KB-1447 Appian Cloud Vulnerability Testing

Purpose

Cloud customers can perform security-related activities against their Appian environments such as penetration testing and vulnerability scanning as well as software composition analysis scans on installers, containers and plugin jars. This article outlines assessment rules and accepted formats for submitting vulnerabilities to Appian.

Appian Cloud Assessment Rules

• All planned security testing by customers must be submitted to Appian Technical Support at least 3 business days prior to testing via a support case.
• The following details must be provided in the support case to prevent Appian or its hosting service providers from adding the test source IP addresses to a block list:
  
  • Contact information
  • Start time of test (including timezone)
  • Test duration
  • Expected peak bandwidth in Gigabits per second (Gbps)
  • Source IP addresses generating the test traffic
• Only perform assessments against the Appian Cloud Sites or FQDNs for which you have explicit approval.
• Make a good faith effort to avoid privacy violations, destruction of data, and interruption or degradation of our service.
• Social engineering (e.g. phishing, vishing, smishing) is prohibited.
• Denial of service attacks are prohibited.
• Appian recommends performing assessments against a test or development site whenever possible, rather than a production site.
• Appian considers any information identified during a security test of an Appian Cloud site to be Confidential Information that is protected under Appian’s contractual agreements with its customers. This obligation to protect Appian’s Confidential Information must flow down to any third-party security consultants hired by Appian customers. Please indicate in the support case whether a third-party entity will be used for security testing and whether the third-party entity has executed a non-disclosure agreement appropriate for the purpose.

Submitting Results

The following applies to all submissions:

• All documentation (including results, summaries, and reproduction steps) must be submitted in English.
• Appian will not accept findings that are missing information within the provided templates.
• Submissions much be done via support case.

Appian Vulnerabilities

This section is applicable to penetration testing or vulnerability scans against Appian installations.

Fill out the Appian Vulnerability Submission Worksheet according the instructions below: 

• All submitted vulnerabilities must be validated by the assessor prior to submission. Appian does not accept unvalidated results or direct output from automated scanners without additional manual validation.
• Appian requires verifiable evidence such as screenshots, payloads, or any other associated proof-of-concept material as well as manual reproduction steps in order to properly validate any reported vulnerability findings.
• All scanning or testing documentation must be accompanied by:
  
  • A summarized index of all issues found, with the severity level of each issue.
  • Clear evidence performed by the assessor showing that the proposed vulnerability can be used to exploit the system, for example by:
    
    • Allowing inappropriate access to the system or its data.
    • Allowing inappropriate modification of the system or its data.
    • Inappropriate use of a component of the system or as a whole.
  • A description of the risk to the system.
  • Guidance on how to reach the impacted end point(s).
  • Clear steps on how to reproduce the issue.

Appian Third-Party Component Vulnerabilities

This section is applicable to Software Composition Analysis scans against Appian installers, containers and plugin jars.

Fill out the Appian third-party vulnerability submission worksheet according to the instructions below: 

• If the vulnerability reporting source is vendor specific (ex: BlackDuck or X-Ray), the customer should provide as much explanatory detail as possible in the Description column in order for Appian to effectively validate the issue.

What to Expect Next

• Appian will review the findings (assuming all submission requirements have been met) and either accept or reject each one.
  • For rejected findings, Appian will provide an explanation as to why the reported vulnerability was rejected (false positive, configuration-level controls available to mitigate, etc.).
  • For accepted findings, Appian will classify the severity of the finding as Low/Medium/High/Critical.
• Appian Support will provide analyses and impact assessments of the report and individual findings through the support case.

Affected Versions

This article applies to all versions of Appian Cloud

Last Reviewed: May 2023