DevOps Security Best Practices!

Automation has been around for decades in various forms, and it’s only now that we’re starting to see its full potential. Automating the software development lifecycle (SDLC) can significantly improve quality assurance, developer productivity, and reductions in time spent on specific tasks. Companies have started to invest more in security practices throughout their SDLCs to protect their data and prevent malware attacks.

Security practices are continuously evolving as the industry changes. There has been a shift from traditional security practices where security was considered to be outside of the development team’s scope, to making security a priority in the SDLC. Adopting a shift-left mentality is on the rise, which means starting with security before the development phase of the SDLC. This has helped companies adopt a more agile approach to handling cybersecurity.

What Is Zero Trust Security?

Zero Trust security?is an IT security framework that treats everyone and everything to be hostile (in a good way!). Thus the Zero Trust security model grants least privileged access to all IT resources, meaning no one should be trusted for anything other than what they have been explicitly granted access to. Instead, only the verified and authorized networks, apps, users, IP addresses, and devices are allowed inside the network by following strict protocols.

The attainment of this Zero Trust framework involves advanced and secured technologies to verify the user’s identification and achieve the system’s security. Some notable technologies used to accomplish this are role-based access control, multifactor authentication, identity and access management (IAM), identity protection, and endpoint security technology. Furthermore, the strict and dynamic user authentication approach is enforced before granting any access.

In addition, constant potential threat scanning and detection are carried out.

In this article, we will focus on Zero Trust security and its importance regarding the software development lifecycle.

Why Security in SDLC?

Every company wants to release new features to their customers faster, and security needs to meet the pace of innovation. Also, organizations are moving their workloads to the cloud, taking advantage of cloud computing services, and the cloud provides for dynamic scaling. It has become obligatory to scale security to match the scale of the cloud. Companies today cannot allow services to go down even for a second, and hence security becomes crucial in automatic incident response remediation.

The cost of fixing a bug in production will upset your customers and create a lot of overhead with the development team, and hence it is highly prescribed by security experts to have security checkpoints at each stage of your SDLC.

Cost to fix a defect by development phase: IBM System Science Institute: Relative Cost of Fixing Defects

To successfully and securely leverage automation, there needs to be an added emphasis on security throughout the SDLC. That is where?DevSecOps?comes in as an integrated mindset for cloud native tech to unify development, operations, and security as one process in the SDLC. It advocates a shift-left approach promoting security at a very early stage of the SDLC.

Challenges of Implementing DevSecOps

There are many challenges to implementing security into the DevOps workflows. Here are a few of the main ones:

• DevOps is a fast-paced game: As DevOps focuses mainly on fast development, deployment, and releases, it becomes challenging for security to get in line with this pace of the fast-moving race.
• Siloed team approach: Security teams usually use different toolsets and processes, and they often lack complete SDLC visibility. This consideration of dev and sec as two separate teams becomes challenging.
• Scalability and integration: With the invention of containerization and creating virtual VMs, DevOps gives away many new attack surfaces to attackers. Various tools and technologies such as Jenkins, Docker, etc., add different security challenges while scaling and can create layers (literally) of complexity.
• Skillset: The scarcity of security principles, proof of concept, and skillset in the DevOps world make hiring true security professionals challenging. Also, enterprises often tend to neglect security teams and not involve them in major decisions, whether it is selecting a new platform or a tool, updating policies, etc., and hence the holistic vision of keeping security at utmost priority gets diluted easily.
• Poor tool selections: Selecting inadequate tools and making poor decisions end up becoming liabilities. This can be done by making the security team a part of the design considerations, tools selection, policymaking, compliance, governance, etc.

Security Best Practices in SDLC

Here are some tips for implementing Zero Trust security in your DevOps pipeline:

• Implement DevSecOps as a base of your SDLC and make the shift-left approach a must.
• Make Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) mandatory whenever working with third-party tools and vendors.
• Have regular security training, instill security awareness and ownership across your developer and operations teams.
• Have security checkpoints at each stage of your SDLC and validate that only good code and no confidential data or secrets are exposed to the outside world.
• Integrate static code analysis into the build process.
• Have a threat modeling plan to identify and mitigate the potential security risks involved in the development process.
• Make continuous security a forethought. Utilize security and compliance best practices and adopt continuous improvement strategies.
• Use security tools that integrate well with your SDLC and easily automate the security and governance with little or no human intervention.
• Ensure your tool suite comprises a robust security vulnerability detector and a universal software composition analysis solution.
• Have strong security threat response management policies to address any security threats if they occur.
• Have access control policies with clear boundaries on access rights, roles, and responsibilities to clear conflict between the teams.

A Real-World Example: DevSecOps Adoption at Fitch

Image source:?TheNewStack

Adopting DevSecOps in a 100-year-old company like Fitch was not easy.?

Initially, when the services started slowly growing, they didn’t understand what was going on in the production. They started noticing so many outages; there was a lack of traceability and inefficient collaboration across the pipeline. One incident used to cause a chaotic situation, and nobody was aware of what and how to handle such an incident.?

The standard procedure followed was to simply reboot the database service.?

The development teams at Fitch had poor knowledge of security and hence affected the collaboration and individual responsibility. Then, they decided to push the security defects to the top of the priority list.

The management team then hired security experts and made them join each development team to break down the silos and make security the utmost priority. They established security checkpoints and criteria at each stage of the DevOps pipeline.?

Next, they decided on the best in breed security tools and used them in the SDLC.?

Kow more in the original article:?100-Year-Old Fitch Ratings Upgrades to DevSecOps

Notable DevSecOps Strategies

DevSecOps helps to address these concerns by integrating security into the development process. It also helps to secure the development environment, which is an important step in protecting against cyber attacks. We have some DevSecOps strategies listed below to tackle and mitigate security issues.

1. Automated Testing for Security Vulnerabilities

One of the biggest challenges when implementing DevSecOps is integrating a security test phase into the SDLC. For years, code testing has been something that was left behind until the end of the project. It used to be ignored, or, even if automated, it was often done poorly.

With DevSecOps, testing needs to be integrated and automated into the SDLC. Code scanners can help with identifying vulnerabilities but lack accuracy, and manual penetration testing is time-consuming and costly. Automated tools can be used to detect vulnerabilities and enforce security standards along with policies. In addition, security tools can be used to identify vulnerabilities in code.

2. Some DevSecOps tools and practices include:

• Code-level testing is done by inspecting the code and looking for dangerous packages, insecure configurations, and risky parameters.
• Code scanners can help find unsafe functions like strcpy or unsecured calls to system commands
• Configuration management prevents issues that could allow unauthorized users to access sensitive data.
• Through dynamic application security testing (DAST), potentially risky parameters are being passed to a function, which could be manipulated to cause malicious actions.

Harness Security Testing Orchestration ?(STO) is one such tool that can help organizations prioritize application security vulnerability data and deliver highly secure applications while maintaining deployment velocity and minimizing rework.

3. DevSecOps and Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

Another significant concept in DevSecOps is employing CI/CD. CI/CD helps development teams automate code commits, build and test the code, and deploy it to the specified environment. In addition, developers can automate testing to find security issues in their application code by integrating application security as part of their production environment pipeline. Therefore, having a robust CI/CD platform is a must and the prerequisite to do DevSecOps because it integreatse continuous monitoring into development cycles. At different stages of the DevOps pipeline, we can have security checkpoints such as vulnerability scanning, JIRA approvals, adherence to governance and security policy, software composition analysis, and more.

4. Development Teams Test Hard and Test Smart

Your development team needs to act like hackers and security breachers and do not give any chance for them to enter your SDLC premises. By configuring your development cycle with all the possible security analysis and testing tools. With platforms like Harness, integration with any test suite is possible. Make sure you configure from simple tests to load tests to availability tests, so your CI/CD pipeline is attack free.

You can see that the above CI/CD pipeline is configured with various testing suites, which ensures security for the application.

5. Culture of Automation and Ownership

Another vital aspect of DevSecOps is the culture of automation and ownership. Developers need to be given the freedom to automate processes independently, but they also need to own their code. This means they are responsible for everything in their code, including the security risks. Developers also need to be given the tools to automate processes efficiently. For example, if you want to automate testing, you must have procedures and tools to run these tests. Many tools can help with automation, such as OWASP ZAP, Burp Suite, or Twist. These tools can be integrated into the code delivery process and trigger automated security tests at different stages.

6. Determine Risk Based on the Criticality of Assets

Another critical aspect of DevSecOps is determining the risk based on the criticality of assets. You can’t treat every change the same; some might pose big risks, while others don’t. When it comes to security, you need to know what risks are in your application. This can be done by using a risk-based approach. You can use a risk-impact matrix to identify risks and assign them a severity based on how they affect your application. You can also use a risk-grade model that helps you identify risks and set a priority for them. This can all be done using platforms like Harness's STO (Security Testing Orchestration).

The Harness STO has the capability to centralize security logs and results from over 40+ security scanners into a single dashboard of results. Data centralization also allows you to kick off continuous improvement initiatives. When data is in silos, it is much harder to analyze the results of the development, and hence the quality of improvements will be low.

7. Have Secrets Management in Place

Your applications will have some type of valuable credentials. It is very critical to ensure the encryption of such credentials and valuable information through secrets management. It can be your GitHub repo auth secrets, database credentials, etc. If such things are leaked, the attackers can easily exploit and pose a security threat. With platforms like Harness, it becomes very easy to keep our application secrets as they get encrypted through?Harness secret manager .

8. Establish a Security Review Process for Code Changes

Once you know what risks are in your application, it’s important to establish a security review process for code changes. This will help you to track changes and identify which team member is responsible for each change. It can also help you identify patterns in the code and see if any vulnerabilities have been introduced or have not been resolved since the last code review.

9. Monitor for Threats and Anomalies in Real-Time

The threats and anomalies can be monitored in real time with the help of threat intelligence and anomaly detection. Threat intelligence is the process of gathering, analyzing, and distributing cyber threat information in real-time. It includes malware alerts, network signatures, and malicious IP addresses. Threat intelligence can help identify observed threats and has been proven to work in real time. It’s essential to monitor for threats and anomalies in real time because threats are evolving and must be resolved as soon as possible.

10. Verify Your Deployments

Continuous Verification (CV) is a practice that involves continuously monitoring and validating the quality of software deployments, making sure that the deployed applications and services are serving as expected.

Harness Continuous Verification is a powerful tool that can help you ensure the quality and performance of your deployments. With Harness, you can easily set up a pipeline to verify your deployments, connecting a variety of monitoring tools of your choice. Once you've set up your verification step in the pipeline, Harness uses unsupervised machine learning to detect anomalies in the deployed applications or services. You can set a threshold for these anomalies, and when they cross the set threshold, the organizations will be able to auto roll back and de-risk their deployments.

Understand how to set up continuous verification for your deployments through this tutorial .

The Need for DevSecOps

Businesses must implement DevSecOps, as it will help them to keep their software and applications secure while increasing their speed to market. Adopting DevSecOps has numerous benefits, as we mentioned above in the article. Tackling security issues to patch common vulnerabilities is now possible with DevSecOps practices. Everything from writing code and testing to deploying applications needs to be approached from a new angle when adopting DevSecOps principles. With platforms like Harness , it becomes a reality to handle these complex vulnerabilities, integrate security in the SDLC and streamline the software delivery.

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