Security capabilities and deployment planning

Plan your deployment by reviewing the security capabilities available for Alibaba Cloud. The onboarding process deploys the capabilities using a single Terraform connector template. Alibaba Cloud onboarding currently supports two capabilities: Discovery and Permissions. No additional capabilities (such as agentless disk scanning, data security, audit logs, registry scanning, serverless scanning, or automation) are currently supported.

Core capabilities (Discovery and Permissions)

The Discovery and Permissions capabilities are mandatory and are deployed automatically when you onboard an Alibaba Cloud account to Cortex XSIAM. Discovery inventories cloud resources across supported services, while Permissions analyzes IAM configurations and monitors access policies.

Module

Identity created

Resources created

Purpose

Regional scope

Discovery

CortexPlatformRole (RAM role)

RAM Role, Custom Policy, Policy Attachment, OIDC Provider

Read-only discovery and inventory of Alibaba Cloud resources across ECS, OSS, VPC, RDS, SLB, CEN, ActionTrail, and NAS.

All supported internal regions.

Permissions

CortexPlatformRole (RAM role)

RAM Role, Custom Policy, Policy Attachment, OIDC Provider

IAM permission analysis and monitoring across RAM users, roles, groups, and policies.

Global (RAM is a global service).

Read-only permissions by service

The Terraform template provisions a custom RAM policy with 46 read-only permissions grouped by Alibaba Cloud service:

Service

Permissions

ECS

DescribeInstances, DescribeDisks, DescribeInstanceRamRole, DescribeSecurityGroups, DescribeSecurityGroupAttribute

OSS

ListBuckets, GetBucketInfo, GetBucketLogging, GetBucketVersioning

RAM

ListUsers, ListRoles, ListGroups, ListPolicies, GetPolicy, GetPolicyVersion, ListPoliciesForUser, ListPoliciesForRole, ListPoliciesForGroup, GetLoginProfile, GetUserMFAInfo, ListAccessKeys, GetPasswordPolicy

RDS

DescribeDBInstances, DescribeDBInstanceIPArrayList, DescribeDBInstanceSSL, DescribeDBInstanceEncryptionKey, DescribeDBInstanceTDE, DescribeDBInstanceAttribute

VPC

DescribeVpcs, DescribeFlowLogs, DescribeVpnConnections, DescribeVpnConnection, DescribeSslVpnServers

SLB

DescribeLoadBalancers, DescribeLoadBalancerAttribute, DescribeVServerGroups, DescribeMasterSlaveServerGroups, DescribeCACertificates, ListTLSCipherPolicies, DescribeLoadBalancerHTTPSListenerAttribute

ActionTrail

DescribeTrails, GetTrailStatus

CEN

DescribeCens, DescribeCenInterRegionBandwidthLimits

NAS

DescribeFileSystems