AppSec USA 2016

Scaling Security Testing at the Speed of DevOps

Recent software development trends, namely DevOps, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment, have empowered developers and drastically reduced the DevTest window forcing teams to adopt highly automated test infrastructures. While the adoption of these trends and automated test frameworks have improved feature delivery and time to market, they have complicated security assessment, producing substantial gaps between the current release and the last security audited code. Consumers are now being forced to
adopt new code releases daily or hourly without substantive security review, especially in the Software as a Service (SaaS) sector. As engineering teams rapidly embrace these development methodologies, the community must evolve security testing strategies so as to enhance the security posture of products, services, and solutions.

This evolution must address three primary problems elucidated by the
aforementioned development trends:

1. Testability: Security requirements should be testable and verifiable.
2. Scalability: Security requirement should be capable of being
automated in a best-effort fashion so as to scale effectively.
3. Accessibility: Security tools and results should be easily digestible
by software engineers and testers, and new security tools should be
accessible to all development and test engineers.

Therefore, we have developed and are preparing to open source a new distributed security testing framework called Norad which facilitates security assessment at scale. This framework automates multiple open-source and vendor security tools and aggregates their results for review. It also provides an SDK which promotes the development of community developed security test content. This talk will explain Norad's design philosophy, architecture, and demonstrate its usage.