Navigating the Challenges of Remote Work Security: Key Insights

Remote work has become the standard for IT teams worldwide, and it's no wonder why organizations are increasingly embracing this trend. The modern workforce is no longer confined to a single physical location. While remote work is increasingly prevalent across various industries, it's been a long-standing practice in the IT sector. For developers, the primary requirement is simply a laptop with an internet connection. Research indicates that remote developers often experience heightened productivity and a sense of increased capacity when freed from office distractions.

However, remote access presents new security risks and vulnerabilities to your infrastructure, necessitating advanced security measures. While using a VPN might seem like a robust security measure, it's not a comprehensive solution to address all security risks. In reality, ensuring remote access security involves implementing various security strategies and cutting-edge technologies.

Let's delve into the intricacies of secure remote access and examine the best security practices for establishing a secure remote work environment.

What Technologies Enable Secure Remote Work Access?

Effective implementation of secure remote access involves employing advanced, safe, and adaptable technologies for accessing systems or applications from remote locations. Here are some notable examples:

Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA):

ZTNA solutions are built around security policies established and managed by organizations. Unlike VPNs, ZTNA systems do not grant users open access; organizational security policies determine access to services and applications. ZTNA solutions are valuable for ensuring secure connectivity over unfamiliar or untrusted networks, allowing organizations to enforce security policies that define access levels for each device and application.

Network Access Control (NAC):

Network Access Control (NAC) incorporates measures implemented via endpoint security tools, two-factor authentication, and your company network security policy. It safeguards the company's network against threats and breaches by allocating restricted access to individuals according to departmental or organizational management decisions.

Endpoint Security:

Endpoint security involves securing devices or endpoints exposed on a network, including mobile devices, laptops, desktops, and servers, using both software and policies. Firewalls and antivirus software are typically installed on endpoint devices to prevent security breaches. Security policies include measures such as preventing the caching of confidential data on your remote devices, avoiding dangerous downloads, and ensuring frequent security patch updates. System backups and snapshots aid in restoring system data in case of data loss or other events impacting production datasets, contributing to a cyber-resilient environment.

Privileged Access Management (PAM):

PAM involves tools to monitor, manage, and ensure secure access to your organization's data from specific privileged accounts. It oversees activities performed through privileged accounts and prevents unusual actions or activities.

Single Sign-On (SSO):

SSO enhances user authentication by granting access to multiple resources, applications, and devices via a single login credential. It enables organizations to manage and control user access to applications while simplifying the sign-on process for end-users, thereby enhancing remote access security.

Virtual Private Network (VPN):

A VPN is a commonly used technology for secure remote access, providing an additional layer of security while accessing a network remotely. It allows remote users to connect to private networks via encrypted servers or tunnels. VPN tunnels come in two types: Remote and Site-to-Site. Remote VPN tunnels are used when individual users access a private network over the Internet, while Site-to-Site VPN tunnels connect entire networks via the Internet. Various protocols establish network connections, such as IKEv2, PPTP, L2TP, and Open-Source VPN.

Secure Software Development in a Remote Setting - Best Practices

As you prepare for an extended period of working from home, it's essential to reassess your approach to security, just like you would with other aspects of remote work. Collaborating remotely, especially if it's new to you, might mean adjusting your security practices or priorities.

Here are some suggestions for adapting your security policies to accommodate a newly remote workforce. Not only will these practices be valuable immediately, but they will also help you maintain strong security measures.

Prioritize Security Visibility

While developer autonomy is valuable, ensuring security is equally crucial. Instead of hindering progress, address security needs through governance and visibility. DevOps principles have taught us that while deploying bugs may be inevitable, detecting and resolving them is paramount. The risk of a vulnerability leading to a hack immediately upon deployment is low, so a prompt response is almost as effective as preemptively avoiding the issue and is less disruptive.

Visibility can take various forms, and here are some recommendations:

• Share vulnerabilities discovered during the build process (provided they weren't severe enough to halt it). Utilize platforms like Slack channels or notification emails so security team members can review issues regularly.

• Instrument builds to capture the dependencies integrated into your application, creating a Software Bill Of Materials (SBOM). With an SBOM in place, you can promptly identify if a newly disclosed vulnerability impacts your project.

• Establish leaderboards showcasing how effectively different teams manage security concerns. Share security achievements across teams, such as the time to remediate a vulnerability. This approach can gamify the process and foster social momentum toward improvement. Teams can monitor their progress over time and modify their strategies if necessary. However, it's crucial to maintain these leaderboards purely for informational purposes and avoid using them as performance metrics. Doing so could undermine efforts to cultivate an open culture of security awareness.

Minimize Build Breakage

The practice of "breaking the build" due to a security breach is a widely adopted security measure in CI/CD pipelines, yet it can be highly disruptive. When a build fails, software development stops, leaving your developers at a standstill. This disruption is particularly pronounced in remote and asynchronous work settings, where teams may encounter delays in identifying, assigning, and resolving the issue, mainly if it stems from an external factor like a newly disclosed vulnerability in a library already in use.

To mitigate such disruptions, reserve build failures for truly exceptional circumstances, such as critical vulnerabilities demanding immediate attention. For other issues, opt to fail to pull requests instead. Pull requests offer several advantages:

• They facilitate testing solely the new code changes, typically within the developer's scope of control.

• They maintain a localized context to the branch where code modifications occur, preserving individual developer autonomy.

• You can decide whether a failed pull request should block a merge or serve as informational only, empowering developers to make informed decisions on how to proceed.

Establish Alignment Between Dev Teams and Security Partners

Forging and maintaining relationships is challenging enough, even more so remotely. Establishing alignment between development teams and their security counterparts is essential to ensure that remote developers have a clear point of contact for security inquiries.

Achieving alignment doesn't necessarily entail organizational changes; it involves integrating people into daily working practices. Pair every member of your Application Security, Product Security, or Cloud Security teams with team leads or directors from development. Schedule regular sync-ups between these pairs and encourage security partners to participate in virtual stand-ups and other activities of their respective development teams. These engagements supplement regular security team meetings, providing a broader organizational perspective. 

Enable Developers (Remote) with Documented Guideline

In remote development, it's crucial to empower each developer to make progress independently while maintaining asynchronous communication. This entails minimizing the need for approvals and granting more decision-making authority. From a security standpoint, it involves reassessing approval processes to delegate decision-making to developers whenever possible. Rather than awaiting approval, developers can drive progress and keep stakeholders informed about their actions and choices.

Effective empowerment hinges on aligning expectations—ensuring everyone comprehends their responsibilities and what constitutes successful task completion. This necessitates investing in documenting practices and expectations, facilitating consistent and informed decision-making for developers.

Focus on Security Fundamentals

In our current environment, it's essential to concentrate on what truly matters to ensure effective outcomes. In security, this entails prioritizing fundamental measures over more complex attacks. For most companies, scaling proficiency in managing vulnerable components, addressing configuration errors, and securing leaked tokens should take precedence over tackling sophisticated threats. You can broaden your focus once you've established robust security practices within your remote development teams. 

How can you Update your Critical Infrastructure Defenses?

If you still depend on privileged networks, it's time for a change. Although developers can use VPNs, home networks (and devices) are typically less secure than corporate environments. Therefore, you should prepare for increased attacks from these less secure networks.

Multi-Factor Authentication

Leverage this as an opportunity to begin investing in two-factor authentication infrastructure. Securing your authentication while working remotely is crucial, whether your developers operate in cloud environments or connect via VPN to your corporate infrastructure. While unplanned, the good news is that these investments will pay dividends in the future as you can extend that capability to other systems on your network or cloud environment.

Bug Bounties

As some companies undergo temporary closures, there will be a surge of individuals seeking opportunities in the gig market. This presents an excellent opportunity to strengthen your security assessment strategy through a Bug Bounty program. Doing so provides work for those seeking employment and enhances the resilience of your software and remote development teams. Bug bounties are an effective method of augmenting your security assessment capabilities and providing clear guidelines for researchers on reporting vulnerabilities to your organization. 

SSH Security

With more machines going remote, the risk of attacks rises. Strengthening authentication mechanisms on these interfaces becomes paramount. Adjusting session timeouts will prevent developers’ workstations from remaining logged into critical systems or code repositories when idle. To further enhance security, consider leveraging open-source or commercial solutions to enable more robust identity-based authentication. 

5 Security Tips for Remote Software Development Teams

In an increasingly remote work environment, ensuring the security of software development teams is paramount. As teams adapt to working from dispersed locations, maintaining robust security measures becomes essential to safeguard sensitive data and protect against cyber threats. 

Here are five crucial security tips for remote software development teams designed to help mitigate risks and strengthen your organization's security posture.

Permissions and Roles

Ensure developers only have access to the databases and repositories necessary for their work.

Reviews of Roles and Access (Quarterly)

Review roles and access permissions regularly and promptly revoke access to any databases or repositories that developers no longer require.

Use of VPN

Always access repositories and environments with two-factor authentication via VPN. Consider using physical keys like Yubikey to generate one-time passwords for added security.

Laptop/Computer Security

Implement basic security measures on your laptop or computer, including enabling disk encryption, activating a screensaver, using a password manager, and keeping your system updated with the latest patches.

Isolated Environments

Conduct development and operation tasks in isolated environments, such as development, staging, and production.

Conclusion

As you adapt to the new normal of remote work, it's essential to evaluate typical work habits and tailor security defenses accordingly. Understanding your developer’s daily tasks and implementing security measures that safeguard them while still enabling productivity is crucial for navigating remote work security challenges effectively.