Securing your DevOps Pipeline from Hackers, Bugs, and Co-workers
In today’s fast-paced software development landscape, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines have become the backbone of efficient and reliable software delivery. As the criticality of CI/CD pipelines grows, so do the cyber threats – and thus the need to ensure the pipelines are secure. Platform and DevOps engineers serve as the gateway to the heart of an organization’s intellectual property – the source code. Securing your CI/CD pipeline is critical to ensure your software development process is secure and that you can deliver high quality software with confidence.
This article dives into the world of securing CI/CD pipelines, providing insights, best practices, and actionable steps that platform and DevOps engineers can implement to protect their organization’s most valuable assets.
Chaos and the Expanding Attack Surface
CI/CD pipelines are complex ecosystems that automate the process of building, testing, and deploying software. While they offer unparalleled speed and efficiency, they also present an expanded attack surface for cybercriminals.
Figure 1: The DevOps Attack Surface
1. Environment layer
CI/CD pipelines rely on build environments, like AWS and Azure, to compile, package, and test code. Attackers can exploit vulnerabilities in these environments to inject malicious code or gain unauthorized access. While organizations often prioritize securing production, it’s important not to overlook the security of development and staging environments. Neglecting the security of these environments can be a blind spot, as they may provide valuable insights into the production environment and offer potential pathways for attackers to compromise the final deployment. This layer helps identify issues related to deployment, integration, and compatibility. Security concerns in the environment layer relate to protecting the runtime environments from unauthorized access, securing sensitive data, applying proper access controls, and ensuring that the environments are properly isolated from each other to prevent data leakage or interference.
2. Pipeline layer
The pipeline layer is responsible for defining the steps and stages code changes go through as they move from development to production. It specifies the automated workflow and the sequence of actions that need to be performed on the code, such as building, testing, and deploying. Developers constantly push code changes to repositories like GitHub or Bitbucket. These repositories are often targeted by attackers to steal source code, proprietary algorithms, or sensitive data.
In addition to securing these repositories, it’s crucial to emphasize that the actual servers and services performing the CI/CD workflows must be securely configured, updated, and assessed, just like corporate networks. Neglecting the security of the underlying infrastructure can lead to vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit to compromise the entire CI/CD process. Therefore, safeguarding not only the code repositories but also the servers and services integral to the CI/CD workflows is paramount for ensuring the overall security and integrity of the development and deployment process.
3. Software layer
The software layer primarily centers around the development, testing, and deployment of the actual application code and its artifacts. It is the heart of the pipeline, and it undergoes various automated processes aimed at maintaining code quality and security, thereby enabling the continuous delivery of new features and improvements to the application. In many software development organizations, there’s a predominant focus on this layer, often overshadowing the importance of securing other layers within the DevOps attack surface.
While automation tools like Jenkins or Travis CI play a vital role in this process, it’s essential to recognize that securing the applications themselves should be the utmost priority. A plethora of tools and practices exist to ensure that code is not only high-quality but also thoroughly secure before it is shipped or deployed, and these should be integrated into the development and CI/CD workflows to reduce the risk of vulnerabilities and unauthorized access.
4. Product Team layer
The product team layer is dedicated to safeguarding the security of workstations, laptops, and mobile devices used by the developer, QA, product managers, and other team members involved in the development process. This layer’s primary objective is to ensure that these essential devices remain secure, preventing any potential compromise of the code and sensitive data. By maintaining the integrity and security of these endpoints, the product team helps create a robust defense against potential security threats, contributing to the overall protection of the development environment and the successful execution of secure and efficient development workflows.
5. Project Management layer
The project management layer plays a critical role in ensuring the security of essential software and services utilized by the product teams. This layer’s primary focus is on the protection of key applications and tools integral to the development and project management processes. These commonly include communication tools such as Slack or Teams, knowledge sharing platforms like Confluence or wikis, and project management tools like Jira and Asana.
Recognizing that these applications contain vital information, discussions, and data relevant to the development process, it is crucial to prioritize their security. Malicious actors can potentially leverage the information stored in these tools to advance their attacks or gain insights into the organization’s operations. Therefore, safeguarding these software and services is of paramount importance to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of critical project-related information while reducing the risk of unauthorized access or data breaches.
As we’ve explored the five layers of the DevOps attack surface, it’s clear that comprehensive security is vital to DevOps. By understanding and addressing these layers, we can better appreciate the measures needed to secure our CI/CD pipelines effectively.
Best Practices for Mitigating CI/CD Risks
For companies building applications, protecting their intellectual property is more than just a security matter; it’s a business imperative. Source code represents the essence of their product, and its compromise can lead to severe financial and reputational damage. Let’s explore the steps that platform and DevOps engineers can take to safeguard their organization’s intellectual property by fortifying their CI/CD pipelines.
1. Map Threats and Connections
Identify potential security threats and understand the relationships and interactions between critical components and stages of the pipeline. Generate hardware and software lists. Produce a CI/CD system architecture and understand potential threats and vulnerabilities.
2. Tighten Access Control
Adhere to the principle of least privilege, limiting access to CI/CD components and deployment targets. Establish precise access control lists and rules, and rigorously maintain access logs, continuous monitoring, and proactive access management. Regularly conduct comprehensive audits to bolster security.
3. Keep Secrets safe
Eliminate hardcoded secrets from both source code and configuration files, ensuring their secure management. Implement a routine password rotation policy, and apply encryption for data at rest and in transit at every stage of your CI/CD pipeline, safeguarding sensitive configuration files, secrets, and communication channels. Utilize a robust key management service for added security.
4. Keep Tools Up to Date
Stay vigilant about keeping all components of your CI/CD pipeline up-to-date. Harden and update servers and systems. Establish a policy to update CI/CD tools regularly, including both the tools themselves and the underlying infrastructure. Stand-up a pipeline twin to test changes before updating the production pipeline.
5. Secure Code Repositories
Institute access controls for your CI/CD tools and repositories to thwart unauthorized entry, incorporating robust authentication mechanisms and access roles for each repository. Wherever feasible, deploy multi-factor authentication (MFA), conduct periodic reviews to revoke access from inactive users, and establish a comprehensive backup policy for added security.
6. Artifact Repository Security
Use signed code, images, and artifacts. If you use containers, ensure that container images are scanned for vulnerabilities, and adopt container security best practices, including least privilege, image signing, and runtime protection. Implement Software Composition Analysis (SCA).
7. Safe Deployment Strategies
Adopt a strategic deployment approach, such as blue-green or canary deployments, to ensure seamless transitions. Establish isolated and ephemeral build environments to mitigate the threat of contamination by malicious code. Employ drift detection as part of your monitoring system, enabling the early identification of deviations from the initial Infrastructure as Code (IaC) setup.
Automate the provisioning and deprovisioning of these environments after each build cycle for efficiency and security. Implement immutable deployments, where fresh instances of your application supplant the older ones rather than undergoing in-place updates. This minimizes the attack surface and streamlines the rollback process, fortifying your CI/CD pipeline.
8. Continuous Testing & Monitoring
Establish a robust system of continuous monitoring for your CI/CD pipelines and the associated environments. Streamline log aggregation and centralize logs for improved visibility. Bolster your security posture by deploying Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) to swiftly identify and address any anomalies or suspicious activities. Additionally, ensure optimal resource management by promptly deprovisioning unused tools and resources, while proactively assess your defenses through periodic penetration testing.
Continuous Delivery
CI/CD pipelines, while essential for rapid software delivery, provide a lucrative target for cybercriminals. By implementing the best practices outlined in this article, you can fortify your CI/CD pipelines and protect your organization’s most valuable assets – its source code and intellectual property.
Stay informed about emerging threats, regularly audit your security measures, and continuously improve your CI/CD pipeline’s resilience to ensure the long-term security of your intellectual property. In doing so, you not only protect your organization but also contribute to the broader cybersecurity ecosystem by making it more challenging for cybercriminals to succeed in their nefarious endeavors.
Remember, cybersecurity is not a one-time effort but an ongoing commitment. If you’re not sure where to start, or if this feels overwhelming, CyberNEX is ready to help – reach out to us at [email protected] for more information or schedule an appointment.
