Automating and Scaling App Protection with Azure Devops

September 10, 2018 4582 Views Gabriel Torok

Prevention, detection, and response

Today, Microsoft announced Azure DevOps – Loosely, it is TFS and VSTS, with its services broken out into distinct components that can be used together or separately. The Azure DevOps services are Azure Boards, Azure Repos, Azure Pipelines, Azure Test Plans and Azure Artifacts. When Azure DevOps was VSTS and TFS, we supported integration with PreEmptive’s Dotfuscator. Today, none of that changes. As Azure DevOps evolves, we will continue to improve our integration, so that you can easily add multi-layered protection to your valuable apps.

In Mindset shift to a DevSecOps culture, Buck Hodges, Director of Engineering for Visual Studio Team Services, stressed the importance of both preventing breaches and “assuming breaches. ”In essence, prevention only gets you part of the way there. “Assuming a breach” allows for effective incident detection, response and recovery process planning.

PreEmptive’s protection tools (Dotfuscator and DashO) easily integrate with your Azure DevOps process, hardening your applications by injecting controls such as:

Anti-Reverse Engineering
Anti-Tampering
Anti-Inspection
Anti-Compromised Device

Hardened applications can respond to attacks by executing standard or customized behaviors. For example, an application could simply exit, or it could send security related messages to an Azure analytics platform such as Visual Studio App Center. In addition to helping satisfy PCI, NIST, and other guidelines, this strategy also lines up with the OWASP mobile recommendation to shut down an app running on a rooted device, to prevent compromise.

For sensitive or high value applications, organizations in virtually every industry are incorporating application hardening and obfuscation into their DevOps process. Along with using other application security practices this can create a DevSecOps process. I will have a future blog with more information on DevSecOps.

What now?

Learn more about securing and protecting your mobile, service, and desktop components with PreEmptive Protection and Azure DevOps, and get a free evaluation of application protection here.

In addition, a free tool called Dotfuscator Community is included in Visual Studio. It is easy to add to your Azure DevOps process via a free extension available here: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=PreEmptiveSolutions.dotfuscator-ce-vsts

PreEmptive Solutions is committed to deepening and broadening its integration into Azure DevOps alongside other Azure DevOps partners such as Mobilize and Progress.

To learn more about #AzureDevOps see https://aka.ms/azurevsts.

Latest Blog Posts

Protecting C# Applications That Use Dynamic Types

The dynamic type in C# provides flexibility that is not available in other statically-typed languages. Since its introduction in C# 4.0 (.NET 4.5), we have worked with customers who wanted to know more about how dynamic types are impacted by the obfuscation process.

Malicious actors — like any thieves — live by a simple rule: If the front door is locked, break the window.

It’s why threats like fileless malware and crypto-jacking have seen substantial gains over last few years. It’s why — despite increasing employee education and IT training — hackers are still hooking phish by developing more sophisticated and authentic-looking email spoofs. Cybercriminal communities, meanwhile, continue to grow on the dark web, allowing attackers to share info, purchase exploit kits and identify potential targets.

What does this mean for CISOs? That typical defense efforts are being outpaced as familiar attack vectors are replaced with non-traditional threats. But it’s not all bad news; here are three questions every CISO needs to ask to help close the doors, bolt the windows and leave hackers out in the cold.

Gabriel, you have been in the security industry for over 2 decades. You have seen many different tools and services. Why create a company around something as specific as obfuscation and in-app protection?

Our customers build a lot of really innovative apps that enable their users and customers to do new and cool things. These apps frequently run on untrusted client computers/devices and they control access to customer’s sensitive data or critical devices.

And after all the effort of designing, building, debugging, and deploying their applications, the last thing they want is for an attacker to steal their work or use it to look for vulnerabilities to break into their system.

Long ago, we built a Java code optimizer, but it became clear to us that our customer cared more about the obfuscation effects of the optimization than the actual performance improvement. That is when we really began to focus on app protection. First with Java, then .NET, Android, iOS, Xamarin, JavaScript, etc.

Gartner calls In-App Protection “crucial” in their July 2019 Market Guide for In-App Protection In-App Protection. The guide’s summary advises security and risk management leaders to “take due care in protecting their application clients” in order to avoid “security failure.”

This raises the question – what constitutes “due care?” Obviously, no development organization looks to recklessly expose their applications or sensitive data to attack or compromise. On the other hand, over-engineered (or poorly engineered) security controls can quickly lead to excessive development costs, performance and quality issues, and, ultimately, unacceptable user experiences. While terms and terminology may vary, there is broad consensus on how to best define “due care” for any given application/user scenario.

If you don’t follow application security closely, you might think of application obfuscation and symbol renaming as being synonymous – and with good reason. Many platforms and languages, like .NET, Java, and JavaScript have popular obfuscators that do little else--our own Dotfuscator Community Edition for .NET and ProGuard for Java are good examples. However, obfuscation is far more than symbol renaming – and in-app protection is far more than obfuscation. Much of this expansion has been driven by new security requirements, shifting attack vectors, the rise of mobile and IoT computing and, lastly, the growing recognition inside regulations and legislation of the exposure that can result from inadequately protected software.

Automating and Scaling App Protection with Azure Devops

Prevention, detection, and response

Protecting C# Applications That Use Dynamic Types

Non-Traditional Attack Vectors: Three Questions Every CISO Needs to Ask

Q&A With PreEmptive CEO Gabriel Torok

Gabriel, you have been in the security industry for over 2 decades. You have seen many different tools and services. Why create a company around something as specific as obfuscation and in-app protection?

The Secret to Effective In-App Protection

Symbol Renaming: App Security’s Maginot Line?

Latest Blog Posts

Protecting C# Applications That Use Dynamic Types

Non-Traditional Attack Vectors: Three Questions Every CISO Needs to Ask

Q&A With PreEmptive CEO Gabriel Torok

The Secret to Effective In-App Protection

Symbol Renaming: App Security’s Maginot Line?

Twitter