Ariel Shiftan
April 9, 2023
Cloud Application Security refers to the practices and technologies used to protect applications that are hosted in cloud environments from threats like unauthorized access, data breaches, and misconfigurations leading to data leaks and data theft. Monitoring the system for suspicious activities, preventing denial of service on the system, and having the ability to analyze incidents effectively. And many more important ongoing tasks related to the robustness of the system. This includes setting up firewalls, WAFs, API Security, enforcing strong authentication measures, employing data encryption, applying software updates regularly and doing penetration testing for all the applications. In our perspective, the primary goal is to secure sensitive data, comply with data protection laws, and honor customers' consent about data processing.
The world of data protection has changed significantly in recent years. Personal and sensitive data used to be treated like any other data, and used to be stored along with the rest of the information in many tables under many databases. However, several factors have shifted the landscape and raised the stakes for data protection in the cloud computing era:
To design cloud systems that are compliant with data protection regulations, emphasizing their data security aspect in this article, organizations must ensure they meet data protection requirements. These include data security to avoid unauthorized access, lawful processing, data minimization, individual rights, data breach notification, and cross-border data transfers.
In this article, we'll explore these requirements in more detail, discuss the challenges of implementing data protection in modern cloud architectures, and provide practical guidance for designing and building secure and compliant cloud applications.
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Organizations must ensure they meet the principal data protection requirements to design a secure cloud environment that is compliant with data protection regulations. These requirements include (partially resembles to GDPR):
Organizations must implement appropriate technical and organizational measures to protect personal data against accidental or unlawful destruction, loss, alteration, unauthorized disclosure, or access. This includes measures such as encryption, access controls, monitoring, and regular security testing.
Personal data must be processed lawfully, fairly, and transparently, with a lawful basis for processing such as consent, legitimate interest, or contractual necessity. Organizations must inform individuals about the purposes of processing their personal data and obtain their explicit consent when required.
Organizations must only collect and process personal data that is necessary for the specific purposes for which it was collected. This means collecting only the data that is relevant and necessary for the organization's operations and avoiding unnecessary data collection
Personal data must be accurate, up-to-date, and kept for no longer than is necessary for the specific purposes for which it was collected. Organizations must take reasonable steps to ensure that personal data is accurate and up-to-date, and delete data that is no longer needed.
Individuals have certain rights with respect to their personal data, including the right to access, rectify, erase, or restrict the processing of their data. Organizations must provide individuals with the means to exercise these rights and respond to their requests within a reasonable timeframe (e.g. through cookie banners, or profile settings).
Organizations must notify individuals and relevant authorities in the event of a data breach that is likely to result in a risk to their data and their rights. Organizations must also have procedures in place to respond to data breaches and minimize their impact.
Organizations must comply with applicable laws and regulations when transferring personal data across borders. This includes obtaining appropriate consent, implementing safeguards such as standard contractual clauses, and ensuring the same level of data protection as required in the country of origin.
Modern cloud architectures are much more complex than in the past. This rising complexity makes it harder to ensure consistent data protection measures. In distributed, microservices, and event-driven architectures, services are designed to be independent and loosely coupled, and data is often propagated and copied across services to keep them independent. This results in more copies of data being created, which makes it very hard to implement and enforce data protection measures consistently across all copies of the data. It also increases the risk of unauthorized access or data breaches if appropriate.
Holding many copies of the same data results in multiplied risk and thus storing it has to be designed differently. In the next section, we'll provide practical guidance for designing modern cloud applications with data protection in mind. To address the challenges of implementing data protection in modern cloud architectures, organizations should consider the following best practices:
By implementing these best practices, organizations can ensure that their cloud applications are secure. In the next section, we'll discuss the key requirements for a data privacy vault solution.
Securing your cloud applications is essential in today's digital landscape, and the safety of sensitive data is paramount. By implementing comprehensive and robust security measures, you can fortify your cloud-based applications and shield them from potential threats. Here, we delve into seven essential best practices for cloud application security, designed to provide a comprehensive defense for your data:
Begin your security journey by encrypting sensitive data at the application level. Whether it's personal identifiers, financial records, or confidential information, field-level encryption ensures that even in the event of unauthorized access, your data remains impenetrable and secure. The higher the layer in the tech stack you encrypt data, the more immune the rest of the stack underneath becomes to data theft. You can still use data encryption at rest, but it’s not that effective.
SQL injection attacks are a common menace to database security. To mitigate this risk, meticulously fortify your application's code against SQL injections. This is easily done by making sure you sanitize the input coming from outsiders before you use it for building the SQL query. It should not contain any apostrophe characters. Remember that the input isn’t trusted because it comes from browsers, mobile apps or any one who can send any malicious payload on your behalf to your application server. Adopt best coding practices, employ parameterized queries, and conduct regular code reviews to uncover and rectify vulnerabilities.
Consistency is the cornerstone of effective data protection. Ensure that access checks for data are enforced uniformly across your application. Implement robust authentication and authorization mechanisms that restrict access solely to authorized users. Basically, you would want to check that the access token is valid by the signer and that it hasn’t expired yet. As well as ensuring the token’s owner is the same one accessing a resource in the server.
For the highest level of protection, employ data masking for exceptionally sensitive data fields, such as national IDs, credit card numbers, and user IDs. Data masking disguises or transforms this information, adding an extra layer of security without undermining the functionality of your application. Prefer reading masked data directly from the database (using a specialized view in the database), as opposed to doing the masking in the backend after reading the complete data from the database. And align the security permissions of that user (or the view itself) with the capability for only reading masked data. This will ensure that nobody will be able to fully access very sensitive columns no matter what, even if the server is fully compromised.
One often overlooked practice is the reduction of privileges for database users. Limit the permissions granted to database users to the minimum required for their tasks. This approach significantly diminishes the potential impact of compromised user credentials, enhancing the overall resilience of your system. Most important is to reduce privileges for the application server that is public to the internet, for example it shouldn’t be able to delete (drop) tables, or access other tables in the database. On the other hand, let internal apps that aren’t internet-facing have the required privileges to work with the data.
Maintaining an audit trail of data access is crucial for monitoring and investigating security incidents. You will never be sorry to record logs for the day you will really need it, otherwise it’s too late. The primary goal is to be able to conduct a complete post-mortem after an incident and to be able to understand exactly what happened. However, it is equally important to do this in a manner that respects privacy regulations. Record just enough information to understand what transpired, all while safeguarding sensitive data. Implement robust logging and auditing mechanisms that adhere to privacy guidelines. In most cases, you wouldn’t want or need to record PII or other sensitive data fields, but if you do, make sure to mask them or tokenize/hash them, never in plaintext, please.
Anomalies in data access patterns can signal unauthorized or malicious activity. Implement real-time monitoring to detect unusual or suspicious access patterns promptly. When access irregularities are detected, take immediate action to investigate and counter potential threats.
By rigorously following these cloud application security best practices, you can significantly enhance the protection of your data, reduce vulnerabilities, and ensure that your cloud applications remain resilient against an ever-evolving landscape of potential threats. Remember that security is an ongoing endeavor; regularly review and update your security measures to stay one step ahead of emerging risks.
A data privacy vault is a centralized solution for securely storing, encrypting and managing sensitive data. When selecting a data privacy vault solution, organizations should ensure that it meets the following requirements:
By selecting a data privacy vault solution that meets these requirements, organizations can ensure that their sensitive data is well-protected and compliant with data protection regulations. Great companies such as Netflix, Apple, Slack, and JP Morgan Chase and Grubhub have successfully done it on their own with a massive undertaking.
In summary, designing and building secure and compliant cloud applications requires careful consideration of data protection requirements, challenges, and best practices. Here are the key takeaways from this article:
By following these key takeaways and best practices, organizations can ensure that their cloud applications are secure and compliant with data protection regulations, providing their customers with the confidence that their personal data is well-protected and that cloud application security threats are kept at bay.
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CTO & Co-founder
Ariel, despite holding a PhD in Computer Science, doesn't strictly conform to the traditional academic archetype. His heart lies in the realm of hacking, a passion he has nurtured since his early years. As a proficient problem solver, Ariel brings unmatched practicality and resourcefulness to every mission he undertakes.
Adopt a centralized key management solution such as a Hardware Security Module (HSM) or cloud-based KMS to securely manage and control cryptographic keys at scale.
Ensuring secure and timely key distribution and synchronization at scale.
Automate key rotation processes to maintain synchronization, reduce human intervention, and minimize errors as the system grows.