Go Fast, Safely
k9 Security helps engineers understand and improve AWS security policies so that you can protect your data, quickly and confidently.
k9 does this by simplifying the complex AWS security model and reducing the time and effort to improve policies with easy-to-use policy generation libraries, actionable analysis, and professional support.
The Nature of The Problem
DevOps practices help your organization deliver changes to customers quickly, at high throughput, with lower risk — hypothetically. However, application decomposition and increasing rates of change mean the old security and risk management practices don’t scale. Here are just a few of the challenges you are likely facing:
The Rate Of Change With Applications Is Rapid
It’s difficult if not impossible to keep up with the volume of change happening within the company, especially new applications that use new Cloud services.
Manual policy development and inspection simply
Does. Not. Scale.
Cloud IAM Systems Are Complex In Many Ways
Cloud IAM systems are very complex, difficult to validate, and risky to test.
Even your Cloud Security Engineer has trouble working out what access capabilities a given policy allows in your universe and interactions with other applications and new capabilities launched by AWS.
Summarizing Access Control Problems Is Hard
It’s difficult to summarize access control problems for your own direct analysis let alone in a way that you can easily share with your own team or other teams.
Modeling thousands of AWS API actions and their effects from scratch wastes your time.
We know you have questions coming at you all day from teams trying to get their applications deployed and that they don’t know as much about AWS Cloud Security as maybe they should. They may even think security is someone else’s job (yours?).
We also know that you want to reduce chaos and urgent work that disrupts building your platform or puts you in the news.
k9 was built to help you and your platform’s users collaborate, ship safely and sleep well.
Practice Safe DevOps
k9 is like having an AWS Security expert integrated into your delivery workflow, providing deep and tireless security expertise, the visibility you need, and advising you about the actual security of your resources.
Platform and Application teams deliver more securely with k9
- Declare your intended access and verify it happened with a consistent access capability language
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Answer ‘simple’ questions with very complex answers like “who has access to what data, compute resources, and APIs?” and helping you understand the risk of that access
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Scale application and platform security review processes out to the people who know the domain best and are responsible for the application, but are not experts in AWS.
- Adopt easy to use, secure resource and security policy management libraries (Terraform) in automated delivery pipelines
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Say “yes, here’s how” to application teams while effectively managing access control risk with a minimum of effort – during normal business hours.
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Find access control problems on the Cloud platform quickly and offer quick-to-implement solutions.
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Address the ‘open secret’ that automation’s power is often ahead of the access controls – can the CI/CD system or an engineer destroy production accidentally or maliciously?
Accelerate application and infrastructure delivery and improve security.
Simplify the Complex AWS Access Control Model
k9 reports what access each application and person has to each Cloud resource in language everyone can understand.
This accurate, automated analysis eliminates the need for mind-bending IAM thought experiments and tedious, time consuming manual report generation.
Use this same language to configure k9 infrastructure code libraries to generate least privilege policies.
Examples
- the ci user has administer-resource, delete-data, read-data for all resources (should it? what about the prod DB?)
- the security-audit role has read-data for all resources
- the ecommerce-web role has write-data and read-data for only the orders bucket
Simple Daily Reporting
k9 analyzes access granted by your AWS security policies nightly, then publishes an actionable report to your own S3 bucket.
Pivot, filter, slice, and dice with tools and data you already use.
Use the Excel format (sample) for quick, interactive analysis:
Scale access monitoring with pre-built dashboards for Splunk & Datadog.
Use the certified 3rd party IAM access report to audit:
✅ IAM administrators
✅ Unused IAM users and roles
✅ Access to critical data sources, keys, and IAM roles
✅ IAM user passwords and API access keys
✅ Access to AWS service APIs
Supported Services: IAM, STS, KMS, S3, RDS, DynamoDB, Redshift, and more (1375+ AWS API Actions)
Secure Policy Automation
Secure your data with security policies generated by k9's usable infrastructure automation libraries. Built for continuous delivery. Specify your intended access in simple language and let k9 generate a least privilege security policy. See k9 Security's Terraform & CDK libraries on GitHub for S3 buckets and KMS encryption keys.
✅ Least privilege access policy
✅ Code review
Who has access to what data? Really. (sample)
k9 tells you exactly what AWS permissions allow today and every day.
k9 determines who has access with the AWS IAM simulation APIs. k9 summarizes that into actionable reports (details). Analysis includes Service Control, IAM, and Resource policies.
This is not a static analysis of IAM policy or summary of yesterday's CloudTrail events. (k9 reports what IAM users and roles could do with AWS APIs and data.)
Now you can "unit test" all of your AWS security policies, even in production.
How k9 Works
The k9 access inventory generation process pulls data from the AWS IAM and data services for your account and summarizes it once you’ve provided k9 access (sample report in xlsx). The inventory process enumerates IAM entities and assess access to resource types supported by k9. The assessment process uses the IAM policy simulation API to ask AWS who has access to what, which is really the only way to be sure about such things. This description glosses over a lot of detail, particularly that this assessment process requires deep knowledge of the AWS security model, careful data modeling, and usually requires a large number of queries to the IAM service, even when highly optimized (don’t worry: AWS IAM API usage is free).
The inventory generation process runs at least once per 24 hour period in which there are changes to IAM or resources. The inventory process generates a report that is encrypted with the customer’s KMS encryption key and stored in an internal k9-managed S3 bucket. Then k9 publishes this report to a customer-managed Secure Inbox implemented using an S3 bucket and KMS.
k9 summarizes each IAM user or role’s provisioned access to AWS resources into a small number of access capabilities:
- administer-resource
- use-resource
- read-data
- write-data
- delete-data
- unclassified-access
Certain actions may classify to multiple capabilities. For example, the rds:DeleteDBCluster action classifies to both delete-data and administer-resource because deleting the DB cluster deletes both the DB instances and the cluster’s data volume. Quick question: who can delete your production data?
Interested in learning more about how k9 works? Check out our How k9 Works page.
Start finding & fixing issues quickly (hours, not weeks)
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configure access
Configure k9 access to your AWS accounts in less than 30 minutes with our simple automation.
Audit
Audit access assessments of your accounts delivered daily to your secure inbox (S3 bucket).
Improve Policies
Use k9 access reports, automation libraries, and pro support to improve security.