CNAPP Validation
CNAPP Validation is the continuous cybersecurity process of verifying the accuracy, effectiveness, and exploitability of risks identified by a Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP). While a standard CNAPP scans for misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, CNAPP Validation takes the next step by actively testing these findings against the environment's actual defenses to determine whether a theoretical risk translates into a real-world threat.
This process transforms static security data into actionable intelligence by distinguishing between "on-paper" violations and actual attack paths that adversaries could utilize to compromise data.
The Purpose of CNAPP Validation
The primary goal of CNAPP validation is to reduce alert fatigue and focus security teams on critical issues. Cloud environments are dynamic, and traditional scanning tools often generate high volumes of false positives or low-priority alerts. Validation provides the evidence needed to prioritize remediation efforts.
Confirming Exploitability: Determining if a vulnerability is actually reachable and exploitable given the current network controls, identity permissions, and active protection agents.
Eliminating False Positives: Automatically close alerts when mitigating controls (e.g., a firewall or WAF) effectively neutralize the risk, clearing the queue for genuine threats.
Validating Fixes: Verifying that a remediation step (patching, configuration change) was successful and that the risk no longer exists.
Key Components of CNAPP Validation
CNAPP Validation operates by correlating data from multiple security domains—Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), Cloud Workload Protection (CWPP), and Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM)—and subjecting them to logic-based or active tests.
Attack Path Validation
This technique maps potential routes an attacker could take from an external entry point to a critical asset (such as a database or storage bucket). Validation engines simulate the attacker's perspective to see if the "chain" of vulnerabilities is complete. If a step in the chain is blocked by a security control, the attack path is invalidated, and the risk score is lowered.
Identity and Entitlement Validation
This process verifies the effective permissions of human and non-human identities. Instead of simply listing all users with "Admin" access, validation checks whether those permissions can be used to access sensitive data or modify critical infrastructure, often highlighting "toxic combinations" of permissions that create hidden risks.
Workload Protection Testing
Validation ensures that the protective agents installed on servers, containers, and serverless functions are operational. It tests whether these agents can detect and block malicious behavior, such as unauthorized process execution or reverse-shell attempts.
Difference Between CNAPP Scanning and Validation
Understanding the distinction between scanning and validation is vital for a mature cloud security strategy.
Scanning (Assessment): This is a passive activity. It reviews configuration settings and software versions against a checklist or database. It asks, "Is port 22 open?" or "Is this software version vulnerable?"
Validation (Verification): This is an active or logic-based activity. It analyzes the control's context and effectiveness. It asks, "Can an attacker on the internet actually reach port 22, or is it blocked by a security group?" and "If they reach it, can they log in?"
Common Questions About CNAPP Validation
Why is CNAPP Validation important for SOC teams? Security Operations Centers (SOCs) are often overwhelmed by alerts. Validation acts as a filter, removing noise and ensuring that when an analyst receives an alert, it represents a verified, actionable threat that requires immediate attention.
Does CNAPP Validation require active attacks on production systems? Not always. While some validation involves "active probing" (safely simulating an attack packet), much of it is done through "logic-based" validation. This involves analyzing the interaction of configurations, logs, and traffic flow without disrupting business operations.
How does CNAPP Validation help with compliance? Auditors increasingly require proof that controls are effective, not just present. Validation provides evidence-based reporting that demonstrates that security controls are working as intended, simplifying the audit process for frameworks such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, and SOC 2.
Can CNAPP Validation replace Penetration Testing? No. Validation is automated and continuous, focusing on known configurations and vulnerabilities. Penetration testing is a periodic, human-led exercise that seeks to uncover novel logic flaws and complex attack scenarios that automated tools might miss. The two are complementary.
Enhancing CNAPP Validation with ThreatNG
ThreatNG plays a pivotal role in CNAPP Validation by providing an adversarial, outside-in perspective that acts as the ultimate "truth test" for internal cloud security controls. While Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs) monitor internal configurations and workloads, ThreatNG validates these findings by determining if a theoretical risk is truly reachable and exploitable from the public internet.
External Discovery
CNAPP validation begins with ensuring the CNAPP is monitoring the entire estate. ThreatNG’s External Discovery module validates the scope of the CNAPP implementation by identifying "Shadow Cloud" assets that may be missing from the internal inventory.
Validating Inventory Completeness: ThreatNG scans the internet for assets associated with the organization, such as orphaned AWS S3 buckets, unmanaged Azure Load Balancers, or "rogue" Google Cloud Compute instances spun up by developers in personal accounts. By comparing ThreatNG’s external discovery list against the CNAPP’s internal inventory, organizations can validate whether their CNAPP agents are correctly deployed across 100% of the environment.
Discovering Unprotected Endpoints: A CNAPP might report that all known production servers are secure. ThreatNG validates this by discovering a forgotten staging environment hosted on a subdomain (e.g.,
dev-test.company-cloud.com) that was never onboarded to the CNAPP, highlighting a critical gap in coverage.
External Assessment
ThreatNG transforms internal configuration alerts into validated external risks. It answers the question: "The CNAPP says this security group is too permissive—but can an attacker actually get in?"
Example of Port Validation: A CNAPP flags a virtual machine as having Port 22 (SSH) open to the world (0.0.0.0/0). ThreatNG’s External Assessment module actively tests this finding from the outside. It attempts a connection handshake to verify whether the port is reachable or if an upstream firewall (not visible to the CNAPP) is blocking traffic. If ThreatNG cannot connect, the risk is validated as "mitigated," allowing the team to deprioritize the alert.
Example of Service Validation: A CNAPP identifies an outdated web server version on a cloud instance. ThreatNG assesses the external posture of the instance to determine whether the vulnerable service is serving content to the public web. It validates whether the specific vulnerability (e.g., a specific API endpoint) is exposed, effectively prioritizing the CNAPP’s finding based on real-world exploitability.
Reporting
ThreatNG unifies the validation process by generating reports that bridge the gap between internal compliance and external reality.
Validation Evidence: Reports provide tangible evidence of exposure or mitigation. For example, a ThreatNG report can confirm to auditors that, despite a CNAPP alert about a misconfigured storage bucket, the bucket was actively tested and found inaccessible from the public internet, validating the effectiveness of compensatory controls.
Prioritized Action Lists: ThreatNG generates reports that highlight the intersection of "Internal Policy Violations" (from CNAPP) and "External Exposure" (from ThreatNG). This focuses remediation efforts on the assets that are both non-compliant and publicly attackable.
Continuous Monitoring
Cloud environments are ephemeral; a secure configuration can become insecure in seconds with a single Terraform apply. ThreatNG provides continuous external validation to detect drift between CNAPP scans.
Real-Time Drift Validation: If a DevOps engineer accidentally changes a security group rule to allow public access to a database, the CNAPP might flag the configuration change. ThreatNG continuously monitors the external perimeter and validates the effect of that change immediately—detecting that the database port is now visible to the internet and triggering a high-priority alert before an attacker can scan it.
Validation of Remediation: Once a CNAPP alert is remediated (e.g., a port is closed), ThreatNG’s continuous monitoring validates the fix. It confirms that the asset is no longer reachable from the outside, closing the loop on the incident response lifecycle.
Investigation Modules
ThreatNG’s investigation modules provide the depth needed to validate complex risks that go beyond simple configuration errors.
Example of Domain Intelligence: A CNAPP might see a cloud instance running a web server. ThreatNG’s Domain Intelligence module investigates the domain pointing to that instance. If the domain is flagged for hosting phishing content or has a poor reputation, ThreatNG validates that the cloud asset has been compromised or repurposed by an attacker, a context that the CNAPP would miss by looking only at the infrastructure layer.
Example of Sensitive Code Exposure: A CNAPP protects the production environment. ThreatNG’s Sensitive Code Exposure module scans public repositories (e.g., GitHub) to identify hardcoded cloud credentials (API keys, Access Keys). Finding these keys confirms that the CNAPP’s perimeter has been bypassed, as an attacker with these keys can log in as a legitimate user, rendering internal firewall rules ineffective.
Intelligence Repositories
ThreatNG uses its intelligence repositories to validate the urgency of CNAPP findings.
DarCache Dark Web Intelligence: If a CNAPP identifies a user account with no Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), ThreatNG checks its Dark Web repository to see if that specific user’s credentials have been leaked in a recent breach. This validates the risk not just as a "policy violation" (No MFA) but as an "imminent takeover threat" (Leaked Password + No MFA).
Ransomware Intelligence: ThreatNG correlates open ports found on cloud assets (like RDP or SMB) with its Ransomware Intelligence repository. It validates whether the exposed configuration is a known entry vector for active ransomware groups, thereby elevating the CNAPP alert priority.
Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG works alongside CNAPP and Cloud Security solutions to create a "Red Team / Blue Team" dynamic that ensures robust defense.
Complementary Solution (CNAPP & CSPM): ThreatNG acts as the external auditor for Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tools. While the CSPM monitors internal compliance (e.g., "Ensure S3 buckets are private"), ThreatNG continuously tests the perimeter to verify whether those policies are effective. If the CSPM misses a misconfiguration due to a permission error, ThreatNG catches the resulting exposure.
Complementary Solution (CWPP): ThreatNG complements Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) by identifying unprotected workloads. If ThreatNG discovers a shadow cloud instance that the CWPP is not monitoring, it flags the gap, enabling the CWPP agent to be deployed to the newly discovered asset.
Complementary Solution (Identity Providers - IdP): ThreatNG integrates with Identity Providers to validate credential hygiene. If an IdP manages cloud access, ThreatNG validates the security of that access by monitoring the dark web for leaked credentials that could enable unauthorized access to the cloud environment.
Examples of ThreatNG Helping
Helping Eliminate False Positives: A CNAPP generates 500 alerts for "Potential SSH Exposure." ThreatNG scans these 500 assets and confirms that 490 of them are actually behind a VPN or blocked by an upstream firewall. The security team only needs to fix the 10 assets ThreatNG confirmed were truly reachable.
Helping Validate Supply Chain Security: ThreatNG helps organizations validate the security of a SaaS vendor hosted in the cloud. While the organization cannot run a CNAPP agent on the vendor's infrastructure, ThreatNG conducts an external assessment to verify that the vendor's cloud environment does not expose critical vulnerabilities that could jeopardize the organization's data.
Helping Confirm "Dangling" Resources: A CNAPP might flag a deleted VM but miss the DNS record pointing to it. ThreatNG helps by identifying the "Dangling DNS" record that points to the now-vacant cloud IP address, validating a risk of Subdomain Takeover that the infrastructure-focused CNAPP missed.
