CDN Security Risk: Key Awareness and Mitigation Strategies

What To Expect With CDN Security 

CDNs hold a lot of data and can be a target for hackers. These hackers can exploit weak security in CDNs. This is solely the responsibility of CDNs and doesn't involve CDN clients or security add-ons CDN provides.

To address these threats, CDN providers can implement several practices aimed at safeguarding their customers' data, which we will delve into shortly.

When choosing your CDN vendor(s), it’s important to ask them the right questions to ensure they are implementing the most advanced security practices. By doing so, you can feel confident you are making the right decision. This blog post can help you get acquainted with the most prominent security risks and protection strategies. Let’s explore.

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Common CDN Security Risks

While CDNs are essential for improving website performance, they also introduce certain security risks. Some common CDN security risks include:

• Data Breaches - CDNs might store sensitive data, including customer PII like credit card numbers or personal health information. While this information is often encrypted with public key cryptography, the CDN servers hold the private key, allowing them to decrypt incoming requests, process them, and route them to the origin. Hence, when attackers manage to infiltrate the CDN, they can effortlessly access and read the data as it has already been decrypted by the CDN.
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• TLS Certificate Breach - A TLS certificate is a digital document that authenticates the identity of a website or server and enables secure encrypted communication. TLS certificates are typically installed and managed on the CDN's edge servers. If the TLS certificate is breached, attackers can obtain access to sensitive data and also deceive users. For example, they can use the TLS certificate to appear as a trustworthy website, while actually redirecting them to a phishing site
• Multi-Tenancy - Multiple content providers are frequently hosted within the same file on CDN infrastructure due to the CDNs' capacity to store a vast number of files. In such instances, users may inadvertently access data from a different content provider, which could occur as a result of a glitch in the CDN software. 
• Cache Poisoning -  In cache poisoning attacks, attackers manipulate the CDN by multiple content requests. Consequently, the CDN creates multiple versions of the content.
  This creates serious operational and efficiency challenges for the CDN, impacting performance, the user experience and the cost for the customer. In addition, cache poisoning risks customer infrastructure since the majority of the traffic will be returned by the CDN by access to the origin.

• Availability - Relying solely on a single CDN vendor creates a single point of failure for their service, leaving them vulnerable. The solution to mitigate this risk is to transition to a Multi-CDN architecture. Any service outage not only impacts the revenue of the CDN vendor but also poses a long-term threat to their reputation.

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How CDN Vendors Can Protect Themselves and Their Customer Data

CDNs can employ various security measures and CDN security best practices to protect the content they deliver and ensure the integrity and availability of their services. Some common CDN security measures include:

• CDN Access Controls - Strong authentication and authorization methods can help CDN vendors restrict access to their infrastructure and content management systems. This ensures that only authorized personnel can manage CDN settings and configurations and limits the probability of a human error or an attacker gaining access to configuration permissions.
• Compliance and Audits - Many CDNs adhere to industry security standards and undergo regular security audits to ensure compliance and best practices are followed. This includes alignment with standards like ISO 27001 and SOC 2, and compliance with data protection regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and PCI-DSS.
  
  CDN compliance plays a crucial role in their customers’ ability to demonstrate their own compliance. Businesses that wish to achieve compliance need to ensure their partners and suppliers (and CDN vendors) are compliant and that the data is handled according to regulation requirements. Therefore, CDNs that ensure data is transmitted and stored according to industry regulations support their customers' and end-users efforts to achieve compliance, becoming a key partners in their compliance endeavor. 
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• Physical Security - The physical security measures taken to protect the physical infrastructure, data centers, and assets supporting the CDN, as well as the servers themselves.

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Conclusion

CDN security is a high priority for CDN customers, and consequently for CDN vendors as well. Alongside the risks, there are also security practices and solutions that can help CDN vendors improve their security posture. Learn how to ensure consistent security across your CDN with IO River. Click here.