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Attackers have turned their sights on your continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) infrastructure, with attackers seeking to prevent you from deploying secure code rather than simply slowing down workflow.
Your CI/CD platforms serve as the backbone of digital transformation initiatives in your business; they ensure updates to clients as quickly as possible so that disruption could have disastrous results on business operations.
An imperfect Continuous Integration and Delivery pipeline can have serious repercussions, which is why this post offers some methods to strengthen its security and deployment techniques that enable rollback should significant security problems emerge with your new app.
What Is Risk-Based Security, And Why Does It Matter?
Risk-based security allows an organization to identify and mitigate the most significant threats facing it, making this approach especially suitable in software development environments that tend to be fast-paced.
Risk-based security measures help avoid data breaches and vulnerabilities, providing greater assurance of application security and safety for applications developed using your pipelines.
Risk-based security can strengthen overall security posture and help meet regulatory obligations more efficiently.
Implementing a risk-based approach enables organizations to boost performance, optimize return on investment (ROI), maintain quality standards and boost ROI by creating strategies tailored specifically for their operational and threat environments, corporate goals and overall corporate culture.
What Is A CI/CD Pipeline?
What is the CI/CD Pipeline? A Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment pipeline strives to reduce human error while quickly and on schedule delivering applications.
Continuous Integration (CI) refers to automatically testing all code changes integrated through Continuous Integration processes into code bases that are continually integrated over time; repositories/version control systems enable developers working on specific projects to collaborate more easily together on them.
Continuous delivery (CD) provides and deploys applications directly into production environments by employing automation.
Before entering production, components undergo testing at this step before returning into continuous integration for further evaluation if they fail.
Understanding The CI/CD Security Threats
Your software development depends on our integration/continuous pipeline, so its security must always remain paramount.
Implementing security into your pipeline for several reasons:
- Protect code from attack: Since your code is an invaluable asset, it must be protected against malicious actors.
- Prevent data leaks: Leakage of sensitive information through an undetected pipeline breach could devastate your business.
- Comply with policies: Your CI/CD workflow must adhere to security policies for proper operation.
- Ensure quality assurance: A secure pipeline will produce code free from security vulnerabilities.
Read more: CI/CD: The Ultimate Software Development Accelerator? Cost, Gain, and Impact Revealed!
How To Ensure CI/CD Pipeline Security
Implementing security checks at various stages in your CI/CD pipeline to verify that the code meets security regulations is vital in protecting its workflow and ensuring adherence.
There are multiple measures you can take to safeguard this workflow process.
Planning Phase
This phase collects requirements and customer feedback to create a product roadmap, including guidelines and best practices necessary for a practical DevOps approach.
Threat modeling can help identify possible points of attack on your pipeline, take preventive steps against potential attacks, and determine possible countermeasures to lessen them. When applied to CI/CD pipelines, threat modeling enables users to recognize attack vectors more readily and take preventative actions against possible attack points.
Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA) provide another valuable planning aid during this stage. This security framework contains an exhaustive checklist of standards and controls intended to prevent supply-chain attacks, protect against integrity challenges, protect software packages and infrastructure in your organization from attack and provide the optimal foundation.
Coding Phase
Coding Phase (CODE PHASE) Developers create the code needed for software construction in this phase, adhering to established standards and design principles when writing their codes.
As part of your security effort, implement source code scanners like CAST Application Intelligence Platform (AIP) or CodeSecure into your workflow to detect pieces of code that pose potential security threats.
Build Phase
Developers are responsible for pushing code changes into a shared repository during the build phase and initiating builds after doing so; automated tests are then run to ensure their bodies conform with project specifications.
Testing Phase
After each successful build, it is reviewed for any defects. Regression testing on any updated body ensures functional tests continue running successfully, as new features may have been included.
At this stage, dynamic analysis security testing (DAST) tools such as Netsparker and Acunetix should be employed, or container scanning technologies like Datadog, Clair, Anchor and Qualys may be used for container scans.
Deployment Phase
At this step, the build will be introduced into its production environment.
Monitoring Phase
DevOps Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment pipelines usually end with this stage, where builds are monitored closely to verify everything functions as it should, and the performance and other factors of production environments' deployed applications can be assessed.
CI/CD Security Checklist
Black-hat hackers always search for new methods of breaking encryption systems and uncovering security gaps. Cybercriminals could employ one or more of these security risks to compromise your CI/CD pipeline:
Let's now discuss strategies and practices for Enhancing CI/CD Pipeline Security.
Code Repository Access Restriction And Using Audited Code
Code repositories and version control systems are essential in hosting codebases, encouraging collaboration, and streamlining continuous integration processes.
Although these platforms can be helpful, their presence could put your code at risk of hackers using weak security standards to compromise it and exploit vulnerabilities.
They use automated scanning techniques to search for large-scale secrets or security holes within codebase versions, with live apps often reflecting any security holes discovered through such testing.
Therefore, keys must be encrypted for safekeeping; also, don't embed secrets directly within application code but instead utilize secret managers like Doppler for secure communication and storage of keys.
Reviewing Code Efficiently
Code review requires an intensive analysis of code's multiple elements and features; the software you must evaluate might contain more than 200,000 lines; successful outcomes depend on staying focused while reviewing code, even though this task might seem overwhelming.
Effectively examining 400 lines or less during a session without becoming distracted and losing focus or concentration will enable you to detect errors or problems that you otherwise might miss due to diminished concentration and focus.
Before beginning the code review, please verify that the author has annotated their code to make it legible. An annotated program makes it obvious why changes or adjustments were made and how it operates.
After reviewing, ensure your feedback to developers and testers remains helpful to enable you to identify flaws more readily and address them comprehensively.
Maximizing Testing Accuracy And Test Coverage
Testing tools provide invaluable assistance for finding issues before the release of a product, but programmers sometimes neglect specific features or parts of code when testing, leaving hidden files untested; products are then released with flaws that were never fully explored due to not enough testing being completed on all files; making these issues hard for programmers to identify.
Code coverage tools provide invaluable aids for comprehensively testing all functionalities within your app.
Examine test reports generated by code coverage tools to locate untested files and determine whether your app has been exhaustively tested.
You will receive notifications regarding lines not tested after reviewing the code; additionally, reports provide details such as the number of branches run, branch statements functions used, and several lines that have been put through their paces - making for easier analysis.
Image Scanning And Repository Auditing
Maintaining a secure environment takes dedication. Given that many images used come from third parties, regular inspection of images and repositories should take place to safeguard security against potentially compromised sources that offer downloads from untrustworthy servers.
For development and production environments, images should be regularly scanned using docker scan to detect security flaws or vulnerabilities.
Additional tools exist that are capable of searching Docker vulnerabilities:
- Docker Bench for Security
- Dive
- Inspec
- AWS ECR
- Trivia
Implementing Safe Deployments By Using Deployment Strategies
An effective deployment plan ensures your application never experiences downtime, with safe ways of rolling back changes should anything go wrong.
Common strategies for successful deployments may include:
- Blue-green development strategy: In this strategy, two production environments are employed: blue and green production environments. While the previous version of the program ran in a blue production environment, its current version operates in green; should there be issues with either of them, traffic will be switched back to a blue production environment if necessary.
- Canary deployment strategy: Only certain users can access newly added application capabilities with this approach as updates are released in stages. An alternative known as the "dark deployment strategy" notifies them of changes based on cookie data, and an app won't become widely accessible if its functioning doesn't function well when tested by only some individuals.
- Recreate deployment strategy: Recreate deployment is the only technique that necessitates downtime from those discussed due to replacing every pod at once instead of gradually. It should only be employed if your program requires significant upgrades.
- Rolling deployment strategy: With this method of pod deployment, pods are progressively introduced. In order to limit downtime and ensure traffic has access, a readiness probe is used as part of this method to verify whether each deployed pod is ready to receive traffic.
Conclusion
Implementation of concepts and best practices discussed here will enable your applications to withstand bugs and security vulnerabilities effectively, helping protect them against bugs or breaches in security policy or measures implemented, along with responding when security vulnerabilities arise.
Training should also be provided to keep up-to-date and address security breaches effectively.
Cybercrime can have devastating repercussions for businesses and is expected to cost $10.5 trillion worldwide by 2025.
Security breaches may damage your brand by making clients distrust your software and website; maintaining a secure CI/CD pipeline will help maintain the trust that can only strengthen it, thus strengthening it as part of your brand identity.
However, protecting CI/CD pipelines alone won't make cyberattacks less likely; you also must be capable of conducting risk analyses, prioritizations, and mitigation strategies.
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