Enabling ASM for Go

You can monitor application security for Go apps running in Docker, Kubernetes, and Amazon 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

1-Click Enablement
If your service is running with an Agent with Remote Configuration enabled and a tracing library version that supports it, hover over the Not Enabled indicator in the ASM Status column and click Enable ASM. There's no need to re-launch the service with the DD_APPSEC_ENABLED=true or --enable-appsec flags.

Enabling threat detection

Get started

  1. Add to your program’s go.mod dependencies the latest version of the Datadog Go library (version 1.53.0 or later):

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

  2. Datadog has a series of pluggable packages which provide out-of-the-box support for instrumenting a series of Go libraries and frameworks. A list of these packages can be found in the compatibility requirements page. Import these packages into your application and follow the configuration instructions listed alongside each integration.

  3. Recompile your program with ASM enabled:

    $ go build -v -tags appsec my-program

    Notes:

    • The Go build tag appsec is not necessary if CGO is enabled with CGO_ENABLED=1.
    • Datadog WAF needs the following shared libraries on Linux: libc.so.6 and libpthread.so.0.
    • When using the build tag appsec and CGO is disabled, the produced binary is still linked dynamically to these libraries.
    • The Go build tag datadog.no_waf can be used to disable ASM at build time in any situation where the requirements above are a hinderance.

  4. 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.

    • 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<=250;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 more more Go Datadog library source codeGITHUB more more OOTB Application Security Management RulesDOCUMENTATION more more Troubleshooting Application Security ManagementDOCUMENTATION more more