DevSecOps: Implement security on CICD Pipeline by Anshuman Abhishek

It was only after the software was written and placed in production environments that security engineers would check for potential vulnerabilities in the code. From manual deployments and large-scale releases to automated and more frequent releases, software development has transformed significantly over the past few years as organizations move to the cloud. Development and operations teams have discovered systems and tactics that help them work more efficiently, reduce costs, and produce high-quality results.

The Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery process ensure continuous testing and verification of the code correctness during the Agile process development. Angel started his career as an US Air Force space systems operations specialist in Cape Canaveral where he realized his passion for technology and software development. He has extensive experience in the private and public sectors and his technical experience includes military/space lift operations, software development, SRE/DevOPs engineering.

Since you already ran SAST in the earlier checks, ensure that you run tests that haven’t yet been covered. The rule sets should test for common critical and high severity issues such as those outlined in the OWASP Top 10. Next, create hooks to trigger activities such as threat modeling, architecture risk analysis, and manual code review. Create additional hooks to review your configuration files for hard-coded credentials. DevSecOps is essential to every development project because it has proven to be the most effective way to deliver secure, high-quality software in practice. The DevSecOps mindset brings security into the fold with operations and development, and creates an environment where security is “everyone’s” responsibility.

The Best of DevSecOps: Trends in Cloud Native Security Practices

Learn the security benefits of adopting Infrastructure as Code and how you can leverage IaC to secure your cloud native applications. An end to end platform for microservices application delivery comprising of Managed Kubernetes, Managed Microservices, Flexible CI/CD pipelines with Security, Compliance, and Observability. Here’s how the right DevSecOps tool and approach can help enterprises overcome these hurdles and ensure the security of the overall business infrastructure. All vulnerabilities identified during your SAST, DAST, IAST, and fuzz testing activities should break the build, gather metrics, and immediately create a defect in your bug tracking system.

Stage helps development teams track and reduce a software assets risk profile over time, ensuring it remains resilient to attacks while fulfilling its business purpose. Typically, SAST is introduced early in the creation cycle because it’s possible to use such a tool before the system is running. Good developers understand that bugs are a fact of life, because development is a creative, chaotic endeavor, and human beings are not perfect. The best developers in the world make plenty of mistakes on the road toward world-class software. The trick is acknowledging reality, and being ruthlessly efficient with finding and eliminating bugs. Large companies found an average of 779,935 bugs in software during standard vulnerability scans in only six months.

Both DevOps and DevSecOps are tactical approaches to software and IT operations. Additionally, collecting application-level security metrics helps to identify patterns of malicious users. Last, but certainly not least, a threat intelligence program can help teams stay ahead of the curve. It can help teams proactively respond to newly discovered security issues affecting applications and platforms. When implementing security into your DevSecOps pipeline, it’s important to conduct these activities with purpose. You can more activities earlier or later within the development process as they suit your life cycle operations.

Dynamic Application Security Testing ) scanners don’t depend on specific languages since they interact with the outside application. Deploy and use linting tools and Git controls to secure passwords and API Keys. If any external library is included in the project, whether it’s authentic, license risks and vulnerabilities, etc. Before it, your product may be insecure at the last minute, which may cause multiple costly iterations. After it, your product is baked with the gold standards of security. However, the probability of finding unexpected issues in the last minutes is much lower.

Tools for build security

By now, you’re probably getting an idea of how your changes are progressing through the DevSecOps pipeline. These checks also identify dependencies and checks if there are any known, publicly disclosed vulnerabilities using tools (e.g., SCA). Introduce the concept of security right from the start of the SDLC to minimize vulnerabilities in software code. In our architecture, CodeBuild triggers DAST scanning and the DAST tool. The following is the code snippet from the Lambda function, where the SCA analysis results are parsed and posted to Security Hub. Based on the results, the equivalent Security Hub severity level is assigned.

Checks for cross-site scripting, SQL injection, and other software security vulnerabilities. After testing, Docker images are built and pushed to the repo. Several Docker images may need to be managed by a container orchestration tool.

The Docker Trusted Registry scans container images against known vulnerabilities, as well. The scans validate that builds are secure before they are released, which eliminates low-level risks in the software build process. The above snippet demonstrates how to specify a job that leverages https://globalcloudteam.com/ the Snyk orb to perform a vulnerability scan on the container image for this specific build. This container image could be deployed to a production environment, and scanning it for issues provides another important security layer that dramatically reduces potential attack vectors.

We build unstoppable teams by equipping DevOps professionals with the platform, tools and training they need to make release days obsolete. Infrastructure as code allows DevOps teams to apply the same guidelines used to manage application code to infrastructure. DevSecOps allows organizations to maintain their pace of development at the speed of the cloud while reducing risk and integrating security directly into the DevOps pipeline. As a developer checks in code, the pre-commit hooks review changes to the code and configuration before committing it to the source code repository (e.g., SVN or Bitbucket).

Government agencies use CircleCI for security and DevSecOps

It also leads to cybersecurity being viewed as “the team of no” and developers doing just enough to get software approved for deployment. Shifting lift flips this paradigm and builds a culture that embeds security into everything it does, which increases throughput and quality in the long run. Stuart Foster has over 10 years of experience in mobile and software development.

Now you have to re-initiate all of your processes and ask developers to fix the flaw. By adopting a security focus from the beginning of a project — a.k.a. shifting left — enterprises become more cooperative and productive. Traditionally, a disconnect between developers and cybersecurity teams leads to bottlenecks and expensive reworks at the end of projects.

What Are DevSecOps Security Requirements?

Records application execution for post-mortem test failure analysis. After the development phase is completed, the code is pushed to the repo, where all the code is hosted. In this stage, the developer/coder, writes the code in the IDE and pushes it to the repo where the code is hosted. In this case, the developer writes the code in the IDE and pushes it to GitHub.

• Security Hub helps aggregate and view all the vulnerability findings in one place as a single pane of glass.
• Notify them about critical code changes that developers have checked into source code repositories.
• Build-time checks, the third activity in the DevSecOps pipeline, are automatically triggered by successful commit-time checks.
• All tests, including functional, integration, performance, advanced SAST, and DAST are executed on this build.
• This post also talked about how to implement security of the pipeline and in the pipeline using AWS cloud native services.

It can be very frustrating to discover the security vulnerabilities at the end of the SDLC. In some ways, the surge in DevSecOps popularity is a logical progression from DevOps. Just as making operations a shared responsibility helps to improve application reliability, making security a shared responsibility improves overall security posture.

Automating web security testing within your DevOps pipelines

Pre-commit checks are used to find and fix common security issues before changes are committed into source code repositories. Pre-commit checks, the first step in the DevSecOps pipeline, consist of steps to complete before the developer checks code into the source code repository. Build continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines with this step-by-step Jenkins tutorial. DevSecOps will play a more crucial role as we continue to see an increase in the complexity of enterprise security threats built on modern IT infrastructure. However, the DevSecOps pipeline will need to improve over time, rather than simply relying on implementing all security changes simultaneously.

After deployment is successful, CodeBuild initiates the DAST scanning. When scanning is complete, if there are any vulnerabilities, it invokes the Lambda function similar to SAST analysis. If there are any vulnerabilities either from SCA analysis or SAST analysis, CodeBuild invokes the Lambda function. The function parses the results into AWS Security Finding Format and posts it to Security Hub.

Understanding the DevSecOps Pipeline

Notify them about critical code changes that developers have checked into source code repositories. With KSPM, enterprises can identify role-based access control issues, compliance issues, and deviations from predefined security policies. Importantly, KSPM integrates into CI\CD pipelines to enable shift left and the transition to a true DevSecOps pipeline. In the next section, we explain how to deploy and run the pipeline CloudFormation template used for this example. Refer to the provided service links to learn more about each of the services in the pipeline. If utilizing CloudFormation templates to deploy infrastructure using pipelines, we recommend using linting tools like cfn-nag to scan CloudFormation templates for security vulnerabilities.

Security Stages of the DevSecOps Pipeline

Dynamic application security testing is the process of scanning an application to find vulnerabilities through simulated attacks. This approach evaluates the app and identifies security vulnerabilities by attacking like a malicious user would. Federal developers can access a wide selection of orbs to automate development use-cases such as code analysis, security, testing, and deployment. Some specific examples of CircleCI orbs for automating public sector DevOps include multiple security use cases for vulnerability scanning and secrets management.

Threat Modeling

After identifying and organizing security vulnerabilities in previous phases, they are finally dealt with in the Remediation phase. Some DevSecOps tools — like SAST — can recommend solutions for the vulnerabilities, errors, and bugs that it has identified. This makes it easier to address security issues as they arise.

However, when trying to implement DevSecOps, most organizations receive resistance from their developer teams. This is where the right tool, and the right approach, can serve as a catalyst for a DevSecOps transformation. The DevSecOps approach identifies vulnerabilities in the software development cycle.