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Solutions for Open-Source Incident Response

Posted by Marbenz Antonio on October 10, 2022

Cloud Incident Response Best Practices | Lucidchart Blog

Red Hat develops the most innovative methods for resolving cybersecurity problems in the tech sector. Red Hat achieves this by making pertinent information easily accessible and empowering the general public to make well-informed security-related decisions.

Red Hat recognized the need to publish a written incident response plan (IRP) to support both incident response and vulnerability management as part of our ongoing evaluations. A formal, publicized IRP is also required under FedRAMP and other regulatory frameworks. Red Hat’s efforts to ensure that we thoroughly documented our incident response procedures to meet our demands and to provide a more methodical approach to examine and enhance our vulnerability reports made sense.

They soon learned that there are no open-source IRPs for product security as we looked at how other businesses handled the reporting of vulnerabilities. Red Hat encourages innovation, thus they decided to formalize and share our own IRP.

We also determined that we would follow the principles of open source and seek community input. As a result, we released a template for usage by and consideration by the industry. The first publicly available, open-source Product Security Incident Response Plan has been developed, and they expect to work with business partners to improve our security procedures.

Why have an IRP?

A predetermined line of action for all important security occurrences is an incident response plan. Some instances spark broader initiatives that affect products for days or even months. An incident response strategy facilitates quicker, more effective, and more consistent stopping, containing, communicating, and event resolution. It is an overall guide to the processes that must take place throughout the company regarding incidents and their resolution, not a playbook. After all, more than simply the security team and engineering are involved in incident responses. Then, the plan is connected to playbooks and other specific procedures.

How an IRP collaborates and provides information on specific procedures that assist the organization’s response effort is another illustration of the benefit of an IRP. Red Hat provides a Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score in addition to instructions on how to categorize the importance of each Common Vulnerability and Exposure (CVE). However, because of compensating controls placed around a particular piece of code, a given Red Hat product might be less affected. A formal IRP provides a strong response to customer inquiries about being thorough in responses and helps steer the teams in handling these instances.

The Method

It is not simple to have a methodical procedure that can manage these requirements. Red Hat’s approach to incident response is a multi-step procedure that begins with triaging problems, continues with analysis, and ends with trackers and fixes. The official procedure Red Hat will adhere to in the event of a product security incident is known as the IRP. These incidents can range from a little false positive report to a serious risk to our customer’s security when using our products. The first thing we do when we learn of a defect is to see if any of our goods are impacted. If so, we assess how seriously the product is impacted. The urgency of the reaction will be determined by the severity analysis, which will also guarantee that the vulnerabilities are fixed right away. This procedure needs to be followed correctly and consistently.

The first phase, “triage,” might be difficult for organizations like Red Hat that participate in various open-source communities and vulnerability mailing lists. These disclosure lists make all known vulnerabilities public and charge a corporation with determining how those flaws will affect their goods. We also maintain an email address where users can report vulnerabilities in addition to evaluating these sources. Our reports, which we track in a queue system, are based on all of these information sources. Our assessment of the incident’s severity and notification process is launched when an occurrence is reported via this queuing system.

Because of this, even though many vulnerabilities do not directly affect us, we must prioritize them to know for sure if we are or are not affected. Our analysis process is faced with many difficulties because of this “lack of guaranteed risk.”

We send the vulnerability for more investigation if it is likely that one of our products could be impacted, starting our assessment and coordination process. Here, we do a thorough analysis. We check to see whether we are vulnerable, and if we are, we work with engineers to have a fix released as soon as possible.

Embargoed CVEs are some CVEs that are not publicly available when disclosed via direct private conversations or private mailing lists. There must be a means to keep them secret in these situations both throughout the coordination of the fix and until they are publicly disclosed.

Customers are protected from different issues as soon as is practically possible thanks to the IRP process. We end this step and move into our recovery and closure phase once we have decided to develop a repair and have established a timeframe for its completion. Here, we complete the tracking of the incident and set up any required external communications. This completes the last stage of our systematic analysis process.

Our IRP document keeps track of the main stakeholders we work with and our expectations for the responsibilities we want them to do in the event of an incident. For instance, we will collaborate with the Engineering, Quality Engineering, and Release teams to track reported problems that have an impact on each product engineering team from the time of the release until it is closed or a fix is decided not to be released. Our procedure determines when we will communicate with each stakeholder for internal monitoring and orchestration when an occurrence is classified as a Major Incident. The Legal and Messages teams made significant contributions to the preparation of public communications for our customers and other aspects included in the IRP as part of this engagement during a Major Incident.

Every step in our process contains a clear set of requirements that must be met as well as a conclusion to avoid missing any important information. This methodical approach makes analysis considerably faster and allows analysts to cover more goods, which increases accuracy.

Conclusion

We feel that disseminating this methodology to the larger software community will help us all benefit from more secure software as well as well-coordinated vulnerability response orchestration. With the help of this methodology, we can continue to be more proactive when it comes to software security. Because our response is planned and understood by all parties, it is also quicker and more reliable.

 


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