Ermetic, a cloud infrastructure security company, has launched CNAPPgoat, an open source project that allows organisations to safely test their cloud security skills, processes, tools and posture in interactive sandbox environments that are easy to deploy and destroy.

CNAPPgoat supports AWS, Azure and GCP platforms for assessing the security capabilities included in Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP).

Unlike projects that illustrate possible attack paths, CNAPPgoat provides a large and expanding library of scenarios that security teams can execute to create a customised cloud environment for simulating unsecured and vulnerable assets and validating their defenses. The ability to easily provision a vulnerable environment with a broad range of risk scenarios provides the following benefits:

• Create a sandbox for testing an organisation’s security posture by assessing security team capabilities, procedures and protocols .
• Use vulnerable environments for hands-on workshops to train team members on new skills and techniques .
• Provision a “shooting range” for pentesters to test their skills at exploiting the scenarios and developing relevant capabilities .
• Benchmark CNAPP tools against known environments to evaluate their capabilities .

“Compared to existing open-source projects that create ‘capture the flag’ scenarios where participants are expected to follow a certain path, CNAPPgoat spans the leading cloud provider platforms and CNAPP capabilities while providing a modular and granular approach for provisioning specific categories of risks and vulnerabilities”,” said Igal Gofman, Director of Research for Ermetic.

“This breadth and depth allows pentesters and defenders to precisely isolate the elements they want to explore for training, new skills acquisition, prevention and security posture assessments,” added Noam Dahan, Research Lead.

CNAPPgoat enables security teams, trainers and pentesters to provision and run vulnerable scenarios from the following modules that make up the CNAPP specification defined by Gartner:

• Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) – covers risks associated with identities and entitlements, such as the unintended ability of an identity to escalate its privileges.
• Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP) – includes the exposure of workloads to vulnerabilities such as running vulnerable/end of life software or OS versions .
• Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) – spans the misconfiguration of cloud infrastructure components, such as publicly exposed storage resources.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) scanning – will be added soon for finding misconfigurations directly in code.

CNAPPgoat is an open community initiative designed to be used by anyone for commercial, technical and educational purposes. Additional artifacts including deeper technical dives and guides will be released soon. Contributions are encouraged including new scenarios, scenario proposals, issues, suggestions, feature requests or simply sharing feedback.