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Your continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) infrastructure is being targeted by cyber attackers who intend to prevent you from deploying secure code, rather than disrupt your workflow.
Take Note: Your business relies heavily on its CI/CD platforms in its digital transformation initiatives as they facilitate updates and features to clients effectively; any disruption of these platforms would have significant ramifications on business performance.
An improper Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment pipeline can have severe repercussions. In this post we'll look at ways you can bolster its security as well as deployment techniques that enable rollback in case significant security concerns surface during development of your new app.
How Does Risk-Based Security Work, And Why Is It Important?
Security-based on risk helps organizations identify and eliminate its greatest vulnerabilities. While this approach works in numerous situations, software development presents particular opportunities.
Risk-based security measures help avoid data breaches and mitigate security vulnerabilities by decreasing their likelihood. To guarantee the security and safety of your applications, risk-based security must become part of your CI/CD pipeline - strengthening both overall security posture as well as helping meet regulatory obligations more easily.
Organizations can improve performance and maximize return on investment (ROI) while upholding quality standards by adopting a risk-based approach.
It allows firms to develop strategies tailored specifically for their operational and threat environments as well as corporate goals, thus leading them on their way towards excellence and optimizing ROI.
A CI/CD Pipeline: What Is It?
A Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment pipeline seeks to minimize human error while quickly and on schedule delivering applications.
Continuous Integration (CI) refers to integrating code changes that have already been tested into codebases before inclusion; repositories/version control systems allow developers to collaborate efficiently on specific projects.
By employing automation, the continuous delivery (CD) stage delivers and deploys applications directly into production environments.
At this point, components undergo testing before going live, but any malfunction will return back into continuous integration stage for repair.
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How To Ensure CI/CD Pipeline Security
It's crucial to incorporate security tests at several points in your CI/CD pipeline setup to make sure your code is safe and complies with security regulations.
You can take several steps to safeguard your CI/CD workflow.
Planning Phase
At this phase, requirements and customer feedback are collected in order to create a product roadmap and develop guidelines and best practices necessary for successful DevOps implementation.
Threat modeling is an invaluable way of pinpointing potential points of attack and taking precautionary steps against pipeline security flaws, with countermeasures established accordingly. You should make use of threat modeling when trying to locate possible points of entry or identify attack points within an CI/CD pipeline and implement security measures accordingly.
As part of your planning stage, Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA) security framework can be an invaluable asset.
SLSA comprises guidelines and procedures designed to guard against supply-chain intrusions, mitigate integrity concerns, protect software assets and safeguard a company's infrastructure.
Coding Phase
Coding phase of software production entails developers writing code in accordance with established standards and design principles to construct software products.
CodeSecure or CAST Application Intelligence Platform (AIP) source code scanners can quickly help identify any code with security flaws that is potentially vulnerable.
Build Phase
Developers are in charge of pushing their source code changes to a shared repository during this phase, starting builds and conducting automated tests to make sure that each build meets specifications.
Testing Phase
Once the program has been created successfully, its program should be evaluated for any flaws or potential vulnerabilities.
Regression testing on any updates conducted ensures functional tests pass with any new features added being evaluated accordingly. Use Dynamic Analysis Security Testing (DAST) tools like Netsparker and Acunetix or container scanning tools such as Datadog, Clair, Anchor, or Qualys for optimal testing results.
Monitoring Phase
A typical DevOps CI/CD pipeline culminates with this final stage, during which builds are monitored closely to make sure everything works as it should and the performance and other aspects of the production environment's deployed application can be evaluated for assessment purposes.
CI/CD Security Checklist
Black-hat hackers are always looking for ways to break new encryption systems and find security holes. Cybercriminals may employ the following security risks to compromise your CI/CD pipeline:
- Insecure codebase.
- Security misconfigurations.
- Using flawed third-party libraries.
- Sprawling secrets.
Let's now examine strategies and best practices to improve the security of your CI/CD pipeline.
Read More: 7 Key Benefits Of CI/CD: How Implementing CI/CD Save Your Business?
Restricting Access To Code Repositories And Utilizing Audited Code
Code repositories and version control systems play an essential part in hosting codebases, encouraging collaboration, and supporting continuous integration.
Although these platforms can be beneficial, if your code is open-sourced with weak security it could easily fall prey to hackers who might destroy its integrity.
They do nothing more than hunt down any large-scale secrets and security holes within codebase versions that were recently deployed live, making sure any flaws found are also present within live applications.
It is therefore imperative that keys are encrypted with strong passwords for added protection while secrets should never be placed within application code - instead utilize secret managers like Doppler for secure storage and distribution of keys.
Many developers mistakenly copy and paste third-party source codes without first checking and auditing them, due to an abundance of free tutorials and application source codes available online that fit almost every app use case.
Your codebase could contain errors if using unscanned source codes without first auditing them - taking an "if it compiles, leave it" approach may have serious repercussions; unaudited components, unsecure code and third-party tools may lead to serious CI/CD security risks that impact productivity and operations management processes.
Reviewing Code Efficiently
Reviewing code requires an in-depth investigation of its various elements and aspects, which is an exhaustive task with software containing over 200,000 lines in some instances.
Successful code review outcomes depend on your ability to stay focused during review sessions despite possible distractions; 400 lines should be evaluated within each review session in order to examine code effectively without becoming distracted and missing errors or problems which you would miss otherwise.
Be certain that the code author has marked his or her code so as to render it legible before commencing with code review.
A legible code review makes it obvious why certain changes or adjustments to it were implemented as well as how best to operate and run the program. Once reviewed, provide clear feedback to developers and testers so you can fully grasp any flaws within it and develop strategies to tackle them on an in-depth level.
Optimizing Test Coverage And Accuracy
Testing tools allow companies to identify a lot of bugs before their product goes to market, yet occasionally programmers inadvertently miss certain features and parts of code to test, such as hidden files that test without proper coverage resulting in products with flaws that remain undetected until later production stages.
One effective solution for thoroughly testing functionalities of an application is code coverage tools which help detect these flaws more easily than programmers could on their own.
Tools for Code Coverage Review test reports generated by testing tools to detect any untested code or files and to assess whether your application has been fully tested.
It will notify you of lines which haven't been subject to rigorous tests after inspecting its code; further, reports include data such as how many branches, statements and functions have been run as well as number of lines actually tested by these testing tools.
Image Scanning And Repository Auditing
Maintaining a secure environment takes continuous effort. Since most images used come from third parties, it is crucial that you audit and scan images and repositories frequently - downloading pictures from untrustworthy repositories could put security at risk.
Development and production images should both be regularly scanned using docker scan to detect security flaws; similarly, tools to search for Docker vulnerabilities should also be utilized regularly:
- Docker Bench For Security
- Dive
- Inspec
- AWS ECR
- Trivy
Putting Deployment Concepts Into Practice To Ensure Safe Deployments
A plan for your deployments is necessary to guarantee that there is never any downtime for your application and that there is a safe way to roll back changes if something goes wrong.
Strategies for deployment that work well include:
- Blue-Green Development Strategy: Two production environments are used in this strategy: a blue production environment and a green production environment. While the previous version of the program operated in the blue production environment, the current version operates in the green one. Traffic will be diverted to the old application in the blue production environment in the event that the new application fails.
- Canary Deployment Strategy: With this approach, only a chosen group of users will be able to utilize the newly added application capabilities as updates are released in stages. A variant of it is known as the "dark deployment strategy," which notifies users of updates based on data obtained from their cookies. The application won't be made available to the entire user base if it doesn't function well when utilized by a small number of people.
- Recreate Deployment Strategy: The recreate deployment method is the only one that calls for downtime out of all others mentioned. This occurs as a result of replacing every pod all at once as opposed to progressively, in stages. This tactic is only useful when the program needs significant and important upgrades.
- Rolling Deployment Strategy: Pods are gradually deployed using this method. In order to minimize downtime, the readiness probe is also used to confirm that the pod being deployed is prepared to receive traffic.
Conclusion
Building a secure CI/CD pipeline is critical to safeguarding software integrity and deterring attackers.
Organizations can protect their pipelines against vulnerabilities by employing automated security checks, using Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and adhering to the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP). Establishing robust monitoring, secret management and regular security audits strengthens resilience while guaranteeing compliance to industry standards.
Regular training of employees on new risks as well as learning about emerging ones bolster overall security posture, helping companies provide their consumers with reliable applications while creating a culture of security awareness.
