A Primer on Santa Lockdown

Santa LOCKDOWN is the holy grail of protection, but is extremely dangerous to implement if you're not properly prepared. Below we've listed some lessons we've learned along the Journey to Lockdown.

Realtime Unblocking

One of the most important elements of a graceful migration toward lockdown is being able to facilitate realtime unblocking. We define as the ability to unblock an UNKNOWN application while on LOCKDOWN mode as quickly and with as little friction as possible.

Rudolph supports this through machine-specific configurations and fast syncing.

Fast Syncing

Santa's official documentation suggests a default sync period of 10 minutes (600 seconds). This means, new rules can take up to 10 minutes before being pushed down to Santa agents. This can result in very poor user experiences.

Rudolph supports any sync interval, down to Santa's minimum of 60 seconds.

Machine-specific Configurations

On Rudolph both rules and machine configurations can be specified both globally and at a machine-specific level.

For Santa agent configurations, there is a default configuration that is hardcoded into the app, but we recommend setting a global one in DynamoDB. Each machine then also can have machine-specific configurations that override the global one.

For rules, there is a set of global rules which is deployed to all machines. Each machine can also have their own machine-specific rules, which are appended onto the global rules (and override them, when applicable). This allows you to deploy rules to specific machines without influencing other machines.

Eventupload

To improve adoption of Santa, it is extremely important to be able to introspect on what your fleet is running. To collect information on this, the /eventupload endpoint in Rudolph can be configured to plug into other AWS services, such as Lambda, Firehose, or Kinesis Data Streams.

Lockdown Gotchas

Here are some gotchas to think about prior to changing sensors to lockdown.

Libcurl and SSL and other Homebrew Darkness

Some system-critical libraries in Homebrew have post-installation scripts that initialize certain parts of the application. One example os libcurl which runs a binary to set up SSL certificates.

If Santa blocks this post-install binary, it can result in libcurl being partially broken inside of Homebrew, and a lot of headaches and debugging will follow.

VPNs

If your Rudolph server is accessible only via a VPN or has some other IP-based inbound allowlist, it's vital that Santa has rules that prevent this pipeline from breaking down.

As an example, if an erroneous rule is deployed to (or is missing from) an endpoint that blocks your VPN provider, it is possible that the Santa agent can get "orphaned" if it is unable to connect to Rudolph (if it needs VPN in order to do so).

Browsers

If you have a web GUI to facilitate the Santa binary unblocking process, it's important that the web browser is not locally blocked, or it can result in a user being "stuck" trying to unblock something.

This can be fixed through the backend but usually results in bad user experience.

Provide feedback

Saved searches

Use saved searches to filter your results more quickly

Uh oh!