Deploying a WhiteHat Security Satellite in Your Infrastructure

DevCentral uses WhiteHat Security's Sentinel service in our application development lifecycle as well as for production compliance. Beyond the direct benefits of improving our SDLC practices and reducing our window of exposure, F5 Networks and WhiteHat Security offer an integrated solution utilizing their tools and BIG-IP Application Security Manager with context-aware, adaptive, and instant virtual patching. Read here for more information on the solution overview.

We recently eliminated public access to our pre-production test ground, so we had to come up with an alternative scanning solution for this environment. Thankfully, in addition to their internet-facing services, WhiteHat offers a satellite scanner in an appliance or virtual machine package that you can deploy behind your public infrastructure. These satellite scanners can perform the same duties as the scanners that hit your publicly available sites without exposing your pre-production development efforts to unnecessary risk. This article will demonstrate the steps required to get a WhiteHat Sentinel Satellite deployed, scanning, and communicating with the mother ship.

Deploying the Satellite Virtual Machine

The download for the VM is in OVA format, but the Bluelock virtual datacenters we're deployed in require an OVF template for upload. You can use VMware's ovftool for this, or if you have Workstation, you can just open the OVA in your Workstation app and then select that VM and export to OVF.

Now that the VM is in the proper form for my environment, I can upload "To the Cloud!" (sorry, couldn't resist) to the virtual datacenter and build the VM. The OVF template should take care of your cpu, memory, and disk allocations, but if the cpu and memory are blank, you can just set to 1 cpu and 1G of RAM as shown in the hardware properties below.

I attached the NIC to DMZ-1 and then powered the VM on. At boot, the only thing you have access to in the console is a configuration menu for the IP address, the mask, the gateway, and a DNS server. The first three were trivial, but the DNS requirement presented a challenge in our environment.

Configuring the Infrastructure

I wrote a blog last week about the DNS challenge presented with this solution, so I won't rehash that here, but you can see in the drawing below that step 1 for the scanner is to do a DNS lookup of the host. A virtual server has an iRule attached to provide a single response to queries from the Sentinel satellite, and then the rest of the app infrastructure is already in place for scanning.

The only part left to handle is the communication between the satellite and WhiteHat. The support/operations teams within WhiteHat need to be able to control and report from the satellite, so I configured a virtual server that forwards on the required tcp port 5050 and snat the source to our external IP addresses. Immediately after activating that configuration the satellite synced up with WhiteHat's server and we were good to go.