RHACS Cloud Service service description

Red Hat’s information security guidelines, aligned with the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, are approved by executive management. Red Hat maintains a dedicated team of globally-distributed certified information security professionals. See the following resources:

Red Hat has strict internal policies and practices to protect our customers and their businesses. These policies and practices are confidential. In addition, we comply with all applicable laws and regulations, including those related to data privacy.

Red Hat’s information security roles and responsibilities are not managed by third parties.

Red Hat maintains an ISO 27001 certification for our corporate information security management system (ISMS), which governs how all of our people work, corporate endpoint devices, and authentication and authorization practices. We have ve taken a standardized approach to this through the implementation of the Red Hat Enterprise Security Standard (ESS) to all infrastructure, products, services and technology that Red Hat employs. A copy of the ESS is available upon request.

RHACS Cloud Service runs on an instance of OpenShift Dedicated hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). OpenShift Dedicated is compliant with ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, PCI DSS, SOC 2 Type 2, and HIPAA. Strong processes and security controls are aligned with industry standards to manage information security.

RHACS Cloud Service follows the same security principles, guidelines, processes and controls defined for Openshift Dedicated. These certifications demonstrate how our services platform, associated operations, and management practices align with core security requirements. We meet many of these requirements by following solid Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF) practices as defined by NIST, including build pipeline security. Implementation of SSDF controls are implemented via our Secure Software Management Lifecycle (SSML) for all products and services.

Red Hat’s proven and experienced global site reliability engineering (SRE) team is available 24x7 and proactively manages the cluster life cycle, infrastructure configuration, scaling, maintenance, security patching, and incident response as it relates to the hosted components of RHACS Cloud Service. The Red Hat SRE team is responsible for managing HA, uptime, backups, restore, and security for the RHACS Cloud Service control plane. RHACS Cloud Service comes with a 99.95% availability SLA and 24x7 RH SRE support by phone or chat.

You are responsible for use of the product, including implementation of policies, vulnerability management, and deployment of secured cluster components within your OpenShift Container Platform environments. The Red Hat SRE team manages the control plane that contains tenant data in line with the compliance frameworks noted previously, including:

All Red Hat SREs and developers go through rigorous Secure Development Lifecycle training.

For more information, see the following resources:

Red Hat scans for vulnerabilities in our products during the build process and our dedicated Product Security team tracks and assesses newly-discovered vulnerabilities. Red Hat Information Security regularly scans running environments for vulnerabilities.

Qualified critical and important Security Advisories (RHSAs) and urgent and selected high priority Bug Fix Advisories (RHBAs) are released as they become available. All other available fix and qualified patches are released via periodic updates. All RHACS Cloud Service software impacted by critical or important severity flaws are updated as soon as the fix is available. For more information about remediation of critical or high-priority issues, see Understanding Red Hat’s Product Security Incident Response Plan.

RHACS Cloud Service does not currently hold any external security certifications or attestations.

The Red Hat Information Risk and Security Team has achieved ISO 27001:2013 certification for our Information Security Management System (ISMS).

RHACS Cloud Service supports integrations with registries, CI systems, notification systems, workflow systems like ServiceNow and Jira, and Security information and event management (SIEM) platforms. For more information about supported integrations, see the Integrating documentation. Custom integrations can be implemented using the API or generic webhooks.

RHACS Cloud Service uses certificate-based architecture (mTLS) for both authentication and end-to-end encryption of all inflight traffic between the customer’s site and Red Hat. It does not require a VPN. IP allowlists are not supported. Data transfer is encrypted using mTLS. File transfer, including Secure FTP, is not supported.

RHACS Cloud Service is deployed on Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS). The user space in RHCOS is read-only. In addition, all RHACS Cloud Service instances are monitored in runtime by RHACS. Red Hat uses a commercially-available, enterprise-grade anti-virus solution for Windows and Mac platforms, which is centrally managed and logged. Anti-virus solutions on Linux-based platforms are not part of Red Hat’s strategy, as they can introduce additional vulnerabilities. Instead, we harden and rely on the built-in tooling (for example, SELinux) to protect the platform.

Red Hat uses SentinelOne and osquery for individual endpoint security, with updates made as they are available from the vendor.

All third-party JavaScript libraries are downloaded and included in build images which are scanned for vulnerabilities before being published.

Red Hat follows secure development lifecycle practices. Red Hat Product Security practices are aligned with the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) and ISO12207:2017 wherever it is feasible. Red Hat covers OWASP project recommendations along with other secure software development practices to increase the general security posture of our products. OWASP project analysis is included in Red Hat’s automated scanning, security testing, and threat models, as the OWASP project is built based on selected CWE weaknesses. Red Hat monitors weaknesses in our products to address issues before they are exploited and become vulnerabilities.

For more information, see the following resources:

Applications are scanned regularly and the container scan results of the product are available publicly. For example, on the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog site, you can select a component image such as rhacs-main and click the Security tab to see the health index and the status of security updates.

As part of Red Hat’s policy, a support policy and maintenance plan is issued for any third-party components we depend on that go to end-of-life.

Red Hat has published software bill of materials (SBOMs) files for core Red Hat offerings. An SBOM is a machine-readable, comprehensive inventory (manifest) of software components and dependencies with license and provenance information. SBOM files help establish reviews for procurement and audits of what is in a set of software applications and libraries. Combined with Vulnerability Exploitability eXchange (VEX), SBOMs help an organization address its vulnerability risk assessment process. Together they provide information on where a potential risk might exist (where the vulnerable artifact is included and the correlation between this artifact and components or the product), and its current status to known vulnerabilities or exploits.

Red Hat, together with other vendors, is working to define the specific requirements for publishing useful SBOMs that can be correlated with Common Security Advisory Framework (CSAF)-VEX files, and inform consumers and partners about how to use this data. For now, SBOM files published by Red Hat, including SBOMs for RHACS Cloud Service, are considered to be beta versions for customer testing and are available at https://access.redhat.com/security/data/sbom/beta/spdx/.

For more detail on Red Hat’s Security data, see The future of Red Hat security data.

The following third-party providers are used by Red Hat in providing subscription support services:

When you create a Central instance using Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console, authentication for the cluster administrator is configured as part of the process. Customers must manage all access to the Central instance as part of their integrated solution. For more information about the available authentication methods, see Understanding authentication providers.

The default identity provider in RHACS Cloud Service is Red Hat Single Sign-On (SSO). Authorization rules are set up to provide administrator access to the user who created the RHACS Cloud Service and to users who are marked as organization administrators in Red Hat SSO. The admin login is disabled for RHACS Cloud Service by default and can only be enabled temporarily by SREs. For more information about authentication using Red Hat SSO, see Default access to the ACS Console.

Red Hat’s password policy requires the use of a complex password. Passwords must contain at least 14 characters and at least three of the following character classes:

Most systems require two-factor authentication.

Red Hat follows best password practices according to NIST guidelines.

Access for remote support and troubleshooting is strictly controlled through implementation of the following guidelines:

Our customer support team offers Bomgar as a remote access solution for troubleshooting. Bomgar sessions are optional, must be initiated by the customer, and can be monitored and controlled.

To prevent information leakage, logs are shipped to SRE through our security information and event management (SIEM) application, Splunk.

To protect our data and client data from risk of theft or destruction, Red Hat employs the following methods:

Data is encrypted in transit and at rest using strong data encryption following NIST guidelines and Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) where possible and practical. This includes backup systems.

RHACS Cloud Service encrypts data at rest within the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) database by using AWS-managed Key Management Services (KMS) keys. All data between the application and the database, together with data exchange between the systems, are encrypted in transit.

Service metrics are internal only. Red Hat provides and maintains the service at the agreed upon level. Service metrics are accessible only to authorized Red Hat personnel. For more information, see PRODUCT APPENDIX 4 RED HAT ONLINE SERVICES.

Core usage capacity metrics are available either through Subscription Watch or the Subscriptions page.

System logs for all components of the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security Cloud Service (RHACS Cloud Service) are internal and available only to Red Hat personnel. Red Hat does not provide user access to component logs. For more information, see PRODUCT APPENDIX 4 RED HAT ONLINE SERVICES.

The RHACS Cloud Service Disaster Recovery strategy includes backups of database and any customization. This also applies to customer data stored in the Central database. Recovery time varies based on the number of appliances and database sizes; however, because the appliances can be clustered and distributed, the RTO can be reduced upfront with proper architecture planning.

All snapshots are created using the appropriate cloud provider snapshot APIs, encrypted and then uploaded to secure object storage, which for Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an S3 bucket.

Disaster recovery plans are exercised annually at a minimum. A Business Continuity Management standard and guideline is in place so that the BC lifecycle is consistently followed throughout the organization. This policy includes a requirement for testing at least annually, or with major change of functional plans. Review sessions are required to be conducted after any plan exercise or activation, and plan updates are made as needed.

Red Hat has generator backup systems. Our IT production systems are hosted in a Tier 3 data center facility that has recurring testing to ensure redundancy is operational. They are audited yearly to validate compliance.