Conclusion

We hope you’ve enjoyed this short journey into the world of security observability and eBPF. It is the technology we’ve always wanted when in the trenches of threat detection and security engineering due to the fully customizable, in-kernel detection and prevention capabilities. It’s an incredibly exciting time for eBPF as it’s gone from an emerging Linux kernel technology to the one of the hottest new tools in distributed computing and infrastructure technology.

As more companies are shifting to containers and cloud native infrastructure, securing Kubernetes environments has never been more critical. Security observability in cloud native environments is the only data you need to create a least-privilege configuration for your workloads, rapidly threat hunt across your entire environment, or detect a breach or compromise.

Containers are implemented as namespace, capabilities, and cgroups in the Linux kernel, and eBPF operates natively in the kernel, natively supporting container visibility. eBPF dynamically configures security observability and prevention policy enforcement for all workloads in a cluster without any restart or changes to your applications or infrastructure. eBPF gives security teams an unmatched level of visibility into their workloads via several hook points in the kernel, including process execution, network sockets, file access, and generic kprobes and uprobes. This security observability enables full visibility of the four golden signals of container security.

Because eBPF operates natively in the kernel, we can also gain visibility and create prevention policy for the underlying Kubernetes worker node, providing detection in depth for your cloud native environment. With visibility of the full MITRE ATT&CK framework, security observability is the only data point you need to objectively understand the security of your environment.

eBPF isn’t just about observability; it also creates an improved prevention policy and framework over traditional security tools. When developing a policy, it’s critical that you use the security observability to create a prevention policy based on observed application behavior. Testing your policies for safety from outages in a development or staging environment follows DevOps/SRE best practices.

If you have a team that isn’t well-versed in security or is wondering how to get started, participating in CTFs and red team assessments are a great way to learn the techniques of an attack while generating eBPF events that represent the behaviors of real-world attacks. These events can be applied to generate prevention policies across the spectrum of the MITRE framework for a defense-in-depth approach to securing your workloads.

The future of eBPF is still uncharted, but if we peer into the future we might see a world where BPF logic is just a logical part of an application. In this model, your application comes with some BPF code, and while technically it’s extending the kernel in some sense, it’s extending the functionality of the application to react to events in a way that doesn’t require a kernel extension. One thing we can be sure of is that eBPF for security is just getting started.