Many financial services organizations fail to enforce strong cryptographic protection policies in their DevOps environments, sometimes at the expense of security, data privacy and compliance in areas such as mobile banking.

That is a finding by Salt Lake City, Utah-based cybersecurity firm Venafi, from its a study on the cryptographic security practices of DevOps teams in the financial services industry.

DevOps, short for software development and information technology, refers to a combination of practices and tools used to increase an organization's capacity to deliver applications and services.

Cryptographic security helps guard valuable data resources on intranets, extranets, and the internet risks. In DevOps settings, compromises in development or test environments can spread to production systems and applications. According to Venafi this is a particular issue for financial services organizations, which have been early adopters of DevOps technology.

According to the study, many financial services organizations provide fairly strong cryptographic security policies in their production systems. However, they often fail to enforce the same vital measures in their DevOps environments.

“Financial services organizations use DevOps technology to deliver new features and improve customer experience in today's hyper competitive market,” said Kevin Bocek, chief security strategist for Venafi. “However, the competitive advantage DevOps offers can't come at the expense of security, data privacy and compliance.” He added, it's clear many financial services organizations still struggle with securing the machine identities impacting everything from mobile banking to high speed trading. “Despite DevOps teams indicating they are aware of the risks associated with TLS/SSL keys and certificates—the most frequently used method to establish machine identities—this awareness clearly isn't being translated into meaningful protection.”

Key study findings:

Financial services organizations struggle with enforcing security polices for DevOps environments. Thirty percent do not consistently enforce the same cryptographic security policies for DevOps projects as they do with production environments. In addition, 7% of respondents were unsure about the enforcement of these policies across both DevOps and production environments.
Eighty percent of financial services DevOps teams are aware of the volume and severity of cyberattacks as a result of compromised keys and certificates. Two thirds of these teams are aware of the controls needed to prevent this type of cyberattack.
Only 51% of financial services organizations replace all DevOps certificates with production certificates once live. When certificates are not changed, there is no way to distinguish between the identities of untested machines that should remain in development and trusted machines that are safe to place in production.
On the positive side, financial services organizations generally implement robust cryptographic security practices throughout their operations, with 75% requiring strong keys (2048-bit or stronger) and 60% of organizations requiring different certificate authorities for development and production environments. Only 2% of respondents said their organization does not require key and certificate policies.

Venafi suggested as the speed and scale of DevOps development intensifies, particularly in the financial services industry, the need to secure machine identities through encryption is exploding. Without robust security measures and practices, successful attacks that target DevOps keys and certificates, can allow attackers to remain hidden in encrypted traffic and evade detection.

“As we've seen with the SWIFT attacks, financial services organizations are a valuable and popular target for cyber criminals,” Tim Bedard, director of threat intelligence and analytics for Venafi said. If financial service organizations don't protect the keys and certificates used by DevOps teams, cybercriminals can exploit transport layer security/secured sockets layers and keys and certificates to create their own encrypted tunnels. Bedard added attackers can also use misappropriated secure shell keys to pivot inside the network, elevate their own privileged access, install malware or exfiltrate large quantities of sensitive corporate data while remaining undetected.

Dimensional Research conducted the study in November 2016 using responses from 103 IT professionals in financial services companies with DevOps programs in the U.S. and Europe.

Instant Insights /

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