11 Ansible Security Benefits

Ansible is an automation engine used for enabling infrastructure as code (IaC), managing and deploying applications, and automating processes. It is often considered a tool for system administrators, DevOps practitioners, and related IT specialists.

Ansible workflows have significant implications for IT security, both enhancing it and introducing potential risks. This guide discusses various security benefits and considerations of using Ansible.

Source Control Integration

Ansible’s configuration management capabilities enable various security techniques associated with effective infrastructure as code, including:

• Versioning and Change Tracking: Keeps a detailed record of what changes are made, when, and by whom.
• Auditing and Compliance: Ensures changes to sensitive documents are made, reviewed, and approved by authorized personnel.
• Consistent and Sustainable RBAC: Links access, actions, and accountability, ensuring that only authorized users can make specific changes.
• Disaster Recovery and Rollback: Facilitates recovery from failures by rolling back to a stable state.
• Peer Review: Manages concurrent collaboration through the source control system. Multiple teams can work on different aspects of an Ansible configuration simultaneously, with the system detecting conflicts before they cause issues.

The integration of these techniques together allows you to use the same Single Sign On (SSO) passwords, development lifecycles, and permission schemes for Ansible authentication as you do for other workflows. Consistent use of IaC can prevent defects, ensuring the resulting operations are both predictable and secure.

Secure Communication

Ansible uses ssh as its default transport protocol. In addition to accessing ssh through standard clients and servers, Ansible also uses Paramiko, a Python implementation of OpenSSH. These components are regarded as secure for commercial traffic.

Ansible encrypts all communications, and authentication mechanisms include public-key, password, and Kerberos protocol.

Idempotent Operations

Ansible emphasizes declarative and idempotent actions (i.e. actions that are defined by their goals). An idempotent action is considered safe to repeat or replay, because it only performs what is necessary to achieve the intended goal. Ansible’s declarative playbooks help prevent different operators from interpreting instructions in different ways.

Consistency is achieved when all individual assets that share the same target reach the same state. This applies to both new and old assets. When a manual action leads to an inconsistent state, another idempotent invocation can bring any deviant systems back in line. Idempotence helps limit human errors and unnecessary changes, promotes consistent system states, and supports transparent auditing and troubleshooting.

Role-based Access Control

Ansible supports role-based access control (RBAC), assigning permissions based on a user’s responsibilities and authority. RBAC enhances security by providing granular access to assets. This granularity helps in modelling least privilege or minimal privilege configurations.

Ansible supports RBAC at two levels:

• Ansible Core: The community release of Ansible relies on operating system (OS) mechanisms for authentication and authorization, and therefore supports RBAC as well as the underlying OS.

• Ansible Tower: The Ansible Tower enterprise-class version of Ansible fully implements and supports RBAC.

Secrets Management Through Vaults

Secure systems rely on “secrets”, that is, information restricted to those with a need-to-know. Ansible Vault is a feature of Ansible that protects various kinds of secret information in encrypted files, including database passwords, documents with sensitive contents, and private keys.

Ansible Vault addresses common challenges related to secrets management:

• Ansible users do not need to generate their own schemes for protecting secrets.

• Its file encryption eliminates the need to store sensitive information in plaintext files.

• Ansible Vault manages access to secrets so the risk of them leaking beyond their intended recipients is minimized.

Audit Logging

Ansible’s audit logging records the details of playbook execution, such as tasks performed, changes effected, and events observed. There are both benefits and risk factors related to audit logging and security.

Audit logs can be valuable for forensic analysis and review, helping operators gain understanding into what occurs on a system. They also must be secured and protected since they have the potential to expose sensitive information like credentials and system configurations. Specifically, that protection should restrict read access to only those with a need-to-know their contents. Safeguarding audit log write access can also help prevent unauthorized modifications or tampering of logs.

Like other business continuity measures, audit logs typically receive attention during a crisis. This means their verification and practice needs to happen before the time of their use. Familiarity with audit logs deserves routine drills so that the logs are accurate and dependable when they are needed.

To be both useful and adequately secure, audit logs must be highly available, securely backed up, regularly monitored, periodically reviewed, and protected by granular RBAC. When appropriate, audit logs should be integrated with Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems. They must also comply with pertinent legal requirements like GDPR or HIPAA.

Continuous Compliance Checking

Ansible features compliance automation, real-time monitoring, auditing, and accountability to ensure systems are in optimal health and continuously supervised. It protects systems using multiple layers of security mechanisms that make sure configurations are performing as intended. By automating compliance tasks, results are more consistent, the need for manual intervention is reduced, and dependence on subject matter experts is minimized.

Security Patching

Security patching with Ansible is governed by Ansible’s authentication and accountability mechanisms to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the patching process. Ansible playbooks verify patch application and ensure consistent, secure, and transparent results.

The consistency of Ansible’s security mechanisms also enable concurrent development and patching to help efficiently resolve crises. When multiple patches must be managed simultaneously, Ansible’s IaC model allows different teams to prepare and test their patches at the same time without hindering each other’s progress.

Custom Modules

Security work often emphasizes the use of well-known, proven techniques. However, many real-world computing systems likely require some customization to meet specific needs. Ansible’s custom modules allow for customization by extending its base functionality in a predictable and manageable way. With that in mind, there are potential risks that come with using custom modules:

• Malicious or Erroneous Code Execution: Custom modules can execute arbitrary code from the Ansible control node. Breakdowns can lead to data breaches, unauthorized system access, or service disruption.
• Escalated Privileges: Custom modules have the ability to edit permissions. Unauthorized users or users with lower privileges could exploit custom modules to perform actions they otherwise wouldn’t be able to do.
• Exposed Information: Passwords, API keys, and security tokens frequently appear in custom modules.
• Insecure Input Handling: Custom modules often receive user inputs. It is crucial to sanitize these inputs to eliminate injection vulnerabilities.
• Lack of Proper Authentication and Authorization: Custom modules can be misused to act beyond their original intent.
• Compromised Code Integrity: Custom modules require thorough review before being deployed to ensure they don’t compromise the system.

Custom modules can be useful, but they require ongoing support. Even if modules are functioning well and remain unchanged, it is a best practice to give them periodic review to ensure they remain unaffected by security advisories and meet security standards.

Consistency in Multi-tier Environments

Ansible can be useful for managing configurations across development, testing, staging, and production environments. Consistent management across tiers is important, and there are numerous security considerations that come with multi-tier environments:

• Secure private information to prevent exposure in plaintext playbooks. This is often done with Ansible Vault.

• Network segmentation should isolate and secure hosts to prevent unauthorized access from the Ansible control machine.

• To ensure accountability and restricted access, credentials and privileges should adhere to RBAC principles.

• Auditing and logging should record tier-specific information to identify and isolate suspicious activity as quickly as possible.

Community and Vendor Support

Some of Ansible’s strengths are the extensive community and vendor support options available. These include Ansible’s documentation library and community forums, along with the wealth of shared content and knowledge provided by other users. As a best practice, community resources generally deserve review before implementing them in your environment:

• Ansible community documentation

• Ansible community forums

More Information

You may wish to consult the following resources for additional information on this topic. While these are provided in the hope that they will be useful, please note that we cannot vouch for the accuracy or timeliness of externally hosted materials.

• Ansible Collaborative Official Site