Securing Your Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD Pipelines

How to make IaC and CI/CD processes part of your security posture in 2024

Incase, this is your 1st Cloud Security Newsletter! Welcome, we are a Weekly newsletter from the team behind Cloud Security Podcast & AI CyberSecurity Podcast deep diving into top of mind topics in emerging technology to make sure collectively we feel confident securing things in this every changing world of Cloud, AI and whatever comes next.

Who else is here reading with you? Ashish & Shilpi, from the weekly show Cloud Security Podcast, friends and colleagues from companies like Netflix, Citi, JP Morgan, Linkedin, Reddit, Github, Gitlab, CapitalOne, Robinhood, HSBC, British Airways, Airbnb, Block, Booking Inc & more who subscribe to this newsletter. If you are reading this - thank you for supporting us and sharing with your friends who like to learn a new Cloud Security Topic from their industry peers every week.

Welcome to this week's edition of Cloud Security Newsletter! We're talking about the critical intersection of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD pipelines, and DevSecOps, focusing on the security challenges and best practices in this rapidly evolving space.

Its 2024 and we are living in an era where cloud deployments are increasingly automated, understanding and mitigating risks in your IaC and CI/CD pipeline processes is important for maintaining a robust security posture. In this week’s edition of the newsletter, we will go through how these practices are changing the landscape of cloud security and what organizations need to do to stay ahead of potential threats. In this edition we have included insights from our interviews with Mike Ruth, Senior Staff Security Engineer at Rippling, Armon Dadgar, CTO & Co-Founder at Hashicorp, Eve Ben Ezra, Senior Software Engineer at The New York Times and Nana Janashia from TechWorld with Nana.

Definitions and Core Concepts

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): The practice of managing and provisioning infrastructure through machine-readable definition files for ease of automation, rather than manual processes.
• CI/CD Pipelines: Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment, practices that automate the building, testing, and deployment of applications and infrastructure.
• GitOps: An operational framework that applies DevOps best practices to infrastructure automation using Git based code repositories as the single source of truth.
• DevSecOps: As Nana describes it, "DevSecOps is basically DevOps. But people, when they started implementing DevOps in practice, they forgot about the security. [...] So DevSecOps concept was introduced to re-highlight or reintroduce the importance of security."

The Evolution of IaC, CI/CD, and DevSecOps

As organizations increasingly adopt IaC & CI/CD practices, several security considerations started coming to the forefront:

1. Expanded Attack Surface: With infrastructure defined as code, the entire CI/CD pipeline becomes a potential target for attackers.
2. Configuration Drift: Ensuring that the actual state of infrastructure matches the defined state in code is an ongoing challenge.
3. Secret Management: Securely handling sensitive information within IaC files and CI/CD pipelines is critical.
4. Access Control: Determining who can make changes to infrastructure code and who can approve those changes becomes a key security control.
5. Compliance and Auditing: With rapid, automated changes to infrastructure, maintaining compliance and audit trails becomes more complex.

Key Research Findings and Industry Trends

Mike Ruth's research uncovered several vulnerabilities in IaC and CI/CD pipelines, including secret exfiltration, unauthorized access, and pipeline manipulation.

"What we noticed was that simply through submitting a PR, we could actually go and exfiltrate all of the secrets that existed, like all of the environment variables and all of the environment variables of the worker itself directly from a PR." - Mike Ruth

There is a significant shift in how organizations are prioritizing security within their DevOps practices. In addition there is also a challenge for experienced IT professionals transitioning to DevOps and cloud roles.

"I think the challenge people who have this large experience in the industry is not the technical skills, but the way they work. So basically they have to unlearn the way they're used to working. Not only themselves, but like how do we work within a team? How do different teams work together in the organization?" - Nana Janashia

This emphasizes the importance of adapting not just technical skills, but also mindsets and working methodologies when transitioning to modern DevOps and cloud practices.

Actionable Insights for Practitioners

To improve the security of your IaC, CI/CD Pipeline , and DevSecOps processes:

1. Implement Least Privilege: Carefully manage access to IaC repositories and CI/CD pipeline systems. This can extend to separation of permission for each of these between Dev, Test & Production environments.
2. Use Policy as Code: Implement tools like OPA, Conftest, or cloud-native policy frameworks to enforce security standards & controls
3. Employ Static Analysis of Infrastructure Code: Use IaC-specific security scanning tools in your CI/CD pipelines to identify hygiene bugs like leaving secrets in the code etc
4. Secure Secrets Management: Utilize specialized secrets management tools and avoid hardcoding sensitive data in IaC files.
5. Implement Robust Change Management: Ensure all infrastructure changes based on the security impact of the code change to be implements should go through proper review and approval processes, where required.
6. Continuous Compliance Monitoring: Implement real-time monitoring to detect and alert on policy violations or unexpected changes.
7. Educate and Empower Developers: Provide training on secure IaC practices and the potential risks of misconfiguration to developers and platform/DevOps engineers.

"Developers should not be only getting feedback on whether or not something is compliant when they go to deploy. So you need to provide developers feedback much earlier in the cycle so that they can have more productivity in knowing whether or not what they're developing is compliant and whether or not their configuration is compliant." - Eve Ben Ezra

"The best organizations we work with are ones that have strong platform teams that are very opinionated about what are the key patterns we support. Maybe it's Java, C sharp, Python, whatever it is. And they say, okay, here's the 10, 20 patterns. We're going to be really prescriptive about how these things run." - Armon Dadgar

Future Trends in IaC, CI/CD, and DevSecOps

Looking ahead, we can expect to see:

1. AI-Driven Security: It’s 2024, of course there is AI now ?? in the market using Machine learning models to detect anomalies in infrastructure configurations and CI/CD patterns.
2. Increased Automation: More sophisticated auto-remediation capabilities for security issues, where it makes practical sense.
3. Enhanced Supply Chain Security: Greater focus on verifying the integrity of all components in the IaC and CI/CD ecosystem (not just the code & secrets)
4. Zero Trust Architectures: Applying zero trust principles to IaC and CI/CD pipelines. Start with Identity, Authentication & Authorization if looking for a place to start implementing ZT.
5. Compliance as Code: More advanced tools and practices for embedding compliance requirements directly into IaC and CI/CD processes.

As IaC, CI/CD, and DevSecOps practices continue to evolve, we all understand that security must be deeply integrated into these processes. The insights from our experts emphasise the need for a holistic approach to securing not just the infrastructure itself, but the entire pipeline that manages it.

The key takeaway is that securing your IaC and CI/CD processes is not a one-time task, but an ongoing journey that requires vigilance, education, and a commitment to continuous improvement. As Armon aptly puts it, "You're never just done. I spun up my VMs, next month there's a Linux vulnerability and you have to go patch it. Okay, so how do I think about now day two?"

By adopting best practices in IaC, CI/CD, and DevSecOps security, organizations can harness the full power of cloud automation while maintaining a strong security posture. This involves not only implementing technical security controls but also fostering a culture of security awareness and shared responsibility across development, operations, and security teams.

The goal is not just to secure your infrastructure, but to enable your organization to move faster and more confidently in delivering value to your customers. By embedding security into your IaC and CI/CD processes, you're not just protecting against threats – you're building a foundation for innovation and agility.

Related Resources

1. Awesome Pipeline
2. OWASP Top 10 CI/CD Security Risks

?? Related Podcast Episodes

?? Are you interested in AI Cybersecurity?

Then you should definitely checkout our sister podcast AI Cybersecurity Podcast that is hosted by Ashish Rajan and Caleb Sima.

??????Cloud Security Training from Practitioners!

Want to learn more about Cloud Security or know someone who wants to, we got you !

If you have been following our journey for a while, you would know that one of the big reasons we started Cloud Security Podcast was to make cloud security knowledge accessible for anyone wanting to learn it.

Have you joined our FREE Monthly Cloud Security Bootcamp yet. There are paid online and corporate trainings available for those looking to hit their Cloud Security goals this year!

We would love to hear from you?? for a feature or topic request or if you would like to sponsor an edition of Cloud Security Newsletter.

Thank you for continuing to subscribe and Welcome to the new members in tis newsletter community??

Hope you are enjoying this new look Cloud Security Newsletter, there’s plenty more to come.

Peace!

Shilpi Bhattacharjee

Was this forwarded to you? You can Sign up here, if this was helpful for you.

Want to sponsor the next newsletter edition! Lets make it happen