Open Source Cloud Security Tools

6 Open Source Tools to Ensure Security Over Cloud

The need for securing data at the cheapest cost was the need of the hour thus resulting in

The need for securing data at the cheapest cost was the need of the hour thus resulting in the adoption of the cloud platforms.

Despite high-security levels, organizations still happen to be the victim of breaches and hacks.

Dependency on security monitoring teams has today reduced. All thanks to open source cloud security tools.
Let’s discuss some of them below.

Some of the Best Open Source Cloud Security Tools Available

osquery

Created by Facebook, it’s an open-source platform and easily accessible on Windows, macOS, CentOS, FreeBSD.

It continues testing for memory leaks, thread safety as well as binary reproducibility on all platforms.

Queries within osquery are taken care of by osqueryd, allowing the execution of scheduled queries across the entire infrastructure.

The logs generated from the same are taken into consideration for maintaining insights into security, performance, and configuration.

Moreover, users can detect malicious activities for scheduled queries.

In June 2019, Linux made an official statement of overtaking the control of osquery from Facebook.

Features:

  • Executing scheduled queries.
  • Try new queries with SQL interface with help of osqueryi.
  • Extraction of data from Docker containers

Grapl

It is known as Graph Analytics Platform. Grapl is an open-source platform for Detection and Response.

A graph usually consists of nodes and edges. Nodes are comparable to entities whereas the edges mark the relationship among nodes.

Though Graphs might seem to be an ordinary image to many, they still can be used by the hackers to derive information from it.

Grapl is an attempt to understand user behaviour through graphs rather than logs.

It uses security logs and converts the same into sub-graphs.

After this these graphs are merged into master graphs representing user actions.

Also Read: Best Cloud Cost Management Tools: You Should Be Aware Of

OSSEC

OSSEC is mainly focussed on detections of server intrusion for both cloud and on-premise.

Many of the functions that OSSEC undertakes for server security are:

  • Log analysis.
  • Integrity checking.
  • Active response.
  • Rootkit detection.
  • Windows registry monitoring.

Features:

  • Real-time data collection from multiple points.
  • Malicious application detection.
  • Log-based intrusion detectors.

Suricata

Suricata was first introduced in the year 2009 developed by the Open Information Security Foundation.

It is suitable for intrusion detections, inline intrusion prevention, network security monitoring, and offline PCAP processing.

Suricata is rule-based wherein a unique characteristic within network traffic can be given a specific definition.

This helps in alerting when such conditions are met and then whether the communication is to be allowed or to be dropped is decided on the same.

Its community is focused on security, usability, and efficiency.

Features:

  • Automatic protocol detection.
  • Lua scripting.
  • Multi-threading.

Zeek/Bro

This tool was developed in the year 1994 and was formerly known as Bro. It was renamed as Zeek at BroCon in the year 2018.

It is an open-source software network analysis framework.

Zeek other than network monitoring is also rich in other capabilities as:

  • Performing incident response.
  • Efficient in forensics it thus provides high-level records of a network’s activity.
  • Converting network traffic data into higher-level events.
  • Provides script interpreter.

Features:

  • In-depth analysis.
  • Open interfaces.
  • Being flexible allows it to not be dependent on traditional signatures.

Panther

It is a continuous security monitoring platform.

Data generation by clouds, networks, and applications are analyzed by Panther for threat detection as well as security.

Python detection logic provided by Panther allows detecting malicious behaviour, threat hunting, and secured cloud resources.

Features:

  • Continuous monitoring.
  • Automatic remediation.
  • Unauthorized access detection.

Conclusion

With the majority of businesses moving to clouds, business is rising faster than ever. But with the same intensity, the security issues to have expanded.

Open source tools can help the organization of any scale by providing it with security and analysis at affordable prices.

Also Read: What are the Cloud Security Standards that you need to Ensure?

About Jason Hoffman

I am the Director of Sales and Marketing at Wisdomplexus, capturing market share with E-mail marketing, Blogs and Social media promotion. I spend major part of my day geeking out on all the latest technology trends like artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, cloud computing, 5G and many more. You can read my opinion in regards to these technologies via blogs on our website.