Enabling ASM for Python

You can monitor the security of your Python apps running in Docker, Kubernetes, Amazon ECS, and AWS Fargate.

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. Update your Datadog Python library package to at least version 1.2.2 (at least version 1.5.0 for Software Composition Analysis detection features). Run the following:

    pip install --upgrade ddtrace

    To check that your service’s language and framework versions are supported for ASM capabilities, see Compatibility.

  2. Enable ASM when starting the Python application.

    DD_APPSEC_ENABLED=true ddtrace-run python app.py

    You can also use one of the following methods, depending on where your application runs:

      Update your configuration container for APM by adding the following argument in your docker run command:

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

      Add the following environment variable value to your container Dockerfile:

      ENV DD_APPSEC_ENABLED=true

      Update your configuration YAML file container for APM and add the DD_APPSEC_ENABLED environment variable:

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

      Update your ECS task definition JSON file by adding the following in the environment section:

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

      Initialize ASM in your code or set the DD_APPSEC_ENABLED environment variable to true in your service invocation:

      DD_APPSEC_ENABLED=true ddtrace-run python app.py

      After this configuration is complete, 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 dd-test-scanner-log;
      # Target non existing service’s routes
      curl https://your-application-url/non-existing-route -A dd-test-scanner-log;
      done

      Note: The dd-test-scanner-log value is supported in the most recent releases.

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

    Further Reading

    Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

    Adding user information to tracesDOCUMENTATION more more Python Datadog library source codeSOURCE CODE more more OOTB Application Security Management RulesDOCUMENTATION more more Troubleshooting Application Security ManagementDOCUMENTATION more more