This is the age-old question faced by so many tech teams: do we build or buy a system we need? TL:DR, Buying can save your engineer time for building the core stack and for the fun experiments needed to determine when to shake up the core stack.
A multi-protocol access proxy is a powerful concept for securing access to infrastructure. But accessing numerous computing resources distributed across the globe via a single endpoint presents a latency challenge. Today we are announcing that the hosted edition of Teleport Access Plane is now available in 5 regions all over the world.
Those of us that work with technology get this question a lot: “What do you do?” “I work in technology — more specifically, I work as a pre-sales engineer.” Sound familiar? Working in IT can mean a lot of different things, and to those outside of this world, it quickly becomes deeply technical and complicated to explain to non-IT people. Even explaining what you do to IT people can become complicated.
There is a growing discussion among network engineers, DevOps teams, and security professionals about the security benefits of bastions. Many assume that they are the “old way” of network access and have little relevance in the modern cloud native stack. These speculations are not irrelevant as in recent years, the corporate IT network perimeter as we knew it is diminishing, and the concept has been shifted to data, identity, and compute perimeter.
In April 2021, I discovered an attack vector that could allow a malicious Pull Request to a Github repository to gain access to our production environment. Open source companies like us, or anyone else who accepts external contributions, are especially vulnerable to this. For the eager, the attack works by pivoting from a Kubernetes worker pod to the node itself, and from there exfiltrating credentials from the CI/CD system.
What would you do when a security incident is detected? Shut down the servers? Pull out the power cord from the data center? When an incident is detected, both the incident method and the time required to contain an incident are essential to limit the damage. The slower you are to react, the more damage an incident would incur. And a service downtime to contain an incident can cost businesses even more than a security incident itself.
Do you have what it takes to become a cybersecurity expert? We interviewed 3 security professionals to find out how they got their start and what advice they would give to someone starting their career in cybersecurity. With security threats increasing, much of business continuity has come to rely on data security. In particular, engineering teams building cloud software rely on access to an ever-growing number of computing resources.
Can you enumerate every single network socket which can be used to hack into your cloud environment and steal your data? When counting, are you including the laptops of people who already authenticated and have access? The purpose of opening with this question is not to instill fear. Trying to answer it probably leads to “it’s complicated” and the complexity of access is what this article will cover. Complexity is our collective enemy in the computing industry.
HSM stands for hardware security module. HSMs are hardware devices. They can be quite small and plugged into the main board of a computer, or they sit side by side in a server rack. They store sensitive data such as private keys. HSMs do not allow you to read that sensitive data back; instead, they expose only cryptographic operations like signing of certificates or encrypting data. This provides stronger protections for storing private keys compared to disks or databases.
This summer, I was fortunate enough to get an internship at Teleport. Being part of the co-op program at the University of Waterloo, I have worked at many different companies before, and this internship will be my fourth placement as I finish my first term of the third year. The project that I was assigned to was an interesting one.
