Getting Started With CI/CD Pipeline Security
Daniel Khoshbayan
Founder & CEO | +11 years of experience as a C# & .Net developer
A continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline is an agile workflow that automates the build, test, and deploy cycles of application delivery. While automated deployment cycles enable developers to release new features and updates rapidly, CI/CD pipelines are commonly targeted by attackers who are looking to exploit vulnerabilities and inject malicious code into application workflows. A compromised pipeline often has severe consequences, such as an attacker gaining access to sensitive data and even controlling the release of new software versions.
In this Refcard, we discuss the key aspects and challenges of securing CI/CD pipelines as well as the fundamental steps to administer security on CI/CD pipelines.
KEY ASPECTS OF SECURING CI/CD PIPELINES
A DevOps workflow is typically characterized by its non-traditional approach to security. This is often because the security of a DevOps workflow is not centralized or does not follow the same approach as other workflows.
Instead, securing a DevOps workflow is often distributed among various tools and processes.
Figure 1: Key aspects of securing CI/CD pipelines
Securing the CI/CD pipeline at every stage requires a thorough understanding of the core aspects, common threats, and challenges for CI/CD security. Core aspects of CI/CD security include testing, automation, source control, incident management, secrets management, vulnerability scanning, and access control.
TESTING
Continuous application testing helps ensure software security and quality without compromising delivery cycles. Besides inspecting application source code, testing also relies on an iterative cycle of identifying security flaws in third-party libraries, resource-level conflicts, and misconfigurations. It is also important to employ the appropriate testing approaches that inspect flaws across various
stages of the CI/CD pipeline. These include:
? Static tests – These tests can be run against code that isn't yet deployed to production, making them extremely fast and easy to automate. However, this testing mechanism can only test for superficial defects, which lacks offering a comprehensive picture of how the code will actually behave in a production environment.
? Dynamic tests – These tests, on the other hand, inspect code during application runtime. This makes dynamic tests slower and more difficult to automate, but they are efficient at detecting flaws that static tests would normally miss. Dynamic tests are further categorized into:
- Load testing to ensure the system can handle heavy traffic
- Stress testing to identify performance bottlenecks
- Security testing to check for vulnerabilities
? Penetration testing – This is a proactive approach used to simulate real-world attacks and offer valuable insights into an organization's security posture. The testing methodology also helps validate the strength of security controls (e.g., firewalls, antivirus systems).
AUTOMATION
By automating the processes of building, testing, and deploying code, you can ensure that only approved code is deployed to production. Automated enforcement of security controls eliminates errors associated with the manual execution of repetitive tasks while making it easier to track changes and roll back if necessary. To ensure systems operate on the most secure versions of software, enterprises can also leverage automation for faster roll out of security updates and patches. Besides automatically documenting and recording system vulnerabilities, you can also leverage automation platforms to configure notifications and alerts to flag security threats as soon as they arise.
SOURCE CONTROL
One of the most powerful ways of enforcing code integrity is to use source control systems that enable enterprise teams to securely manage code changes, collaborate with cross-functional teams, and resolve conflicts in code before committing changes. This approach also helps prevent accidental or malicious changes from being introduced into the codebase, which could potentially break the build or cause other problems downstream. Also commonly referred to as version control, source control involves the configuration of access permissions to the codebase, ensuring only the approved contributors are allowed to make code changes. This guarantees that only authorized users have access to the codebase and that all changes are tracked and audited. Additionally, by using a centralized source control repository, you can more easily automate code reviews and roll back changes if something does go wrong.
INCIDENT MANAGEMENT
Incidents are unplanned events that disrupt normal operations by compromising the integrity of a system. In the context of CI/CD pipelines, incidents can range from simple build failures to more complex security breaches. Consequently, it's essential to formulate an incident management process that encompasses various procedures and tools to manage and respond to security events. While the primary purpose of an incident management framework is to reduce the impact of an event, it also helps alleviate the future occurrence of similar incidents by helping recognize identical patterns and fine-tuning alerting systems for expedited response. A typical approach is also to hard-code incident response plans into workflow tools, allowing for the automatic remediation of CI/CD security threats.
SECRETS MANAGEMENT
Managing secrets involves practices and procedures to securely manage, store, and transmit confidential credentials, including encryption keys, API keys, passwords, session tokens, database connection strings and certificates. Effectively administered secrets management maintains a fine balance between the ease of injecting secrets and limiting data exposure. This essentially implies that sensitive data remain confidential, while services can autonomously use secrets to interconnect with other services or tools. There are a few key things to keep in mind when managing secrets for
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CI/CD pipelines:
? Always use strong encryption for storing and transmitting secrets. This will help ensure that even if a malicious user gains access to your secrets, they will not be able to read or use them.
? Be sure to rotate your secrets regularly. This will help prevent attackers from using old secrets that they may have discovered.
? Make sure that only authorized users have access to your secrets. This can be accomplished through role-based access control (RBAC) or other authorization mechanisms.
? Use environment variables to store secrets as part of your application code. This approach allows you to keep secrets out of your code repository that prevent deeper compromise of the system.
VULNERABILITY SCANNING
Automated vulnerability scanning helps teams enforce a shift-left approach for security by identifying and remediating threats from early stages of a development cycle. Remediating vulnerabilities typically involves detecting a flaw, assessing its impact and severity, deploying a fix, and performing a determinative scan to ensure the flaw no longer exists. Since CI/CD pipelines are composed of numerous components and dependencies, vulnerability scanning for CI/CD is often broken down into:
? Source code scanning
? Third-party dependency scanning
? Container image scanning
? Infrastructure component scanning
To ensure all misconfigurations are appropriately attributed with their impacts, a common practice is also to leverage databases of known weaknesses. Some popular vulnerability databases include:
ACCESS CONTROL
One of the most important aspects of CI/CD security is making sure all cluster endpoints are secured. Access control mechanisms help mitigate the risk of data breaches by determining who has the privileges to access specific data and resources of a pipeline. Administering stricter policies requires users to verify their identity before they are allowed to access sensitive information. Beyond verifying a user's identity, access control policies also determine the allowed actions by defining permissions granted for each user.
COMMON CI/CD PIPELINE SECURITY THREATS
As per OWASP, although there are emerging practices and tools to avert security incidents, attackers continue to adapt novel techniques that exploit the distributed complexity of a CI/CD framework. Some common security threats of CI/CD pipelines include:
? Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks – are orchestrated by compromising the server, network, or service by overwhelming it with a high number of requests/internet traffic in a given time
? Supply chain attacks – focus on weak links in trusted thirdparty vendors that offer tools and services to the CI/CD pipeline
? Dependency confusion attacks – abuse flaws within package managers to replace legitimate private packages with malicious versions in public registries
? Injection attacks – are exploited over input validation errors to inject unauthorized code into the application, which ends up interpreting it as part of a command or a query
? Remote code execution attacks – are widely exploited attacks executed through malicious code on remote machines by connecting to them over insecure public and private networks
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