An organization’s network firewall is the first line of defense against an attack and a vital component for maintaining a secure environment. As a security operator, you construct and manage secure networks to ensure that your firewall only allows inbound and outbound network traffic defined by your organization’s firewall policies. A firewall policy consists of security rules that protect the network against harmful incoming and outgoing traffic.

Managing multiple firewall rules across various products and vendors can be both challenging and time consuming for security teams. Manual workflow processes that involve complex tasks can result in errors and ultimately cause delays in investigating an application’s suspicious behavior or stopping an ongoing attack on a server. When every solution in a security portfolio is automated through the same language, both security analysts and operators can perform a series of actions across various products in a fraction of the time. This automated process maximizes the overall efficiency of the security team.

Ansible security automation interacts with a wide variety of security technologies from a range of vendors. Ansible enables security teams to manage different products, interfaces, and workflows in a unified way to produce a successful deployment. For example, your security team can automate tasks such as blocking and unblocking IP and URLs on supported technologies such as enterprise firewalls.

Ansible security automation enables you to automate various firewall policies that require a series of actions across various products. You can use an Ansible role, such as the acl_manager role to manage your Access Control Lists (ACLs) for many firewall devices such as blocking or unblocking an IP or URL. Roles let you automatically load related vars, files, tasks, handlers, and other Ansible artifacts based on a known file structure. After you group your content in roles, you can easily reuse them and share them with other users.

The below lab environment is a simplified example of a real-world enterprise security architecture, which can be more complex and include additional vendor-specific tools. This is a typical incident response scenario where you receive an intrusion alert and immediately execute a playbook with the acl_manger role that blocks the attacker’s IP address.

Your entire team can use Ansible security automation to address investigations, threat hunting, and incident response all on one platform. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform provides you with certified content collections that are easy to consume and reuse within your security team.

Before you begin automating your IDPS with Ansible, ensure that you have the proper installations and configurations necessary to successfully manage your IDPS.

  $ sudo snort --version

   ,,_     -*> Snort! <*-
  o"  )~   Version 2.9.13 GRE (Build 15013)
  ""    By Martin Roesch & The Snort Team: http://www.snort.org/contact#team
        Copyright (C) 2014-2019 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
        Copyright (C) 1998-2013 Sourcefire, Inc., et al.
        Using libpcap version 1.5.3
        Using PCRE version: 8.32 2012-11-30
        Using ZLIB version: 1.2.7

$ sudo systemctl status snort
● snort.service - Snort service
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/snort.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
   Active: active (running) since Mon 2019-08-26 17:06:10 UTC; 1s ago
  Main PID: 17217 (snort)
   CGroup: /system.slice/snort.service
           └─17217 /usr/sbin/snort -u root -g root -c /etc/snort/snort.conf -i eth0 -p -R 1 --pid-path=/var/run/snort --no-interface-pidfile --nolock-pidfile
[...]

To automate your IDPS, use the ids_rule role to create and change Snort rules. Snort uses rule-based language that analyzes your network traffic and compares it against the given rule set.

The following lab environment demonstrates what an Ansible security automation integration would look like. A machine called “Attacker” simulates a potential attack pattern on the target machine on which the IDPS is running.

Keep in mind that a real world setup will feature other vendors and technologies.