Cloud Native Software Security Handbook: Unleash the power of cloud native tools for robust security in modern applications

"The "Cloud Native Software Security Handbook" by Mr. Shah is an indispensable resource for any cloud security team. It delves deeply into complex compliance concepts and offers practical insights and straightforward guidelines. These instructions empower readers to craft policies, standards, and processes tailored to industry-specific compliance requirements for the cloud, regardless of their choice of cloud service provider."

With great pleasure, I’m excited to share my review of the “Cloud Native Software Security Handbook” authored by Mihir Shah. I would like to extend my gratitude to Packt for giving me an opportunity to do an expert review.This book focuses on adopting security practices in a cloud infrastructure to identify and mitigate potential security risks, threat modeling for Cloud-native environments, developing secure software through Application Security (AppSec) programs, etc. I have been working on my research on securing cloud infrastructure resources and found this book invaluable as it provides pragmatic and prevalent information on cloud-native security.During my research, I was delving into understanding the current identity access mechanisms used in cloud-native Kubernetes platforms, and from chapter 6 of the book, I learned about the principles of least privilege, various authentication and authorization mechanisms such as OIDC tokens, X.509 certificates, Role-based access control (RBAC), Node authorization, etc., that are used to manage authentication and authorization effectively and enhance the security posture of the Kubernetes environment. I found Chapter 7 explains the automation of incident response using custom scripts, security orchestration, and SOAR and that helped me to implement an automated workflow and create a security playbook for efficient incident management, response to security threats, continuous monitoring, etc. From Chapter 8, I was able to leverage the concepts of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform, Policy as Code for managing the policies and overcoming the IaC security misconfigurations such as hardcoded secrets by integrating Vault with Terraform for secrets management.Kudos to the author “Mihir Shah” who has written an exceptional book and this book reflects his prowess in the Cybersecurity domain. I strongly recommend this book to anyone working in DevSecOps, Cloud Security Operations, Site Reliability Engineering, Software Development, etc.

My use-case starts, “As a security professional, I want to understand cloud security details with sufficient skills to be able to effectively implement and automate. If that resembles your daily use-case, then, “Cloud Native Software Security Handbook” (Packt, 2023) by Mihir Shah could be an excellent reference work. Three sections appear, security basics, implementation, and then compliance requirements. My favorite section was implementation as a code-heavy directive for what and how to change the various security requirements. Recommend as a key reference for any security professionals. The book starts by explaining the various requirements for cloud-native implementation and all the areas one must consider ifor applications, architecture, monitoring, and automation. Each of those is supplemented with a high-level review of some tools that can advance those solutions. One of my favorite parts was the reliance on OPA throughout the book. I personally use OPA to manage policy for security in multple implementations so it is always nice to have personal theories confirmed. The section also references the OWASP Top-10 list for security concerns and provides an extensive analysis for each. These faults then become the basis for correction in Section 2. Normally, security books wander heavily towards the policy end but Shah is relentless in showing those code implementations for fixing each security area. Not only do the code patches appear, they appear for multiple tools. The section emphasizes the importance of not just security fixes but of building a security culture that advocates for security. Again, confirms a personal bias that security cannot just be shifted left but should appear consistently. All of these options are then linked to visualization tools like EFK, Prometheus, Grafana and Splunk. If you have ever had to explain security to a project manager, these instructions are extremely valuable The chapter on securing the infrastructure is probably the book’s best. It includes software applications, bare-metal concerns, and communication. Each of these is referenced in terms of authentication and authorization solutions to improve security. Again, the tools rely heavily on OPA but also introduce Callico and Falco as possible alternatives. The last section addresses compliance and provides top-level reviews of some of the state and federal legislation driving cloud security practices. Privacy is emphasized and the need to be able to protect data at all levels. Privacy legislation is then expanded in the final chapter to which vendors are cloud certified through options like FedRamp, NIST, and the ISO stacks. Two case studies are mentioned for a hack of Target and then the Federal Office of Personal Management but I found them to be dated as they were both almost a decade old. My least favorite part of the book was Chapter 5 on threat modeling. I find threat modeling useful but think it occupies an entirely different part of the security pyramid than implementation. Threat modeling does help prepare a system for a specific attack but does not typically yield more benefit than the OWASP top-ten in protecting an organization. This becomes more true as one focuses on specific threats rather than a generic approach. Some space could have been spared by scaling down this chapter and more time on even-more detailed solutions to OWASP problems. Overall, this was a great book. As a security professional, I intend to put “Cloud Native Software Security Handbook” on my desk as a frequent reference. The OPA configuration alone will likely benefit me immensely. As an overall read, I’d recommend this to security analysts and engineers working with cloud.

I had the opportunity to read through Packt Publishing's Cloud Native Software Security Handbook by Mihir Shah. Mihir does an excellent job providing useful information and guidance for implementing and managing security in cloud environments. This includes architecture, threat modeling, operations and DevSecOps practices across infrastructure, applications, and code. This book focuses on cloud infrastructures and cloud native applications from a general perspective and can be applied across cloud providers. This is a must have for anyone working in cloud environments.

This book provides in-depth insights into leveraging cloud-native tools for application security. A developers will benefit from its practical guidance on blending cloud computing with robust security measures.