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Building AcraCensor transparent SQL firewall 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.

Can WAF prevent SQL injection? 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.

On blockchain and GDPR 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.

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.

The main new features of Acra 0.84.0 are based around the DevOps’ needs – they eliminate the need to have a deep knowledge of secure development and cryptography to protect your data using Acra. Logs, metrics, and full-scale tracing will help during the deployment and usage of Acra. You can export them to your favourite tools (i.e. ELK, Prometheus, Jaeger) and monitor Acra’s load, performance, and behaviour, in real-time. Great things are planned for the next few releases.

As the days were getting shorter, our pull requests were getting longer, and here we are now, proud to present Acra 0.83.0. Its distinctive new feature is the AcraRotate utility, which allows you easily rotate the storage keys on a regular basis or perform an emergency key rotation if you’ve detected (or suspect) a compromise of the client app. SQL filtering got more flexible — the new 6 patterns (including SUBQUERY and LIST_OF_VALUES) allow deep customisation for configuring the accepted queries and blocking malicious requests.

A methodical software developer’s perspective on mapping privacy regulations to changes in the database structure, updates in DevOps practices, backups, and restricted processing. GDPR and software development After 2 years of fearful anticipation, GDPR is finally here, in full effect starting with May 25, 2018. A considerable number of clients who've entrusted their data to our solutions keep asking a lot of questions in one or another way related to GDPR.