# Announcing Curiefense Integration with Emissary-Ingress for Enhanced Multi-Cloud Application Security

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, multi-cloud environments are increasingly becoming the standard for many organizations, including Cisco ET&I. With applications hosted across multiple cloud providers, ensuring robust security is a constant challenge. To address these challenges and as part of our ongoing commitment to maintaining a secure and reliable infrastructure, we have successfully integrated Curiefense support into Emissary-Ingress, offering a powerful solution for multi-cloud application security.

Before discussing the integration details, let's briefly examine the multi-cloud application security landscape.

## Navigating the Complexities of Multi-cloud Application Security

Securing applications in a multi-cloud environment presents several challenges, starting with the absence of a unified solution. Each cloud provider offers its own tools and services, complicating the task of maintaining consistent security policies and configurations across multiple platforms. This inconsistency can lead to vulnerabilities and discrepancies in overall security.

Integration and management of multiple security solutions across different cloud environments is another challenge. Organizations must invest substantial time and effort to integrate various solutions while ensuring effective management. This process can be time-consuming and error-prone, increasing the complexity of the security landscape.

Inconsistent visibility and monitoring across cloud platforms is another issue. Each cloud provider has its own monitoring and logging systems, making it difficult to obtain a unified view of security events and incidents across all platforms. This lack of visibility can impede the ability to detect and respond to threats promptly, ultimately putting applications at higher risk.

Multi-cloud environments also introduce compliance challenges. Ensuring compliance with industry regulations and standards becomes more complex, as different providers may offer varying levels of support for specific requirements. Organizations must carefully navigate this landscape to maintain compliance while taking advantage of multi-cloud deployments.

Lastly, organizations risk vendor lock-in when relying on a single cloud provider's security solutions. Switching providers without reconfiguring security settings can be challenging, leading to increased dependence on the chosen provider.

To overcome these challenges, organizations need a unified security solution deployable across multiple cloud platforms. Implementing a unified solution at even one layer simplifies management, reduces costs, and provides consistent protection against certain threats, enabling businesses to reap the benefits of multi-cloud strategies without sacrificing security.

## Web Application Firewalls (WAF)

Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) serve as a critical runtime security component that monitors and filters HTTP traffic between web applications and the internet. By analyzing incoming requests, WAFs can block malicious or unwanted traffic, effectively safeguarding applications from potential attacks and unauthorized access.

Major cloud providers offer their own WAF solutions, including:

- AWS WAF (Amazon Web Services)
- Google Cloud Armor (Google Cloud Platform)
- Azure Web Application Firewall (Microsoft Azure)

While these cloud-based WAF solutions provide a reasonable level of protection, they can still be constrained by the challenges associated with multi-cloud environments.

Fortunately, the WAF layer is comparatively easier to unify across providers than other layers, such as firewalls, due to its focus on the application layer (HTTP/HTTPS). This higher-level perspective allows WAFs to analyze and protect web applications regardless of the underlying infrastructure, making them more portable across different cloud providers.

## Curiefense: A Unified Multi-cloud Solution

Curiefense is an open-source, cloud-native WAF designed for seamless integration with a variety of HTTP gateways (such as Envoy and Nginx), service meshes (like Istio), and Kubernetes ingress controllers (including Nginx and now Emissary). This versatility makes Curiefense an effective and unified solution for securing containerized applications across multiple cloud platforms and environments. By adopting Curiefense, organizations can reap the benefits of a unified security solution that can be deployed across various cloud platforms, ensuring consistent security policies and configurations without the need for multiple WAF solutions. This cross-platform compatibility promotes a more streamlined and cohesive security approach in multi-cloud environments.

Curiefense encompasses all the essential features you would expect from a WAF solution, including IP blocking, rate limiting, and advanced threat intelligence. These features collaborate to identify and block malicious activity before it reaches the application, safeguarding your organization's digital assets.

Furthermore, Curiefense provides detailed logs of events and actions taken by the system, ensuring complete visibility into the security landscape surrounding your applications. This transparency empowers organizations to monitor, analyze, and respond to security events effectively and efficiently.

## Emissary-Ingress: An Envoy-powered Open Source API Gateway

Securing user requests entering your Kubernetes cluster necessitates advanced traffic management solutions. In this increasingly complex landscape, Emissary-Ingress emerges as an open-source API gateway offering a developer-centric, modern Kubernetes ingress controller.

Supporting a wide array of protocols, such as HTTP/3 and gRPC, Emissary-Ingress not only features built-in TLS termination but also promotes traffic management reliability and resilience. As it is built on the high-performance Envoy Proxy, Emissary-Ingress inherits all the capabilities of that project.

## Curiefense ❤️ Emissary-Ingress

We are proud to announce the successful integration of Curiefense support into Emissary-Ingress. This powerful combination allows you to enforce advanced security policies and protections directly within your Emissary-Ingress deployments, ensuring even greater security and stability for your applications. By leveraging Curiefense's WAF capabilities within Emissary-Ingress, you can protect your applications from a wide range of threats, such as SQL injections, cross-site scripting (XSS), and DDoS attacks.

To help you get started, we have made the necessary images available at the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/curiefense/emissary-images

## Conclusion

Organizations operating in multi-cloud environments face numerous challenges in securing their containerized applications. The lack of a unified solution, the complexities of compliance, and the risk of vendor lock-in necessitate a comprehensive and unified security solution. Curiefense, with its versatile integration capabilities, advanced security features, and cross-platform compatibility, emerges as an ideal WAF solution for multi-cloud deployments.

By leveraging Curiefense, organizations can effectively navigate the complexities of multi-cloud application security and maintain consistent security policies and configurations across various cloud platforms. As a result, businesses can enjoy the benefits of multi-cloud strategies without compromising the security of their applications, ensuring a more streamlined and cohesive approach to protecting their digital assets.

We are excited to see the positive impact this integration will have on your applications and the enhanced security it will provide.