Skip to main content

AWS Solutions Library

Guidance for Container Runtime Security Monitoring with CNCF Falco and AWS Security Hub

I'm ready to deploy

Overview

This Guidance shows you how to stream security event logs from Falco into AWS Security Hub in near real-time for enriched analysis. Provided by Cloud Native Computing Foundations (CNCF), Falco detects security events at runtime for containers. Using an integration of the FireLens and Fluent Bit tools with AWS services, this Guidance enriches security event logs generated by Falco and imports them into AWS Security Hub. Your security and DevOps teams can then use the Security Hub management portal to gain a centralized view of security events from all your container applications to facilitate triage and resolution.

How it works

Infrastructure

This architecture diagram shows how to set up the Amazon EKS cluster needed for this Guidance. To learn more about detecting security events using CNCF Falco and AWS Security Hub, open the Architecture tab.

Download the architecture diagram PDF
Architecture diagram illustrating the security model for Amazon EKS using CNCF Falco on AWS. The diagram details the flow between administrators, DevOps engineers, application clients, Git repository, and the Amazon EC2 management instance, highlighting key AWS components such as IAM, KMS, Network Load Balancer, EKS control plane and compute VPC, public/private subnets, and node groups. Visual steps and network segmentation for secure Kubernetes operations on AWS are depicted.

Architecture

This architecture diagram shows how to detect runtime security events with CNCF Falco and send them to the AWS Security Hub portal for triage. For instructions on setting up the Amazon EKS cluster, open the Infrastructure tab.
Download the architecture diagram PDF
Architecture diagram depicting the integration of AWS, CNCF Falco, and Security Hub for container runtime security monitoring. It shows how security events from Amazon EKS clusters across multiple AWS regions are collected using Falco containers, processed by Fluent Bit and FireLens, and sent to Amazon CloudWatch Logs. The diagram illustrates how AWS Lambda further processes security log events and forwards them as ASFF security events to AWS Security Hub for aggregation and analysis by security teams.

Get Started

Deploy this Guidance

Sample code

Use sample code to deploy this Guidance in your AWS account

Well-Architected Pillars

The architecture diagram above is an example of a Solution created with Well-Architected best practices in mind. To be fully Well-Architected, you should follow as many Well-Architected best practices as possible.

This Guidance provides operational excellence by invoking Security Hub workflows that respond in near real-time to security threats related to your business applications. The Fluent Bit and FireLens integration used with Falco sends information about containers’ potential runtime security violations to the CloudWatch log event manager. Lambda then converts them into ASFF and imports them into Security Hub portals, where your security team can review, triage, and remediate them.

Read the Operational Excellence whitepaper 

This Guidance uses Falco to continuously scan the containers running on your Amazon EKS applications for runtime security events. Falco also monitors containers running on Amazon EKS cluster nodes for security violations and works with FireLens, CloudWatch , and Lambda to send security event information into Security Hub , which further aggregates the security event logs and displays them for review and triage by your security team. You can then use Security Hub to start remediation workflows for security threats. All IAM policies used in the Amazon EKS cluster are scoped down to the minimum permissions required for the service to function properly.

Read the Security whitepaper

Amazon EKS is an enterprise-grade, reliable Kubernetes application service deployed with high availability across multiple Availability Zones. CloudWatch is a log-event-management service, and Lambda is an event-processing service; together, these services ingest and generate information on security threats that might impact application reliability. Security Hub aggregates and displays these findings so that your security and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams can quickly address threats, significantly reducing the chances of application failures due to security violations.

Read the Reliability whitepaper

This Guidance provides efficient scalability and performance both for your containerized application platforms (using Amazon EKS ) and for event detection (using Falco, CloudWatch , Lambda ). You can also deploy this security monitoring solution across Regions, further helping you avoid negative performance impacts from security threats.

Read the Performance Efficiency whitepaper

By using Falco, which is an open-source service, available at no cost, you can lower the cost of security event monitoring. CloudWatch , Lambda , and Security Hub are charged based on the amount of ingested and processed event data. These services provide a free tier of data storage and processing, so costs only accrue after you exceed this tier. Additionally, CloudWatch provides automatic archival for logs, helping you reduce message storage costs.

Read the Cost Optimization whitepaper

CloudWatch , Lambda , and Security Hub are serverless and automatically scale to match workload demands and eliminate idle resources, and Amazon EKS provides high elasticity. By using these managed AWS services, alongside cloud-native technologies that run on elastic Amazon EKS clusters, this Guidance helps you achieve a high utilization of infrastructure resources, helping you minimize energy waste. Additionally, this Guidance does not require custom hardware or physical servers, and by using it to remediate security threats, you can further optimize resource utilization.

Read the Sustainability whitepaper

Disclaimer

The sample code; software libraries; command line tools; proofs of concept; templates; or other related technology (including any of the foregoing that are provided by our personnel) is provided to you as AWS Content under the AWS Customer Agreement, or the relevant written agreement between you and AWS (whichever applies). You should not use this AWS Content in your production accounts, or on production or other critical data. You are responsible for testing, securing, and optimizing the AWS Content, such as sample code, as appropriate for production grade use based on your specific quality control practices and standards. Deploying AWS Content may incur AWS charges for creating or using AWS chargeable resources, such as running Amazon EC2 instances or using Amazon S3 storage.

Did you find what you were looking for today?

Let us know so we can improve the quality of the content on our pages