Enabling ASM for Go

You can monitor application security for Go apps running in Docker, Kubernetes, and AWS ECS.

In general, setting up Application Security Management (ASM) involves:

1. Identifying services that are vulnerable or are under attack, which would most benefit from ASM. Find them on the Security tab of your Service Catalog.
2. Updating to the latest Datadog library (the most recent APM tracing library).
3. Enabling the library to collect the application security data from the services and send it to Datadog.
4. Triggering security signals in your application and seeing how Datadog displays the resulting information.

Prerequisites

• The Datadog Agent is installed and configured for your application’s operating system or container, cloud, or virtual environment.
• Datadog APM is configured for your application or service, and traces are being received by Datadog.

• One of the supported APM tracing integrations.
• CGO is enabled in your build environment, along with the C library headers and the C toolchain for your compilation target. For detailed instructions, see Enabling CGO

Get started

1. Update your program’s dependencies with the latest version of the Datadog Go library (version 1.36.0 or later):

   $ go get -v -u gopkg.in/DataDog/dd-trace-go.v1
   

   For information about which language and framework versions are supported by the library, see Compatibility.

2. Recompile your program and enable ASM and CGO:

   $ env CGO_ENABLED=1 go build -v -tags appsec my-program
   

3. Redeploy your Go service and enable ASM by setting the DD_APPSEC_ENABLED environment variable to true:

   $ env DD_APPSEC_ENABLED=true ./my-program
   

   Or one of the following methods, depending on where your application runs:

   Add the following environment variable value to your Docker command line:

   $ docker run -e DD_APPSEC_ENABLED=true [...]
   

   Add the following environment variable value to your application container’s Dockerfile:

   ENV DD_APPSEC_ENABLED=true
   

   Update your application’s deployment configuration file for APM and add the ASM environment variable:

   spec:
     template:
       spec:
         containers:
           - name: <CONTAINER_NAME>
             image: <CONTAINER_IMAGE>/<TAG>
             env:
               - name: DD_APPSEC_ENABLED
                 value: "true"
   

   Update your application’s ECS task definition JSON file, by adding this in the environment section:

   "environment": [
     ...,
     {
       "name": "DD_APPSEC_ENABLED",
       "value": "true"
     }
   ]
   

   The library collects security data from your application and sends it to the Agent, which sends it to Datadog, where out-of-the-box detection rules flag attacker techniques and potential misconfigurations so you can take steps to remediate.

4. To see Application Security Management threat detection in action, send known attack patterns to your application. For example, trigger the Security Scanner Detected rule by running a file that contains the following curl script:

   for ((i=1;i<=200;i++)); 
   do
   # Target existing service’s routes
   curl https://your-application-url/existing-route -A Arachni/v1.0;
   # Target non existing service’s routes
   curl https://your-application-url/non-existing-route -A Arachni/v1.0;
   done

   A few minutes after you enable your application and exercise it, threat information appears in the Application Trace and Signals Explorer in Datadog.

Further Reading

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

Adding user information to tracesDOCUMENTATION Go Datadog library source codeGITHUB OOTB Application Security Management RulesDOCUMENTATION Troubleshooting Application Security ManagementDOCUMENTATION