StackRox Enhances Container Security Platform with Deeper Kubernetes Integrations to Operationalize Container Security

New Capabilities for Deployment-Centric Visibility, Multi-Factor Risk Profiling and Network Policy Management Enrich Context and Streamline Enforcement While Aligning DevOps and Security

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — January 23, 2019 StackRox, the leader in security for containerized cloud-native applications, today announced new capabilities in the StackRox Container Security Platform that leverage the platform’s multiple integrations with Kubernetes. The latest enhancements allow businesses to gain a deployment-centric view of their environment, quickly prioritize risks based on rich context, leverage Kubernetes for robust and scalable policy enforcement, and significantly improve the security of their container and Kubernetes environments.

In their research, “Answering the 10 Biggest Questions About Containers, Microservices and Docker” (March 2018), Gartner analysts note that, “intercontainer communication needs to be monitored and secured, and traditional-host-based tools are ineffective in doing it.” Gartner goes on to advise Infrastructure and Operations leaders to follow best practices, including “Proactively detect and monitor abnormal behavior by using container granular security tools that can provide container-native and service-level views, and that can aid in the prevention of malicious application traffic.”

New capabilities available in the latest release of the StackRox Container Security Platform include:

  1. Deployment-Centric Visibility. StackRox’s deep integration with Kubernetes delivers visibility centered around deployments versus simply an image, enabling DevOps and Security teams to speak a common language and eliminate confusion. DevOps and Security teams can quickly visualize all of their deployments and pods across namespaces and clusters. Visibility at the deployment level is essential to managing policies and addressing misconfigurations effectively in a Kubernetes environment.
  2. Multi-Factor Risk Profiling. StackRox leverages its integration with Kubernetes to deliver deeper insight into cluster details, labels and annotations, privileges, secrets and network reachability to more accurately prioritize risks. Details such as whether a cluster is running in test or production, the owner of the application, the type of data and secrets accessed, and the network configuration of the deployment (e.g., is it reachable from the Internet) all provide helpful context far beyond vulnerability data.
  3. Network Policy Management. StackRox network policy enforcement capabilities include the newly added network graph, policy recommendation engine, and policy simulator. These features all tie into Kubernetes to enable a robust, scalable and portable solution for network segmentation. The network graph displays allowed versus actively used communications paths among namespaces and deployments as well as Internet reachability of deployments. The policy recommendation engine provides actionable steps to disable unnecessary communications paths among these assets. The policy simulator enables DevOps and Security teams to preview new network policies, visualize their network connectivity paths, and confirm the policies are accurate before applying them in Kubernetes.

“As Kubernetes continues its astonishing pace of adoption as the orchestrator of choice for cloud-native environments, it becomes an increasingly attractive target for attackers. Given that many organizations are still getting educated on Kubernetes security best practices, they are at increased risk for exposing their applications and data,” said Wei Lien Dang, StackRox Vice President of Product. “The StackRox mission is to deliver a platform for DevOps and Security teams alike to operationalize security for their Kubernetes and container environments. We developed our new capabilities for better visibility, richer context, and stronger enforcement — tied to our deep integrations with Kubernetes — to provide more ways to reduce the container attack surface, mitigate known vulnerabilities, and limit the impact of attacks efficiently and effectively.”

Deployed as a set of containers using Kubernetes YAML files or Helm charts, the StackRox Container Security Platform supports all Kubernetes deployment modes, including self-managed clusters; managed services such as Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, and Google GKE; and Kubernetes distributions such as Red Hat OpenShift and Docker Enterprise Edition.

These new capabilities are available in the current release of the StackRox Container Security Platform. For more information on StackRox’s focus on Kubernetes security, click here.