Pegasystems announced the general availability of Pega Infinity ’24.1™.
The previous blog in this WhiteHat Security series highlighted the individual build, release and run stages within the app-building process, and the appropriate security posture to incorporate within each of these phases.
Start with Security and the Twelve-Factor App - Step 1
Start with Security and the Twelve-Factor App - Step 2
Start with Security and the Twelve-Factor App - Step 3
Start with Security and the Twelve-Factor App - Step 4
Start with Security and the Twelve-Factor App - Step 5
Step 6 of the Twelve-Factor App methodology encourages executing the app as one or more stateless processes. Here is some actionable security-focused advice which developers and ops engineers can follow during the SaaS build and operations stages.
Defining Processes in the Twelve-Factor App
In this sixth step, the Twelve-Factor methodology encourages executing the app as one or more stateless processes by using small programs that communicate over the network. In other words Twelve-factor processes are stateless and contained in a shared-nothing (SN) architecture, a distributed-computing architecture in which each node is independent and self-sufficient, and there is no single point of contention across the system. More specifically, none of the nodes share memory or disk storage. The benefits of SN architecture include eliminating any single point of failure, allowing self-healing capabilities. and providing an advantage in offering non-disruptive upgrade.
Many organizations are undertaking a “re-platforming” journey, in which the overarching platform is broken up into smaller programs that are more service focused, enabling changes to be made more quickly.
Applying Security to Step 6
Unfortunately, a major security drawback of this journey is that when you start to break up a big building block into smaller pieces, the attack surface increases. This means there are more places where requests can be sent to your infrastructure, which equates to more opportunities to send an attack. Assumptions about how code would be invoked by their callers will change when migrating to service oriented architectures, and some of those changes impact security. By way of example, consider the WhiteHat Security 2018 Stats Report. This report compared vulnerability related security metrics between monolith and microservices architectures and found that for every 100KLOC, monolith applications had 39 vulnerabilities whereas microservices had 180 vulnerabilities. Be mindful of legacy code that is being exposed over the network as you break up your app into services, as such code may have been written without security in mind.
Read Security and the Twelve-Factor App - Step 7, which focuses on exporting services via port binding, and what to apply from a security point of view.
Industry News
Mend.io and Sysdig unveiled a joint solution to help developers, DevOps, and security teams accelerate secure software delivery from development to deployment.
GitLab announced new innovations in GitLab 17 to streamline how organizations build, test, secure, and deploy software.
Kobiton announced the beta release of mobile test management, a new feature within its test automation platform.
Gearset announced its new CI/CD solution, Long Term Projects in Pipelines.
Rafay Systems has extended the capabilities of its enterprise PaaS for modern infrastructure to support graphics processing unit- (GPU-) based workloads.
NodeScript, a free, low-code developer environment for workflow automation and API integration, is released by UBIO.
IBM announced IBM Test Accelerator for Z, a solution designed to revolutionize testing on IBM Z, a tool that expedites the shift-left approach, fostering smooth collaboration between z/OS developers and testers.
StreamNative launched Ursa, a Kafka-compatible data streaming engine built on top of lakehouse storage.
GitKraken acquired code health innovator, CodeSee.
ServiceNow introduced a new no‑code development studio and new automation capabilities to accelerate and scale digital transformation across the enterprise.
Security Innovation has added new skills assessments to its Base Camp training platform for software security training.
CAST introduced CAST Highlight Extensions Marketplace — an integrated marketplace for the software intelligence product where users can effortlessly browse and download a diverse range of extensions and plugins.
Red Hat and Elastic announced an expanded collaboration to deliver next-generation search experiences supporting retrieval augmented generation (RAG) patterns using Elasticsearch as a preferred vector database solution integrated on Red Hat OpenShift AI.
Traceable AI announced an Early Access Program for its new Generative AI API Security capabilities.