Rebooting Software Development - OWASP AppSecUSA

Rebooting (secure) (web) software development

with continuous deployment

Nick Galbreathhttp://www.client9.com/ [email protected] @ngalbreath

OWASP AppSec USAAustin, TexasOct 25, 2012

http://www.client9.com


mailto:[email protected]


Nick Galbreath OWASP USA 2012-10-25 @ngalbreath

The latest version of these slideshttp://client9.com/20121025

http://www.client9.com/20120816/

http://www.client9.com/20120816/


Presented at OWASP AppSec USAAustin, Texas, USAOctober 25, 2012


Based on a BSides Los Angeles presentation at Hermosa Beach, August 18, 2012http://client9.com/20120816

Three Blocks from Conference.

http://client9.com/20120818



I took all these photos in NYC.Unless I didn't.In which case, they are from The Internet.


Continuous Deployment?"Rebooting" software development?


whoami

• Director of Engineering, Etsy

• enterprise, fraud, security, fun

• New Gig, but... Etsy sponsored my trip here

• VP Engineering, “Company Confidential”

• Stay tuned for details

Nick Galbreath www.client9.com @ngalbreath




Context Alert!• My background is software development

• Mostly in public, web-facing applications

• Everything from C to PHP

• Your mileage may vary if you are in different industries, with different risk profiles


Problem Statement• Web App vulnerabilities aren’t conceptually that

hard and should be easy to deal with.

• In spite (or because) of our efforts, security is an “end of line” process or whack-a-mole

• Security education has been at best marginally useful to developers (in the large, your organization may be different).

• How can we get ever get ahead?


How did we get here?

View from Hyatt Austin hotel room.


The Software Product ModelCode flows to functional groups.

• Product Managers spec code

• Engineers write code

• QA tests code

• Security tests code

• Release engineers package code

• Operations runs code


High Distribution CostThe Software Product Model is designed for applications where the cost of distribution is high. Where “high” might be measure by risk, money, time, resources, customer annoyance.

• Retail, CD/DVDs

• Embedded or Exotic Hardware

• Safety, Medical or Defense Systems

• Operating Systems (phone or desktop)

• Your Homework (1-time deploy)


SPM -SDLCOpsRelease

QAQA

Development Bug Fix / Slush

New Specs

Com

mits

time in weeks or months

freeze

Specs


SPM-Production Changes to Production

Major Release Minor Releases Major Release

BigBang

BigBang

New Features going live are 100% correlated with volume of changes to production.


Nothing wrong here.

Given high distribution costs, it makes sense to front-load the development process


WebApps Y2K• Mostly followed software product model since

that’s all we knew

• High barrier to entry

• Specialized Hardware, software, people to get started

• Lots of engineering to keep things running and scaling.


True Story

• “Can’t push out the spelling error change since it’s too risky”

• “That code has already been through QA, it’s locked down.”

• “Product has to prioritize that, else we aren’t touching it.”

This

Smells


WebApps 2012

• Almost no barrier to entry

• Commodity hardware

• “Learn PHP in 24 hours”

• Scaling problems can be outsourced (sorta)


WebApps 2012 and Cost of Distribution

• Moving a few megabytes from source control to a few machines in production over a 1Gb or 10Gb link.

• In other words... free!


Given this and competitive /customer expectations, it’s not

unreasonable to expect an SDLC moves faster

than the Software Product Model


On the other hand, WebApps 2012 have very different failure cases


The Nature of Failure• WebApps 2012 are data-driven.

• and frequently have APIs, user-generated content, social features (unexpected use cases, new problems)

• Failure might be due to algorithm problems, but...

• ...more likely it’s bad user input, bad data in database, or operational load.

• This means data added in the past might cause problems in the future. Complicated!


• Rollback

• Spend next week figuring out what changed, by whom, caused the breakage

• Re-qa

• Re-push

• meanwhile new code is piling up.

And When It Happens


When SPM meets WebApp2012• There is a long time between code-written to code-

deployed. This “non-value added” steps for what should be low-cost changes.

• Might be weeks or months before code deployed.

• Feedback loop between code in dev and code in production broken.

• When the bug/security report comes in, it’s likely the engineer is on a different project.

• Any wonder that engineers don’t care for operations or security?


Hypothesis• It is impossible to simulate the production

environment in development, either to operational differences or data differences.

• No amount of QA or Security Testing can prove you don’t have bugs, vulnerabilities, or won’t cause severe operational problems.

• You have bugs and vulnerabilities right now your site.


Conclusion:You're Screwed!


• Company wide push to move faster

• Being a bottleneck isn’t acceptable.

• Nor is giving up or saying “need more resources”

• Engineers disengaged

• Looming security disaster awaits

• Whack-a-Mole doesn’t scale


If we want to fix Security,

we have tofix Development.


Continuous Deployment

A System of Software Production Characterized By Numerous Small Changes to the Production Environment

or That Crazy Shit That Etsy Does. And Google.

And Facebook. And Amazon. And Twitter. And NetFlix. So maybe not that crazy.


CD -Changes to Production

New Features are not correlated with volume of changes to production

new featurenew feature


Developers are responsible and confident with their code.

In Production


What If You Had a Button that saidDEPLOY

This button logs who performed the change, and what the change was, but no other rules or controls.

•Pushes whatever is on HEAD/TRUNK to production.•In about a minute.•Anyone is allowed to push it.


Take 1: Fear• Likely no one is going to

push it since they are afraid they’ll break something.

• Meanwhile un-deployed code keeps piling up.

ex. New hires are terrified of deploying an... HTML change!“but I don’t want to break Etsy!”


Take 2: First Attempt

• At some point, some brave sole will put their code on TRUNK, and push the button.

• It’s likely someone else tells them that their feature blew up the site or doesn’t work, and to please role it back.


Take 3: With Graphs• The developer learns that they’d don’t know

how the code runs in production and they need some way of understanding how it works.

• Enter Graphite/Ganglia/StatsD! http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-everything/

• Make it free to monitor anything in the application and expose that to everyone.

http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-everything/





Take 4: Push It

• Repushing out code with fix, still causes some problem as witness by a graph falling off a cliff, but the developer was aware of it and was able to role back.


Take 5: Isolation

• Hmmm, the developer in reviewing the code notices that actually they are pushing a few bugs fixes, and some other minor features.

• Maybe just pushing out a single bug fix one at time to help isolate the problem.


Take 6: Success!

• Yes! The developer pushed code and fixed a bug and made the site just that much better.

• The secret about continuous deployment is small deltas that you or anyone can understand easily.


Take 7: Dark Pushes• Now that the developer got the bugs out of the

way, it time for the feature.

• Let’s push out all the supporting files. By themselves they do nothing. By getting these out first, you isolate them as being “unlikely to cause a site problem”

• Also now that they are on the trunk, others can look at them (easily).


Take 8: Ramp-ups• Now it’s time to get that feature live.

• Instead of a Big Bang, he’ll put a ‘ramp-up’ in the code. This will control how many people on the site will get the new feature.

• Maybe start with “employees only” so his team can test in production.

• Start at 1%, 5%, 10% and make sure things work, graphs are stable and work up to 100%.

• if problem, can ramp-down or turn off.


Take 8: Eliminate• Along the way you’ll get burned by little things, so, we’ll

• A development environment that mimics prod as close as possible (won’t be exact)

• Fast and stable unit and functional tests that are easy to run. If they are slow and flakey, no one will use them

• Eliminate stupid bugs with commit or pre-commit static analysis.

• Move QA/Security/Release checks as close as possible to the developer.


Take 9: Communicate• As more people get use to it, you’ll need a way

of co-ordinating releases among people.

• IRC works well

• Need set of conventions that match your risk levels.

• At least developers are talking about releases!


Take 10: Learn• No doubt along the way, serious mistakes will be made.

Complex system failures will happen.

• Learn from them. Do Post-Mortems. Do Root-Cause Analysis.

• Recount what happened.

• 99.99999999% of problems are caused by mistakes ... not maliciousness

• How can the environment be changed so it doesn’t happen again?

• Publish the results.


Butt What About...


What About That Guy Who Pushes at 3AM

• That Guy who pushes at 3AM, and something goes wrong and wakes up all of operations with pagers going off will quickly learn this was a bad idea.

• It’s about courtesy and respect.

• Of course there are off-hours exception, in which That Guy should pre-inform everyone.


What about...code reviews?

• Yup, do them

• Nothing here precludes code reviews.

• In fact, it’s frequently easier to do since the reviewer doesn’t have to dork around with branches or tags.... they have all the dark code already on Trunk/Head

• .. and the reviews are smaller and faster


What about... security reviews?

• Yup do ‘em.

• Nothing here eliminates your existing review cycle.


What about...Agile Methods?

• (everyone does “agile differently” so hard to qualify this).

• Agile methods frequently work to improve the spec-writing / development cycle

• Or the spec / dev / qa cycle

• But code still pools up waiting to go to production.


What about Customer Service? Do they freak out with all the changes?

• Remember, most changes either do nothing, or are trivial or are minor.

• Feature launches always need to be co-ordinated with customer service

(from audience question)

Nick Galbreath OWASP USA 2012-10-25 @ngalbreathSo why did I tell you all this?


That Engineer who previously didn’t push code is now sensitized that their code has consequences

and are responsive to fix it.It’s amazing how interested engineers become in security when you find problems with their code

when they are able to fix quickly themselves.


Security Fixes can go out quickly.

In addition, you know fixes can go out since they happen every day.


You can repurpose the QA stack, graphing and log analysis for

attack detection and vulnerability prevention.

Need ideas? Check out these other presentations on fraud and security by Etsy:

http://slidesha.re/IMaavqhttp://slidesha.re/JGaU2shttp://slidesha.re/KPvHYuhttp://slidesha.re/Kw5zdV

http://slidesha.re/IMaavq

http://slidesha.re/IMaavq

http://slidesha.re/JGaU2s

http://slidesha.re/JGaU2s

http://slidesha.re/KPvHYu

http://slidesha.re/KPvHYu

http://slidesha.re/Kw5zdV

http://slidesha.re/Kw5zdV


While there is always whack-a-mole, you can focus

on being a service organization and work on engineering to be

secure by default.


New Roles, Less Silos• Developers: works with operations

• QA: works on making systems to empower people to write tests, static analysis, in-house consultancy on good test design

• Release: tools to push code to production, system images.

• Security: in house consultancy, security engineering, secure by default, detection


So Continuous Deployment is Only for Websites?

Wine Robot at DFW American Airlines lounge


Google Chrome• Really made updates painless for the consumer.

• Frequent changes “regularly” -- maybe not continuous but way faster than normal software product

• Multiple channels of releases.

• Config flags can turn on or off experimental features.

• Works so well, many others are copying this approach.


Apps• Due to cost of deployment being high

(e.g. due to approval from Apple)

• And due to diversity of destination (how many different types of hardware will it run on), hard to predict how well it work.

• Put as much as you can into the release

• Then read configs from internet to light up or turn off features


Chip Design• After this talk, I met an engineer who does

hardware design.

• All changes are tiny and then tested, then committed.

• Any change too big is rejected.

• Learned the hard way that big changes are impossible to understand and test.


So What Now?

Ice Skating at Rockefeller Center in October.


Security is in a Good Position to Force Change• Security bridges multiple disciplines:

ops, dev, qa, release, business.

• Unique position to make change.

• When breach happens (in whatever the layer), we need to patch fast.

• I hope that is not controversial.


Start with the Deploy Button


It will change your SDLC

NYC Public Library


Continuous Deployment


Thanks!


Nick Galbreath@ngalbreath [email protected]






Technology

Rebooting Software Development - OWASP AppSecUSA