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Intro # Any set of security controls deployed in your infrastructure may fail. Given enough pressure, some controls will certainly fail. No surprises here, but the question is – how to build our systems to make security incidents less damaging in case of a failure of some components? How to prevent data leaks even in case of a successful data breach? Building security tools , we strive towards defense in depth approach.

New Themis is greatly improved and sparkly with additions. We are proud to introduce Rust-Themis – full support of Themis for Rust. Rust-Themis works with all four crypto-systems: Secure Cell for storing data securely, Secure Message for encrypting and signing envelopes, Secure Session for encrypting session communications and Secure Comparator for zero-knowledge authentication. All Rust-Themis components can be installed from crates.io . Jump to the Rust How-To guide to learn more.

New Acra 0.85.0 brings the expanded functionality we’ve announced during the release of Acra 0.84.0. We’ve added server-side encryption mode which allows integrating Acra without altering the client application code. It’s called AcraServer’s Transparent proxy mode and allows you to configure AcraServer to parse SQL queries and to encrypt values designated for specific database columns. Transparent encryption mode is useful for large distributed applications where updating the source code of each client app separately would be complicated.

Intro There are two main ways to mitigate SQL injections: inside the app (using prepared statements, stored procedures, escaping) and outside the app (using Web Application Firewalls or SQL firewalls). WAFs analyse web and HTML traffic using rule sets based on regexs and are good for covering the known vulnerabilities. SQL firewalls sit closer to the database, analyse SQL statements for potentially malicious content, which makes them more flexible in SQL injections prevention.

Intro What is the biggest threat to a tool that prevents unauthorised database access? Requests from the application side that trigger data leakage. Namely, SQL injections and other application attacks that allow attackers to craft custom SQL queries. How can we prevent that? The standard industry response is obvious — input sanitization, web application firewalls (WAFs), and prepared statements are typically used for addressing these concerns. We’re shipping a product which aims to intervene into application logic as little as possible but as it turns out, input sanitization is rarely done well, WAFs are not always efficient, and prepared statements are a question of app developer’s choice.

Intro As cryptographers who develop data security tools that heavily involve cryptography (surprise surprise), we get asked a lot of questions about “crypto”. Unfortunately, not “cryptozoology”* crypto, but neither it is cryptography. Very often it is about blockchain. More and more tools claim to have “unprecedented levels of security” or “GDPR compliance & security by design” when using security designs based on blockchain and distributed consensus systems. But blockchain solutions have pre-defined threat model.

2018 was as exciting as it was busy — 7 new versions of Acra Open Source accompanied by Acra Live Demo and Acra Engineering Demo, launch of DGAP security consulting and security training services, over a dozen articles in the blog and Medium, a whole new Documentation Server, talks at conferences all over the world, and many more interesting events. Stats According to our GitHub statistics, 2018 resulted in:

We believe that everyone should be able to create secure applications and protect users’ privacy. That’s why our main cryptographic components are open source and developer-friendly. But open-source would be nothing without external contributions and feedback from users. We would like to publicly celebrate our open-source contributors and users who challenged us to make our open-source offerings more robust by asking hard questions, pointing out usability problems and potential usage patterns we were not aware of before.

In our company, we’ve succeeded in clearly articulating the deliverables of our products and consulting projects. Building a network of great partners and delegating the work out of range of our primary competencies to them helps both parties concentrate on what’s we’re best at. However, there are a lot of challenges in building distributing the work between different types of security specialists. Larger part of the market is still struggling to show a viable differentiation for the customer looking to mitigate various infosec-related risks.

Distributed tracing is incredibly helpful during the integration and optimisation of microservice-rich software. Before implementing tracing as a publicly available feature in the latest version of Acra, we did a small research to catch up with current industry standards in tracing protocols and tools. In this article, we’ve decided to explain, why tracing is a very useful thing and how you can benefit from using it in your projects.