that!

With Calico Cloud, you can reduce your cloud-native application’s attack surface, harness machine learning to combat runtime security risks from known and unknown zero-day threats, enable continuous compliance, and prioritize and mitigate the risks from vulnerabilities and attacks.

Let’s take a look Continue reading

Why you need Tigera’s new active cloud-native application security

First-generation security solutions for cloud-native applications have been failing because they apply a legacy mindset where the focus is on vulnerability scanning instead of a holistic approach to threat detection, threat prevention, and remediation. Given that the attack surface of modern applications is much larger than in traditional apps, security teams are struggling to keep up and we’ve seen a spike in breaches.

To better protect cloud-native applications, we need solutions that focus on threat prevention by reducing the attack surface. With this foundation, we can then layer on threat detection and threat mitigation strategies.

I have exciting news to share on this front! Today, Tigera launched new capabilities in its Calico product line to help you address your most urgent cloud security needs. Before getting into a discussion about the features themselves, I’d like to talk about the driving force behind the changes, our thought process, and why we’re well-positioned to bring these to market.

A new runtime security model

To properly secure modern cloud-native applications, we need to use a modern architecture that aligns with them. At Tigera, we’ve created a model we call active cloud-native application runtime security. This model has three components:

• Threat prevention – Effectively Continue reading

Introducing our exciting new ambassador program: Calico Big Cats

The Project Calico community is one of the most collaborative and supportive communities in the open-source space. Our community has shown great engagement through the years, which has helped us maintain and grow the project.

Thanks to our 200+ contributors from all over the world, Calico Open Source (the solution born out of the project) is powering 1.5M+ nodes daily across 166 countries. Our engineering team is committed to maintaining Calico Open Source as the leading standard for container and Kubernetes networking and security!

Given our community’s passion for Project Calico, we wanted to give its members a chance to inspire others by telling their stories. To this end, we are very excited to announce our new Calico Big Cats ambassador program!

What is Calico Big Cats?

Calico Big Cats is an ambassador program that provides a platform for our community to talk about their experiences with Calico. The goal is to help community members connect, inspire, and share common challenges and ways to overcome these challenges using Calico and other tools.

Why join Calico Big Cats?

If you have experience with Project Calico, recognize its value in the open-source networking and security domain, and are passionate about sharing Continue reading

Is ARM architecture the future of cloud computing?

Central processing units (CPUs) can be compared to the human brain in that their unique architecture allows them to solve mathematical equations in different ways. x86 is the dominant architecture used in cloud computing at the time of this writing; however, it is worth noting that this architecture is not efficient for every scenario, and its proprietary nature is causing an industry shift toward ARM.

ARM (Advanced RISC Machines) is a type of CPU architecture that powers most tablets and smartphones, as well as the fastest supercomputer in the world (supercomputer Fugaku). ARM’s low power consumption and high computational performance make it a worthy rival for x86 in cloud computing.

In this article, I will talk about a few popular ARM projects, the main difference between x86 and ARM architectures, and explore how we can prepare developers for the future by providing them with an ARM-based container environment.

ARM versus x86

Companies are increasing their pursuit to leverage ARM in order to reduce both cost and energy consumption. While x86 remains a proprietary CPU architecture, ARM provides licenses to other companies allowing them to design their own custom-built processors using ARM’s patented technology.

Amazon’s custom-designed Graviton processor is a great Continue reading

How to Monitor Calico’s eBPF Data Plane for Proactive Cluster Management

Monitoring is a critical part of any computer system that has been brought in to a production-ready state. No IT system exists in true isolation, and even the simplest systems interact in interesting ways with the systems “surrounding” them. Since compute time, memory, and long-term storage are all finite, it’s necessary at the very least to understand how these things are being allocated.

Why Does the Calico eBPF Data Plane Support Metrics?

Perhaps this question seems contrived. However, it’s always worth spending a moment thinking about reasons before adding any technical complexity to a distributed system! After all, they are already quite complicated! So why does the Calico eBPF data plane support metrics through Prometheus and Grafana?

Well, the Calico eBPF data plane is production ready and widely deployed, so a well-configured Kubernetes cluster with the Calico eBPF data plane correctly enabled will be stable and reliable. However, distributed systems are inherently complex and when dealing with them, it is generally good practice to instrument and baseline metrics wherever they are available. Doing so provides many benefits, especially for capacity planning, change management, and as an early-warning or smoke-testing system.

Additionally, seeing a running distributed system fully instrumented can be Continue reading

Why cloud native requires a holistic approach to security and observability

Like any great technology, the interest in and adoption of Kubernetes (an excellent way to orchestrate your workloads, by the way) took off as cloud native and containerization grew in popularity. With that came a lot of confusion. Everyone was using Kubernetes to move their workloads, but as they went through their journey to deployment, they weren’t thinking about security until they got to production. While this might seem like the intuitive thing to do, it doesn’t work in Kubernetes.

With Kubernetes, you can’t wait until the end when you’re ready to move workloads to production; you need to think about security early on. If security is not thought through in a system like Kubernetes, workloads are left vulnerable and you will not end up with a solution that is effective.

Why is this? What makes cloud native so different? Let’s take a look at some of the differences to understand why they warrant a more holistic approach to security and observability for cloud-native applications, whether in Kubernetes or another environment.

Cloud native: Origins, key differences, and challenges

What we’re used to (if we remove cloud native from the equation) is having a client-server architecture, where servers are running Continue reading

Extending Panorama’s firewall address groups into your Kubernetes cluster using Calico NetworkSets

When deploying cloud-native applications to a hybrid and multi-cloud environment that is protected by traditional perimeter-based firewalls, such as Palo Alto Networks (PAN) Panorama, you need to work within the confines of your existing IT security architecture. For applications that communicate with external resources outside the Kubernetes cluster, a traditional firewall is typically going to be part of that communication.

A good practice is to enable enterprise security teams to leverage existing firewall platforms, processes, and architectures to protect access to Kubernetes workloads.

Calico Enterprise already extends Panorama’s firewall manager to Kubernetes. The firewall manager creates a zone-based architecture for your Kubernetes cluster, and Calico reads those firewall rules and translates them into Kubernetes security policies that control traffic between your applications.

With its 3.11 release, Calico Enterprise extends its integration with PAN firewalls to include Panorama address groups in sync with Calico NetworkSets. The new release provides granular application security for your cloud-native application and eliminates workflow complexity.

This integration helps users to:

• Eliminate complex workflows when using existing PAN firewalls with Kubernetes workloads
• Extend their Panorama firewall investment to cloud-native applications
• Provide granular application security for their cloud-native applications

Why Calico’s integration is important

Cloud-native workloads require Continue reading

Faster troubleshooting of microservices, containers, and Kubernetes with Dynamic Packet Capture

Troubleshooting container connectivity issues and performance hotspots in Kubernetes clusters can be a frustrating exercise in a dynamic environment where hundreds, possibly thousands of pods are continually being created and destroyed. If you are a DevOps or platform engineer and need to troubleshoot microservices and application connectivity issues, or figure out why a service or application is performing slowly, you might use traditional packet capture methods like executing tcpdump against a container in a pod. This might allow you to achieve your task in a siloed single-developer environment, but enterprise-level troubleshooting comes with its own set of mandatory requirements and scale. You don’t want to be slowed down by these requirements, but rather address them in order to shorten the time to resolution.

Dynamic Packet Capture is a Kubernetes-native way that helps you to troubleshoot your microservices and applications quickly and efficiently without granting extra permissions. Let’s look at a specific use case to see some challenges and best practices for live troubleshooting with packet capture in a Kubernetes environment.

Use case: CoreDNS service degradation

Let’s talk about this use case in the context of a hypothetical situation.

Scenario

Your organization’s DevOps and platform teams are trying to figure out Continue reading

How network policies can protect your environment from future vulnerabilities like Log4j

If you have access to the internet, it’s likely that you have already heard of the critical vulnerability in the Log4j library. A zero-day vulnerability in the Java library Log4j, with the assigned CVE code of CVE-2021-44228, has been disclosed by Chen Zhaojun, a security researcher in the Alibaba Cloud Security team. It’s got people worried—and with good reason.

This is a serious flaw that needs to be addressed right away, since it can result in remote code execution (RCE) in many cases. By now, I have seen many creative ways in which this can be used to infiltrate or disturb services. The right solution is to identify and patch your vulnerable Log4j installations to the fixed versions as soon as possible. If you are using Log4j, make sure you are following this page where you can find the latest news about the vulnerability.

What else should you be doing, though, for this and similar exploits? In this blog post, I’ll look at the impact of the vulnerability in a Kubernetes cluster, and share a couple of ways that you can prevent such vulnerabilities in the future.

How does the Log4j vulnerability work?

On its own, the Log4j vulnerability Continue reading

Experiment with Calico BGP in the Comfort of Your Own Laptop!

Yes, you read that right – in the comfort of your own laptop, as in, the entire environment running inside your laptop! Why? Well, read on. It’s a bit of a long one, but there is a lot of my learning that I would like to share.

I often find that Calico Open Source users ask me about BGP, and whether they need to use it, with a little trepidation. BGP carries an air of mystique for many IT engineers, for two reasons. Firstly, before its renaissance as a data center protocol, BGP was seen to be the domain of ISPs and service provider networks. Secondly, many high-profile and high-impact Internet outages have been due to BGP misuse or misconfiguration.

The short answer to the question is that in public cloud Kubernetes deployments, it is almost never necessary to configure or use BGP to make best use of Calico Open Source. Even in on-premise Kubernetes deployments, it is only needed in certain scenarios; you shouldn’t configure BGP unless you know why you need it. It is even less common to require complex BGP setups involving route reflectors and the like.

Helping You Benefit from our Pluggable eBPF Data Plane – Introducing the New Calico eBPF Data Plane Certification

Why Create a Course About Calico’s eBPF Data Plane?

Calico is the industry standard for Kubernetes networking and security. It offers a proven platform for your workloads across a huge range of environments, including cloud, hybrid, and on-premises. 

Calico has had a high-quality, production-ready, performant, eBPF data plane option for some time!

However, although many users are deploying it in production and benefitting, we still sometimes see users who don’t know that Calico has an eBPF data plane or feel confident deploying it, and:

• Don’t understand the benefits of Calico’s pluggable architecture
• Don’t fully understand what eBPF is
• Don’t know that Calico has an eBPF data plane
• Don’t understand why it is not the default Calico data plane or best choice
• Don’t feel confident to deploy the Calico eBPF data plane

We created the new CCO-L2-EBPF (Certified Calico Operator: eBPF) course specifically to address these points. The course will help you to understand the strengths of eBPF and when it is, or is not, the right choice. It will also help you see how easy it is to deploy the Calico eBPF data plane if you have made the choice that it is right for you and your cluster.

Continue reading

Calico WireGuard support with Azure CNI

Last June, Tigera announced a first for Kubernetes: supporting open-source WireGuard for encrypting data in transit within your cluster. We never like to sit still, so we have been working hard on some exciting new features for this technology, the first of which is support for WireGuard on AKS using the Azure CNI.

First a short recap about what WireGuard is, and how we use it in Calico.

What is WireGuard?

WireGuard is a VPN technology available in the Linux kernel since version 5.6 and is positioned as an alternative to IPsec and OpenVPN. It aims to be faster, simpler, leaner and more useful. This is manifested in WireGuard taking an opinionated stance on the configurability of supported ciphers and algorithms to reduce the attack surface and auditability of the technology. It is simple to configure with standard Linux networking commands, and it is only approximately 4,000 lines of code, making it easy to read, understand, and audit.

While WireGuard is a VPN technology and is typically thought of as client/server, it can be configured and used equally effectively in a peer-to-peer mesh architecture, which is how we designed our solution at Tigera to work in Kubernetes. Using Calico, Continue reading

Turbocharging AKS networking with Calico eBPF

A single Kubernetes cluster expends a small percentage of its total available assigned resources on delivering in-cluster networking. We don’t have to be satisfied with this, though—achieving the lowest possible overhead can provide significant cost savings and performance improvements if you are running network-intensive workloads. This article explores and explains the improvements that can be achieved in Microsoft Azure using Calico eBPF in AKS, including reducing CPU usage, decreasing complexity, enabling easier compliance and troubleshooting, and more.

Before going into details about how exactly Calico takes advantage of eBPF, it is important to note that in the context of this article, Calico is viewed as an additional networking layer on top of Azure CNI, providing functionality that turbocharges its performance. In particular, the standard instructions for installing Calico’s network policy engine with AKS use a version of Calico that pre-dates eBPF mode.

Accelerating network performance

Test methodology

To show how Calico accelerates AKS network performance using eBPF, the Calico team ran a series of network performance benchmarks based on the k8s-bench-suite. These performance benchmarks compared the latest Calico eBPF data plane (using the iptables data plane) with a vanilla AKS cluster.

Tests were run using Standard_D2s_v3 nodes, which are a Continue reading

Real-time threat response for Kubernetes workloads, using threat intelligence feeds and deep packet inspection

Cloud-native transformations come with many security and troubleshooting challenges. Real-time intrusion detection and the prevention of continuously evolving threats is challenging for cloud-native applications in Kubernetes. Due to the ephemeral nature of pods, it is difficult to determine source or destination endpoints and limit their blast radius.

Traditional perimeter-based firewalls are not ideal fit for Kubernetes and containers. Firewalls have traditionally been used to block attacks at the perimeter, but if the perimeter is breached, there’s no protection from within the cluster. The dynamic nature of Kubernetes requires a specialized approach to intrusion detection and prevention for containers, Kubernetes, and cloud.

Threat intelligence feeds, which record and track the IP addresses of known bad actors, are a critical part of modern cloud-native security. Calico Cloud now provides threat intelligence feeds, such as AlienVault, as part of its default security policies. This means that traffic to suspicious IPs is blocked from day one without the need for any extra configuration. Additionally, an anomaly detection dashboard in Calico’s UI shows full context, including which pod(s) was involved so you can analyze and remediate.

Another advanced method for intrusion detection and prevention introduced in Calico Cloud is deep packet inspection (DPI). DPI inspects, Continue reading

What’s New in Calico v3.21

It’s that time again; we’re really happy to announce Calico v3.21! As always, thank you to everyone who contributed to this release! For detailed release notes, please go here. Alongside the usual-but-essential bug fixes and other improvements, there are some big new improvements to be aware of:

BGP Improvements

Calico supports BGP, which is used within the cluster in some scenarios, and to allow you to integrate cluster routing with your upstream network devices. Now though, you can even view the status of your BGP sessions, including RIB / FIB contents, and agent health via the new CalicoNodeStatus API. See the API documentation for more details.

In addition, you get more granular control; you can control BGP advertisement of certain prefixes using the new disableBGPExport option on each IP pool.

Service-based network policy improvements

If you aren’t already familiar with them, the egress policy rules that can match on Kubernetes services, introduced in v3.20, are pretty transformative. However we have improved even further upon them in two ways:

• Now, you can use service matches in Calico NetworkPolicy and GlobalNetworkPolicy ingress rules.
• And, you can even now use service-based network policy rules on Windows nodes!

Option to run Calico Continue reading

We’ve just published a book on container and cloud-native application security and observability

We are excited to announce the release of our O’Reilly book, Kubernetes security and observability: A holistic approach to securing containers and cloud-native applications. The book, authored by Tigera’s Brendan Creane and Amit Gupta, helps you learn how to adopt a holistic security and observability strategy for building and securing cloud-native applications running on Kubernetes.

Security practitioners are faced with a wide range of considerations when securing, observing, and troubleshooting containerized workloads on Kubernetes. These considerations range from infrastructure choices and cluster configuration to deployment controls and runtime and network security. Although securing cloud-native applications can be a daunting task, our book will give you the knowledge and confidence you’ll need to establish security and observability for your cloud-native applications.

In 11 chapters, the book covers topics relevant to containers and cloud-native applications in detail, including:

• Infrastructure security
• Workload deployment controls and runtime security
• Network policy
• Managing trust across teams
• Exposing services to external clients
• Encryption of data in transit
• Threat defense and intrusion detection
• And more…

After reading the book, you’ll have gained an understanding of key concepts behind security and observability for cloud-native applications, how to determine the best strategy, and which technology choices are available to support Continue reading