Protego Labs recently discovered that 98 percent of functions in serverless applications are at risk, with 16 percent considered "serious."
Additionally, most of these functions are provisioned with more permissions than they require which could be removed to improve the security of the function and the application.
“When we analyze functions, we assign a risk score to each function. This is based on the posture weaknesses discovered, and factors in not only the nature of the weakness, but also the context within which it occurs,” explains Hillel Solow, CTO, Protego. “After scanning tens of thousands of functions in live applications, we found that most serverless applications are simply not being deployed as securely as they need to be to minimize risks.”
The greatest security posture issues Protego uncovered are unnecessary permissions, while the remainder are with vulnerable code and configurations. Often, extra permissions are a result of developers or security operators using wildcards (“*”) for permissions rather than itemizing exactly which permissions they need.
Supply chain problems are predominantly with third-party libraries or modules that contain known vulnerabilities. Most of the functions with these problems also have access to resources and services they don’t need, making them excellent targets for attackers.
A small percentage of configuration problems include triggers that are unnecessary and functions with long timeouts that could be shortened to minimize the damage an attacker could do if they get access.
“The good news is these are all mitigable issues,” says Solow. “Serverless applications enable you to configure security permissions on individual functions. This allows you to achieve more granular control than with traditional applications, significantly mitigating the risk if an attacker is able to get access. Serverless applications require far more policy decisions to be made optimally, which can be challenging without the right tools, but if done accurately, these decisions can make serverless applications far more secure than their non-serverless analogs.”
