Implement DevSecOps to Secure Your CI/CD Pipeline

Before understanding DevSecOps, let’s understand what DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increase an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity.

In fast-moving projects, security often lags behind and is given low priority which may lead to buggy code and hacks. Let’s see how we can reduce the risk of attack by integrating security in our DevOps pipeline.

What is to DevSecOps (DevOps + Security)

DevSecOps is a software development approach that integrates security practices into the DevOps (Development and Operations) methodology. It aims to ensure that security is considered and implemented throughout the entire software development lifecycle, rather than being treated as an afterthought. DevSecOps promotes collaboration between development, operations, and security teams, with the goal of delivering secure and high-quality software efficiently.

What are the benefits of using DevSecOps?

• Finds vulnerability and bugs at an earlier stage of development
• Streamlined compliance
• Speedy recovery
• Secure supply chain
• Cost saving
• Can include AI-based monitoring for detecting anomalies
• Reduces the risk of surface attack and increases confidence
• Full visibility of potential threats and possible ways to remediate it

we will cover the following standard CI/CD stages and how to secure them:

1. Plan/Design
2. Develop
3. Build and Code analysis
4. Test
5. Deploy
6. Monitor and Alert

1. Plan/Design

planning and designing for DevSecOps, there are several key areas you should focus on.?

Threat Modeling:

Understand the concept of threat modeling and its importance in the DevSecOps process.

Learn about different threat modeling methodologies, such as STRIDE (Spoofing, Tampering, Repudiation, Information Disclosure, Denial of Service, Elevation of Privilege) and DREAD (Damage Potential, Reproducibility, Exploitability, Affected Users, Discoverability).

Explore tools and techniques for conducting threat modeling exercises effectively.

Secure Development Practices:

Familiarize yourself with secure coding practices and principles, such as input validation, output encoding, and proper error handling.

Understand common vulnerabilities and their mitigations, including OWASP Explore secure development frameworks and libraries that can help in building secure software.

2. Develop

The Development stage starts with writing code and we can use shift-left security best practice which incorporates security thinking in the earliest stages of development. For example:

• Install linting tools inside the code editor like Visual Studio Code. One of the most popular linting tools is SonarLint. Which highlights bugs and security vulnerabilities as you write code.
• Use Pre-commit hooks to prevent adding any secrets to code.
• Setup Protected branch and code reviews process.
• Sign git commit with GPG key.
• Always verify the downloaded binary/file hash.
• Enable 2-factor authentication.

3. Build and code analysis

Before building, we need to scan our code for vulnerabilities and secrets. By doing static code analysis, it may detect a bug or a possible overflow in code and these overflows lead to a memory leak, which degrades the system performance by reducing the amount of memory available for each program. Sometimes it can be used as an attack surface by hackers to exploit the data.

4. Test

The best content for testing in the context of DevSecOps provides comprehensive guidance on security testing methodologies, techniques, and automation practices. It covers topics such as secure testing techniques, test automation for security, threat modeling, test environment setup, reporting and remediation, test data security and privacy, and compliance testing.?

5. Deploy

Deployment can be of infrastructure or application; however, we should scan our deployment files. We can also add a manual trigger where the pipeline waits for external user validation before proceeding to the next stage, or it can be an automated trigger.

6. Monitoring and Alerting

The best content for monitoring and alerting in DevSecOps provides comprehensive guidance on establishing effective monitoring and alerting practices to detect and respond to security incidents in real-time. It covers topics such as defining monitoring requirements, selecting appropriate monitoring tools and technologies, establishing meaningful metrics and thresholds, implementing proactive monitoring strategies, and integrating security incident response workflows.?Follow RazorOps Linkedin Page?Razorops, Inc.