Praetorian Launches Snowcat Tool for Istio

PRESS RELEASE

AUSTIN, Texas, Oct. 14, 2021 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Privately held cybersecurity solutions firm Praetorian Security, Inc. announces today the availability of Snowcat, the first dedicated static analysis tool (SAST) for Istio, the world's leading cloud service mesh.

A service mesh is a modernized service networking layer that provides a transparent and language-independent way to automate application network functions. It is a popular solution for managing the different microservices that make up a cloud-native application. According to a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) survey, Istio is the "dominant" service mesh for cloud microservices, used by 47% of all organizations that have implemented a service mesh. Istio is an open source service that is available for download on Github.

Snowcat scans an Istio deployment and reports on misconfigurations and deviations from best practices. It is intended for use by cloud deployment operators and cloud security professionals.

The announcement comes just two months after releasing GoKart, an open source security scanner for GoLang. "We're deeply committed to open source security, and Snowcat addresses security concerns associated with the rapid adoption of cloud, service meshes, and Istio in particular," says Nathan Sportsman, CEO at Praetorian. "The pace of moving workloads to the cloud continues to accelerate, and service meshes play a value-adding role, but can't be implemented at the expense of security."

Snowcat may be used across major cloud providers, though in tests of the product's initial version, the best performance is observed on Google's Cloud Platform (GCP).

As with all their open source code, Praetorian welcomes anyone who wishes to be involved in the project. "Open source plays a critical role in solving the cybersecurity problem. Praetorian has a long history of contributing to open source, and I'm proud that our team is accelerating our innovation with open source contributions." said Richard Ford, Praetorian's Chief Technology Officer.

Snowcat can be found on GitHub, where pull requests and new ideas are always welcome. Praetorian is also hiring new "Open Source Developer Positions"-- contact us if you would like to contribute to Snowcat and other open source security applications full-time.