Tens of thousands of people and hundreds of cybersecurity vendors descended on San Francisco at the end of April. While the RSA Conference was the primary draw, there are a number of peripheral events that go on throughout the week as well, such as the Cloud Security Alliance Summit, the CIO/CISO Interchange, BSides San Francisco and the Qualys Security Conference.
I was able to attend some of the Qualys Security Conference and I had the opportunity to see Alex Mandernack, security solution architect for product management at Qualys, presenting on the need to shift left when it comes to cybersecurity.
Mandernack outlined some of the issues organizations face today when it comes to security. Migrating to the cloud and embracing DevOps culture means more ephemeral, elastic environments and compressed development time frames. He pointed out that these trends make security more challenging, but also described the opportunity they present to change our approach to streamline and improve security.
The Traditional Pipeline is Broken
The traditional model of application development is much more linear. Each app team builds their own image—often in a silo or vacuum disconnected from other teams. Penetration testing is conducted on a sporadic or infrequent basis, and eventually the app is deployed. Vulnerability scans are run on the app in production, and issues or deficiencies are reported back to the developers to address or incorporate into the next build.
The process is slow and cumbersome. It also has the potential to introduce redundancies that waste resources and make the organization less efficient. As companies embrace DevOps and move to the cloud, the traditional development pipeline simply doesn’t work—especially not for security.
DevOps, and Cloud, and Containers — Oh My!
The cloud and DevOps fundamentally change the development lifecycle. Development time frames are compressed, and the process is a self-feeding, iterative circle rather than a repeating linear approach. The traditional approach of identifying and resolving security issues after an application is deployed won’t work in a DevOps environment because by the time issues are identified and fixed, the app itself may have already moved on to the next version.
Cybersecurity and the development pipeline have enough challenges with the cloud and DevOps, but there is also a newer technology trend that exacerbates the problem—containers. Containers are designed to get code quickly and to operate fast. They are also built for scalability—spawning and spinning down hundreds or thousands of containers constantly to keep pace with demand.
There is a diverse array of tools and platforms associated with cloud, DevOps and containers. Organizations often employ a complex collection comprised of some combination of AWS, Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift and others. The result can quickly become a black hole when it comes to security—which is why it’s important to push security left into the CI/CD pipeline.
Shift Left to Help Security Teams Do Better
In a DevOps culture, developers and security teams need to think about security sooner. It’s important to get the security tools into the process earlier. Thankfully, with the DevOps lifecycle and the tools commonly used within a DevOps environment, it can be done.
For starters, companies should build a golden image. Developers shouldn’t have to patch and update the base operating system before they even start developing. The golden image takes a baseline operating system such as Ubuntu or CentOS, and completely patches and configures it so everyone has a standard, consistent image to develop on.
With the golden image in place, the next step in shifting security left is to implement testing and scanning in the CI/CD pipeline. Put vulnerability information at the fingertips of developers as they’re developing and implement vulnerability gates in the pipeline to ensure that applications that don’t comply with policies and meet minimum requirements are not allowed to be deployed.
New Role of the Security Team
Part of shifting security left includes providing tools that make security self-service for the DevOps team. Automating actions with scripting, APIs and CI plugins ensures that security is simplified and streamlined to provide value for developers.
In this shift left scenario, the security team has to redefine its role in the process. The security team is still vital, but rather than being the police or a roadblock in the development process, the role of security focuses on verifying and auditing the process. The security framework should have dashboards and live data that enable the security team to monitor activity and identify trends that may need further attention.
Better Security, Faster
There is often conflict between developers and security teams, but there doesn’t need to be. Mandernack stressed that developers don’t want to create insecure apps either.
Shifting security to the left into the CI/CD pipeline streamlines the whole process. Ultimately, the result is higher quality, more secure applications that are developed faster.
