Duo Security has released a new open-source tool called CloudMapper. CloudMapper is an AWS visualization tool that was first designed to help Duo Security generate interactive network diagrams of its AWS accounts.

“Duo has a number of AWS accounts run by different teams for different projects. With a variety of business needs across these accounts, we went in search of a tool to help us better visualize our AWS assets as a compliment to a traditional asset inventory,” Scott Piper, AWS security consultant for Duo Security, wrote in a post.

The tool will allow engineers to double-check their work as well as understand other environments and present that information to other stakeholders. According to the company, using CloudMapper users will be able to what resources are publicly exposed, what resources can communicate internally with other resources, and is the architecture robust enough to handle the event of an availability zone failure.

To get the program up and running, there are three steps users will have to follow:

  1. “Collect information about an AWS account via a shell script that uses the AWS CLI.
  2. Convert that data into a format usable by the web browser.
  3. Run a simple web server to view the collected data in your browser.”

For visualizing large networks, the tool uses the CoSE (Compound Spring Embedder) layout for Cytoscape.js that was developed by i-Vis Lab in Bilkent University. Due to graphs with a large number of nodes and edges becoming complicated, the company also provides options in order to reduce the amount of data displayed. This includes showing only specified regions, ignoring internal edges, and composite similar EC2 instances to a single node.

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