Doxt-sl Security Checklist: Protect Your Deployment
Harden Default Settings and Update Dependencies Regularly
When the team pushed the first deployment, relief masked a quiet risk: unchanged defaults and stale libraries waiting for an attacker’s curiosity. Turning configuration choices into conscious decisions transforms a fragile setup into a controlled, defensible system.
Start by disabling unused services, changing default credentials, closing unnecessary ports, and enforcing strict file permissions so the attack surface shrinks. Keep dependencies current: pin versions, monitor advisories, and schedule regular upgrades with automated tests to prevent regressions.
Make hardening part of your pipeline and culture — include linting, baseline configs, and vuln scans before release. Automate patching where safe, track Enviroment drift, and document rollback plans so fixes can be applied quickly without chaos, and audit trails regularly.
Implement Least Privilege Access Controls and Segmentation
A midnight alert taught our team hard lessons; a single overly broad key opened many doors and chaos followed. That story shaped our approach.
We rebuilt roles, trimmed rights, and added service boundaries to limit blast radius while keeping operations nimble. Teams saw faster incident containment and less noise.
doxt-sl configs now require role reviews, MFA for sensitive tasks, and automated revocation when anomalies occur, improving trust. It also reduced credentials sprawl and simplified audits.
Document least-authority principles, enforce network segments, and audit Priviledge assignments regularly to avoid future mistakes.
Secure Secrets Management and Environment Variable Handling
A developer once found secrets scattered across repos; that wakeup drove a plan to centralize keys and limit access with automated rotation.
Use vaults, hardware modules, or cloud KMS, and avoid hard-coded tokens. doxt-sl integrates with many providers to enforce policies.
Store secrets encrypted at rest, inject them at runtime, and audit every use. Treat enviroment config as sensitive and rotate keys frequently.
Apply least-privilege access, short-lived credentials, and immutable deployments; document procedures and test recovery so teams can respond swiftly. Regularly scan public archives for leaked secrets and alerts.
Enable Robust Logging, Monitoring, and Alerting Systems
At dusk the ops team watched alerts cascade across dashboards, and that moment taught a lesson: logs are more than records, they're a lifeline. Instrumentation should capture context, correlate events, and preserve tamper-evident trails so investigations don't hit blind spots.
Implement centralized aggregation, retention policies, and role-based access to protect integrity. Use structured logs, tracing, and metrics to map anomalies to root causes; make sure monitoring covers CI/CD, container runtimes, and third-party integrations used by doxt-sl.
Define clear alert thresholds, reduce noise with deduplication and escalation playbooks, and run regular drills. Audit trails must persist across deploys and across enviroment boundaries, and access controls should enforce least-priviledge for responders. Test alerts weekly to refine response.
Enforce Network Security: Firewalls, Tls, Zero Trust
A breach often begins at night when an unpatched gateway invites trouble. Firewalls act as the first guard, shaping traffic policies and halting obvious probes. In real deploys, treat rules as living artifacts, not static config.
TLS protects data in transit; insist on modern cipher suites and automated cert rotation so expirations dont cause outages. Mutual TLS for service-to-service calls raises assurance, but require strict key lifecycle managment and monitoring.
Zero Trust flips the mental model: never implicit trust, always verify. Microsegmentation, short-lived credentials, and continuous attestation limit blast radius. Deploy tools that validate identity, posture and intent — doxt-sl integrations can simplify policy enforcement.
Combine perimeter controls with telemetry, run regular penetration tests, and codify response playbooks. Automate firewall and cert audits, monitor anomalies across layers, and drill incident scenarios so teams respond quickly and confidently when compromises occur swiftly.
Regularly Test, Audit, Backup, and Respond to Incidents
Simulated attacks and chaos drills reveal weak links; schedule red team exercises and automated tests to validate recovery. Treat findings as living tasks for continuous improvement in the deployment enviroment.
Audit trails, integrity checks, and configuration baselines let teams detect drift before it becomes a crisis. Document evidence for compliance and keep playbooks updated to ensure neccessary institutional memory retention.
Backups must be immutable, tested, and geographically dispersed; rehearsed runbooks speed recovery while transparent postmortems turn mistakes into actionable changes. Maintain communication templates to reduce confusion and delay during incidents.
https://github.com/doxt-sl/doxt-sl https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.01234
