The recent growth of ransomware attacks, malware, and cyber security breaches across the globe has been giving businesses a hard time. Critical data applications, especially, have become a favorite target for cybercriminals. Malicious actors are always on the lookout for vulnerability in apps running on the cloud.
In fact, incorporating security measures into the DevOps process has a separate name for it: DevSecOps. It uses application security testing tools, and runtime protection helps mitigate issues early.
What is Runtime Protection?
Runtime protection is a security solution designed to provide personalized protection to applications. The tools analyze the application’s data and the state of the application to identify the threats at runtime. In addition, it is equipped to deal with runtime attachments on the software application layer by providing the admin more visibility into the hidden vulnerabilities.
Runtime protection is the server-side security software or tool that wraps around your application with the runtime instrumentation and protects it.
There are multiple tools in the market that offer runtime protection. They incorporate security into a running app no matter where the server of the application resides. They also intercept calls from the apps to the system to ensure the requests are secure and validate requests inside your app directly. These tools integrate within the runtime environment of an application.
They work by deploying agents that sit close with your application to watch and react. Every tool works uniquely. They reduce deployment time and work with robust WAF.
How it Works
Runtime application protection works in two ways: one is self-protection mode, and the other is monitoring mode. Depending on the requirement, DevSecOps admins should deploy the tool with the app.
Runtime Application Self Protection
As the name suggests, a runtime application self-protection tool detects the possibility of an execution of a request at runtime, leading to a cyberattack due to vulnerabilities in the application’s code. These tools act as the first line of defense against any external threats.
Monitoring Mode
The monitoring mode keeps a close eye on the application and keeps checking for potential risks. Without intervening with requested requests or calls to the application, it displays the vulnerability information in the dashboard.
Usually, the tool is deployed with passive monitoring as it consumes minimal resources and doesn’t increase latency.
Runtime Protection Safeguards
Runtime application protection safeguards the application, the user data, and other critical data from attacks like Zero-Day exploits. A Zero-Day exploit is a cyberattack that targets vulnerabilities in the software that are unknown to the antivirus or software vendors. The runtime protection infers attacks based on contextual detection along with the mixed static view and dynamic view of the application architecture. This process also reduces the number of false positives.
Runtime protection protects the application from various risk factors, including the OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities.
Runtime protection protects the application and its data from different attacks and injections. Some of the attacks it protect the system from are HTTP response splitting, HTTP method tampering, large requests, clickjacking, malformed content-types, path traversal, and unvalidated HTTP redirects
Runtime protection adapts quickly to the application architecture.
Consideration for Using Tools
Along with the basic features of the tools, the DevSecOps admin should look at tools that can further benefit their application and improve security. When choosing a tool, ensure that it is developer-centric and fully integrates with the stack. It should have a minimal performance footprint and work without any latency issues. The selected tool should not introduce any new vulnerabilities into the system. Most importantly, the deployment and maintenance of the tool should be as easy as possible.
Conclusion
Cyberattacks are everywhere. During the pandemic, many organizations moved to the cloud, making them easier targets for attacks. The cost incurred by companies as a result of cyberattacks is projected to be 6 trillion by 2025. Thousands of attackers are targeting online businesses every single day.
A simple web firewall may be great for protecting against known vulnerabilities. However, in the case of unknown vulnerabilities, runtime protection tools provide more targeted controls that are designed to mitigate the attacks automatically.
