Streamlining Security Scanning with CAIOS and Python

Elinoar Sofer, COO of BlackSwan Technologies explains how the company eliminated manual processes to enhance security and increase collaboration

As the COO of BlackSwan, my first priority is operational efficiency. As a company, we’re always looking for ways to streamline our processes; making us more efficient and enabling our teams to spend more time on complex tasks where their expertise can provide the most value to our clients and partners.

So when it became clear that we could eliminate laborious work by automating our workflow for security scanning, we looked for the best approach to help us achieve this. Our CISO clarified that there were still many manual elements to the workflow, and therefore coordinating and agreeing on new changes had been a time-consuming process.

To address this, I sought to create an improved process, enabling better coordination between the security, R&D, DevOps and senior management teams. I wanted a solution that would be accessible to everyone in the organization, that could help us prioritize any updates and changes and ultimately improve our operations.

CAIOS — the cloud AI operating system — ticked all three boxes as it enabled us to easily create complex workflows and adjust them to meet the requirements of each individual in the organization. One of the other benefits of using CAIOS was that we could use pure Python and rely on the system to generate our cloud infrastructure automatically.

What we did:

To begin the project, we wrote a Python script containing a number of functions, including the workflow’s main entry point _start_scanning.

    async def _start_scanning(self) ->None:
        """Security scanning Workflow"""
        repolist=self._get_repo_list()
        for repo in repolist:
            self._rescan_repo(repo)
            sleep(60)
        sleep(900)
        self._take_screenshot()
        secretsfinding=self._get_source_code_results()
        self._update_jiras()
        cves_finding=self._get_docker_images_results()
        self._update_jiras_for_new_cve()
        self._send_notification(secrets_finding,cves_finding)

This function performs the following steps:

1. Calls _get_repo_list to get a list of services to scan
2. Iterates through the list of services, calling _rescan_repo on each one
3. Calls _take_screenshot for dashboard overview
4. Calls _get_source_code_results to retrieve the source code scanning results
5. Calls _update_jiras to update the relevant Jira tickets with the scan results related to secret and private data
6. Calls _get_docker_images_results to retrieve the docker images scanning results
7. Calls _update_jiras_for_new_cve() to create Jira tickets for the new cves found in the docker images lastest build
8. Calls _send_notification to send notifications about the scan results to relevant parties.

Using CAIOS, we were able to automatically generate a workflow from the above function and more than 1300 lines of DevOps scripts, allowing us to easily deploy the service to the cloud -the actual move from code running on a local IDE to a fully functioning service on the AWS public cloud took less than 5 minutes!.

Workflow generated automatically by CAIOS

The workflow runs on a regular basis (e.g. nightly) to ensure that our code and docker images are regularly scanned for vulnerabilities and sensitive information.

Benefits:

By using CAIOS and Python to automate our security scanning workflow, we’ve been able to:

• Save time and resources by eliminating manual processes and the need for cloud development or deployment scripts
• Ensure that our code and images are regularly scanned for vulnerabilities and sensitive information
• Quickly move from development to deployment
• Maintain the highest level of security for our products and services
• Keep our stakeholders informed of any potential issues

Conclusion:

CAIOS and Python have proven to be powerful tools for streamlining our security scanning workflow. By relying on these technologies, we’ve been able to efficiently and effectively ensure the security of our products and services while keeping our stakeholders informed.