Towards a Taxonomy of Infrastructure as Code Misconfigurations: An Ansible Study

R Nasiri, I Kumara, DA Tamburri… - … and Summer School on …, 2024 - Springer
Symposium and Summer School on Service-Oriented Computing, 2024Springer
Abstract Infrastructure as Code (IaC) enables the management and provisioning of
infrastructure using code instead of manual processes. While the IaC approach can simplify
and automate infrastructure management, the configuration errors (ie, misconfigurations) in
the IaC scripts can significantly hinder achieving the benefits of the automation, incur undue
costs, and leave the system faulty and insecure. In this paper, we present a taxonomy of IaC
misconfigurations to assist practitioners and researchers in building tools for detecting …
Abstract
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) enables the management and provisioning of infrastructure using code instead of manual processes. While the IaC approach can simplify and automate infrastructure management, the configuration errors (i.e., misconfigurations) in the IaC scripts can significantly hinder achieving the benefits of the automation, incur undue costs, and leave the system faulty and insecure. In this paper, we present a taxonomy of IaC misconfigurations to assist practitioners and researchers in building tools for detecting misconfigurations. The user manuals of the IaC frameworks describe configuration parameters and their usage constraints, and provide recommendations on configuring certain parameters correctly. Hence, we systemically collected and analyzed 100 user manuals of the Ansible IaC language to compile a catalog of 25 configuration errors. We also developed a proof-of-concept tool for using the information in the user manuals to generate misconfiguration detection rules.
Springer
Showing the best result for this search. See all results