Using the Linux Audit System to detect badness
Security vendors have a mediocre track record in keeping their own applications and infrastructure safe. As a security product company, we need to make sure that we don’t get compromised. But we also need to plan for the horrible event that a customer console is compromised, at which point the goal is to quickly detect the breach. This post talks about how we use Linux's Audit System (LAS) along with ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) to help us achieve this goal. Background Every Canary customer has multiple Canaries on their network (physical, virtual, cloud) that reports in to their console which is hosted in AWS. Consoles are single tenant, hardened instances that live in an AWS region. This architecture choice means that a single customer console being compromised, won’t translate to a compromise of other customer consoles. ( In fact, customers would not trivially even discover other customer consoles, but that's irrelevant for this post. ) Hundreds of consoles runn...
