CI/CD orchestration has become increasingly popular in DevOps practices. It facilitates faster deployment of software and product delivery. Through the use of automation when building, testing and deploying applications, CI/CD bridges the gap between development, operation activities and teams.
However, there are many security considerations to keep in mind with frequent deployment. From quality automation to code history analysis, security must be baked into your CI/CD pipeline to ensure your product and processes remain safe from hackers.
To gain insights on the top security considerations for CI/CD, I asked the speakers and sponsors for the upcoming SKILup Day as well as several DevOps Institute Ambassadors for their thoughts. In this two-part series, I will be sharing their insights. Did you miss part one? You can read it here. Here’s what they had to say in part two of this series:
Speaker, Ravi Lachhman, Evangelist, Harness
“CI/CD platforms are core to an organization’s engineering efficiency and typically have elevated privileges to sensitive environments such as production. Since CI/CD platforms typically will be deploying, this makes sense. Delving into the SolarWinds hack with binary artifact signing, etc., can separate security concerns into two parts. One concern would be the security around the actual CI/CD platform and one around the DevSecOps goals inside a CI/CD pipeline. With so many items shifting left, having proper role-based access control (RBAC) is crucial. With the separation of duties for regulated environments and the need for engineers to be efficient, controls that ensure only certain entities can deploy and certain entities can view pipelines is important. Around the DevSecOps movement, container/OSS scanning is still top of mind for many firms.”
Sponsor, Basis Technologies, Eran Kriegshauser, Basis Technologies’ SAP DevOps Architect
“The question you should be asking is ‘How do I maintain quality with the frequent deployment tempo demanded by business today?’ We need automation of quality and guaranteed rigor. For example, take promoting security configuration changes in systems applications and products (SAP). Today, this is done by SAP transports where the change is created in an SAP development system, then imported into QA and, ultimately, into production. How do you ensure that a developer can’t give themselves extra security access through a role modification? Automated analysis and approval workflows must support segregation of duties requirements. Users can’t approve changes they create–the appropriate CI/CD process will not allow it.
Another area is automatic peer review notification on changes to sensitive enterprise resource planning (ERP) objects. Technologies like Basis Technologies’ ActiveControl Risk Guard analyzer can automatically identify SAP changes to risky objects. Once identified, the promotion of those object changes are halted until approved by a team lead or change and release manager.”
Savinder Puri, DevOps Evangelist, Zensar Technologies
“Infuse as many aspects of security as possible into your CI pipeline. CD is already too late for security—you’ve already deployed the application into an environment.
Start from the basic static code analysis, security scanners, etc., and then keep maturing. Whatever tools you integrate into CI Server, ensure the corresponding integrated development environment (IDE) plugins are made available to developers. That way, devs can do the first-level validation within their IDE itself, and do it as they code, even before compiling. That’s the practical implementation of the often overused term ‘shift left.'”
Vishnu Vasudevan, Head of Product Engineering and Development, Opsera
“Now with cloud migration, emerging technologies and open source technology, companies will have to make sure they have the right tooling to measure and take action based on the security challenges born out of different development activities.
The focus will need to be on managing the risk that is tied to the business criticality. Each industry, domain, technology, etc., all have their own independent security goals, and you cannot have one security goal across the enterprise for different technologies and different domains. It is important to evaluate the technology being used and weigh the security requirements accordingly.”
Stephen Walters, Sales Engineer, Everbridge
“Inclusion! This is why the term DevSecOps came to be—because, erroneously, security was not included as part of a DevOps transformation, and the same is true for transformation of an SDLC to incorporate security.
Security has still been treated as a non-functional requirement; an afterthought. If there is one thing we should learn, there is no such thing as a non-functional requirement. Security needs must be considered on an equal footing with all other requirements and built into the design, test, deployment and delivery of any feature.”
Mark Peters, Technical Lead, Novetta
“CI/CD pipelines should implement security at every step. Tests can be automated in tooling to conduct tests of various functions at multiple levels for code accuracy, unit tests through fuzzing and integration or vulnerability testing. Most vulnerability testing in a pipeline is actually patch management, ensuring all commercial and proprietary holes are filled for release software. The first step should be using coding checks to make sure there are not any common problems with the code. While this may seem easy, if you are not managing that basic step, you cannot move ahead to the more complicated areas.”
Pawel Piwosz, Lead Systems Engineer, EPAM Systems
“At a high level, I would say that security is still outside the main scope of CI/CD. We should consider a few areas and different angles, here. Security should be not only implemented by CI/CD; CI/CD should be implemented in a secure way. Everything-as-code is a solution here: policy-as-code, security-as-code, drift-as-code, and if we talk about infrastructure, remediation-as-code.”
If you’d like to learn more about the latest in CI/CD and similar topics, check out the upcoming SKILup Day schedule. Or, learn more about the benefits of becoming a DevOps Institute Member.
