Continuous Deployment - The New #1 Security Feature, from BSildesLA 2012

Continuous Deployment
The New #1 Security Feature

Nick Galbreath Security BSides Los Angeles
http://www.client9.com/ Hermosa Beach
nickg@client.com Aug 16, 2012
@ngalbreath

Continuous Deployment? #1 Security Feature?

Nick Galbreath BSidesLA Aug16,2012 @ngalbreath

whoami
Nick Galbreath www.client9.com @ngalbreath

• Director of Engineering, Etsy

• enterprise, fraud, security, fun

• But.. on very good terms.
In fact Etsy sponsored my trip here

• VP Engineering, “Company Conﬁdential”

• Stay tuned for details

Context Alert!
• My background is software development

• Mostly in public, web-facing applications

• Everything from C to PHP

• Your mileage may vary if you are in different
industries, with different risk proﬁles


Problem Statement
• Web App vulnerabilities aren’t conceptually that
hard and should be easy to deal with.

• In spite (or because) of our efforts, security is an
“end of line” process or whack-a-mole

• Security education has been at best marginally
useful to developers (in the large, your organization
may be different).

• How can we get ever get ahead?


How did we get here?


The Software Product Model
Code ﬂows to functional groups.

• Product Managers spec code

• Engineers write code

• QA tests code

• Security tests code

• Release engineers package code

• Operations runs code


High Distribution Cost
The Software Product Model is designed for applications
where the cost of distribution is high. Where “high” might be
measure by risk, money, time, resources, customer annoyance.

• Retail, CD/DVDs

• Embedded or Exotic Hardware

• Safety, Medical or Defense Systems

• Operating Systems (phone or desktop)

• Your Homework (1-time deploy)


SPM -SDLC
Release
QA Ops
QA
Commits

freeze
Specs Development Bug Fix / New Specs
Slush

time in weeks or months

SPM-Production
Changes to Production

a ng g
B igB B an
Big

Major Release Minor Releases Major Release

New Features going live are 100% correlated
with volume of changes to production.

Nothing wrong with this
given the requirements.
Given high distribution costs, it makes sense to
front-load the development process


WebApps Y2K
• Mostly followed software product model since
that’s all we knew

• High barrier to entry

• Specialized Hardware, software, people to get
started

• Lots of engineering to keep things running and
scaling.


True Story
• “Can’t push out the spelling error change
since it’s too risky”

• “That code has already been through QA, it’s
locked down.”

• “Product has to prioritize that, else we aren’t
touching it.”
his ls
T l
e
Sm

WebApps 2012

• Almost no barrier to entry

• Commodity hardware

• “Learn PHP in 24 hours”

• Scaling problems can be outsourced (sorta)


WebApps 2012 and
Cost of Distribution

• Moving a few megabytes from source control
to a few machines in production over a 1Gb
or 10Gb link.

• In other words... free!


Given this and
competitive /customer
expectations, it’s not
unreasonable to expect
an SDLC moves faster
than the Software
Product Model

On the other hand,
WebApps 2012 have very
different failure cases


The Nature of Failure
• WebApps 2012 are data-driven.

• and frequently have APIs, user-generated content,
social features (unexpected use cases, new problems)

• Failure might be due to algorithm problems, but...

• ...more likely it’s bad user input, bad data in database,
or operational load.

• This means data added in the past might cause
problems in the future. Complicated!


When SPM meets WebApp2012
• There is a long time between code-written to code-
deployed. This “non-value added” steps for what
should be low-cost changes.

• Might be weeks or months before code deployed.

• Feedback loop between code in dev and code in
production broken.

• When the bug/security report comes in, it’s likely the
engineer is on a different project.

• Any wonder that engineers don’t care for operations
or security?


Hypothesis
• It is impossible to simulate the production
environment in development, either to
operational differences or data differences.

• No amount of QA or Security Testing can prove
you don’t have bugs, vulnerabilities, or won’t
cause severe operational problems.

• You have bugs and vulnerabilities right now
your site.


Conclusion:
Your Screwed!


• Company wide push to move faster

• Being a bottleneck isn’t acceptable.

• Nor is giving up or saying “need more
resources”

• Engineers disengaged

• Looming security disaster awaits

• Whack-a-Mole doesn’t scale


If we want to ﬁx
Security,

we have to ﬁx
Development.

Continuous
Deployment
A System of Software Production Characterized By
Numerous Small Changes to the Production Environment
or
That Crazy Shit That Etsy Does. And Google. And
Facebook. And Amazon. And Twitter. And NetFlix.
So maybe not that crazy.


CD -Changes to
Production
new feature
new feature

New Features are not correlated with volume
of changes to production


Developers are responsible
and conﬁdent in
their code.

In Production

What If You Had a Button that said
DEPLOY
•Pushes whatever is on HEAD/TRUNK to production.
•In about a minute.
•Anyone is allowed to push it.

This button logs who performed the change, and what
the change was, but no other rules or controls.


Take 1: Fear
• Likely no one is going to
push it since they are afraid
they’ll break something.

• Meanwhile un-deployed
code keeps piling up.

ex. New hires are terriﬁed of
deploying an... HTML change!
“but I don’t want to break Etsy!”


Take 2: First Attempt

• At some point, some brave sole will put their
code on TRUNK, and push the button.

• It’s likely someone else tells them that their
feature blew up the site or doesn’t work, and
to please role it back.


Take 3: With Graphs
• The developer learns that they’d don’t know
how the code runs in production and they need
some way of understanding how it works.

• Enter Graphite/Ganglia/StatsD!
http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/
measure-anything-measure-everything/

• Make it free to monitor anything in the
application and expose that to everyone.


Take 4: Push It

• Repushing out code with ﬁx, still causes some
problem as witness by a graph falling off a
cliff, but the developer was aware of it and
was able to role back.


Take 5: Isolation

• Hmmm, the developer in reviewing the code
notices that actually they are pushing a few
bugs ﬁxes, and some other minor features.

• Maybe just pushing out a single bug ﬁx one at
time to help isolate the problem.


Take 6: Success!

• Yes! The developer pushed code and ﬁxed a
bug and made the site just that much better.

• The secret about continuous deployment is
small deltas that you or anyone can
understand easily.


Take 7: Dark Pushes
• Now that the developer got the bugs out of the
way, it time for the feature.

• Let’s push out all the supporting ﬁles. By
themselves they do nothing. By getting these
out ﬁrst, you isolate them as being “unlikely to
cause a site problem”

• Also now that they are on the trunk, others can
look at them (easily).


Take 8: Rampups
• Now it’s time to get that feature live.

• Instead of a Big Bang, he’ll put a ‘rampup’ in the
code. This will control how many people on the
site will get the new feature.

• Maybe start with “employees only” so his team
can test in production.

• Start at 1%, 5%, 10% and make sure things work,
graphs are stable and work up to 100%.

• if problem, can rampdown or turn off.

Take 8: Eliminate
• Along the way you’ll get burned by little things, so, we’ll

• A development environment that mimics prod as close as
possible (won’t be exact)

• Fast and stable unit and functional tests that are easy to run.
If they are slow and ﬂakey, no one will use them

• Eliminate stupid bugs with commit or pre-commit static
analysis.

• Move QA/Security/Release checks as close as possible to
the developer.


Take 9: Communicate
• As more people get use to it, you’ll need a way
of co-ordinating releases among people.

• IRC works well

• Need set of conventions that match your risk
levels.

• At least developers are talking about releases!


Take 10: Learn
• No doubt along the way, serious mistakes will be made.
Complex system failures will happen.

• Learn from them. Do Post-Mortems. Do Root-Cause Analysis.

• Recount what happened.

• 99.99999999% of problems are caused by mistakes not
maliciousness

• How can the environment be changed so it doesn’t happen
again?

• Publish the results.


But What
About...


What About That Guy
Who Pushes at 3AM
• That Guy who pushes at 3AM, and something
goes wrong and wakes up all of operations
with pagers going off will quickly learn this
was a bad idea.

• It’s about courtesy and respect.

• Of course there are off-hours exception, in
which That Guy should pre-inform everyone.


What about code
reviews?
• Yup, do them

• Nothing here precludes code reviews.

• In fact, it’s frequently easier to do since the
reviewer doesn’t have to dork around with
branches or tags.... they have all the dark code
already on Trunk/Head

• .. and the reviews are smaller and faster


What about security
reviews?

• Yup do ‘em.

• Nothing here eliminates your existing review
cycle.


What about Agile
Methods?
• (everyone does “agile differently” so hard to
qualify this).

• Agile methods frequently work to improve the
spec-writing / development cycle

• Or the spec / dev / qa cycle

• But code still pools up waiting to go to
production.


What about Customer Service?
Do they freak out with all the
changes?

• Remember, most changes either do nothing,
or are trivial or are minor.

• Feature launches always need to be co-
ordinated with customer service

(from audience question)


So Why Did I Tell You
All This?


That Engineer who previously
didn’t push code is now sensitized
that their code has consequences
and are responsive to fix it.
It’s amazing how interested engineers become in
security when you find problems with their code
when they are able to fix quickly themselves.


Security Fixes can go
out quickly.
In addition, you know ﬁxes can go out since they happen
every day.


You can repurpose the QA stack,
graphing and log analysis for
attack detection and vulnerability
prevention.
Need ideas? Check out these other presentations on
fraud and security by Etsy:

http://slidesha.re/IMaavq
http://slidesha.re/JGaU2s
http://slidesha.re/KPvHYu
http://slidesha.re/Kw5zdV


While there is always whack-
a-mole, you can focus on
being a service organization
and work on engineering to
be secure by default.


New Roles, Less Silos
• Developers: works with operations

• QA: works on making systems to empower people
to write tests, static analysis, in-house consultancy
on good test design

• Release: tools to push code to production, system
images.

• Security: in house consultancy, security
engineering, secure by default, detection


So Continuous Deployment
is Only for Websites?

Google Chrome
• Really made updates painless for the consumer.

• Frequent changes “regularly” -- maybe not continuous
but way faster than normal software product

• Multiple channels of releases.

• Conﬁg ﬂags can turn on or off experimental features.

• Works so well, many others are copying this
approach.


Apps
• Due to cost of deployment being high
(e.g. due to approval from Apple)

• And due to diversity of destination (how many
different types of hardware will it run on), hard to
predict how well it work.

• Put as much as you can into the release

• Then read conﬁgs from internet to light up or turn
off features


Chip Design
• After this talk, I met an engineer who does
hardware design.

• All changes are tiny and then tested, then
committed.

• Any change too big is rejected.

• Learned the hard way that big changes are
impossible to understand and test.


So What Now?


Security is in a Good
Position to Force Change
• Security bridges multiple disciplines: ops,
dev, qa, release, business. Unique position to
make change.

• When breach happens (in whatever the layer),
we need to patch fast.

• I hope that is not controversial.


Start with
the Deploy Button


It will change your SDLC

more resilient
more secure

Continuous Deployment
The New #1 Security Feature


Thanks!


Continuous Deployment - The New #1 Security Feature, from BSildesLA 2012

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