How to Build a secure CICD pipeline using DevSecOps

How to Build a secure CI/CD pipeline using DevSecOps?

The age-old adage “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link” holds true even today. Comparing this to the DevOps approach you are following; undoubtedly the CI/CD approach has dramatically improved cross-team collaboration, code quality, release frequency, customer satisfaction  and much more. But what good will this never-ending list of benefits bring to your organization if you are not focusing on the security aspect?

So how do you ensure that your business-critical CI/CD pipeline is secure? Well, DevSecOps is the answer.Right from the source code to deployment, DevSecOps implements security standards at every stage of the DevOps pipeline.  To know more about DevSecOps,please read our blog Make your organization future-ready with DevSecOps

This blog will walk you through everything you want to know about securing your CI/CD pipeline using DevSecOps. Without further ado, let’s get started.

Continuous security implementation

Security Unit Tests

The first implementation of continuous security is security unit tests.Leveraging security unit testing, you can validate components in the delivery pipeline. The components in the pipeline are the smallest distributable and testable units.

SAST (Static Analysis Security Testing)

SAST integrates really well with the continuous delivery pipeline. With static code analyzers your team can detect:

  • Violations in coding best practices
  • Security vulnerabilities in codes owned by you and in insecure libraries that you import

PS. While choosing a SAST scanner make sure that it is compatible with the programming language you choose. Further, a drawback associated with SAST is that it can often report false positives.Adding to the chaos, the false positives can become highly annoying and ultimately it may lead to a situation where you team stops responding to broken pipeline notifications, and that’s surely not a healthy practice. You can easily overcome this drawback by incorporating a

layer of persistence. This helps the pipelines to “remember” and prevents repeated flagging of a false positive identified by the team.

DAST (Dynamic Analysis Security Testing)

A subsystem essentially comprises of loosely coupled components. DAST can be used to deploy and test subsystems for security vulnerabilities. It examines an application in the running state. Thus, DAST scanners hardly have a dependency on specific languages.

It is recommended to include both SAST and DAST as part of your security strategy. As each comes with its unique benefits, integrating both the approaches in the pipelines can prove to be highly beneficial from the security aspect.

How to integrate DevSecOps in security operations centers?

DevSecOps can play a crucial role in modernizing the processes of a SOC.

  • Build a distributed SOC with DevOps members
  • Team up threat hunters and DevOps team
  • Ensure that the SOC is available for advice and guidance as and when required

The  Future of Security-DevSecOps

Evolution of DevOps culture, DevSecOps will not disrupt your existing cybersecurity strategy but help your team inculcate security processes, capabilities, and intelligence gained over the years into an appropriate platform thus ensuring the practices are consistently utilized.With an aim to overcome cyber risks, organizations are adopting DevSecOps to ensure that the entire organization shares the responsibility for security. It highlights the fact that unless an organization works as a single team to integrate security into products throughout the development and operations cycles, they may never be able to harness the complete potential of DevOps.

The cost of an error is low in test, medium in staging, and high in production. So, invest in security with DevSecOps right from the get-go. Break the silos of conventional security professionals and adopt the agile and continuous approach of DevSecOps. The approach makes your team accountable, efficient and productive. Security coupled with continuity can do wonders and ushers in the best days of software development and delivery.

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