CI/CD security is a key aspect of your company’s fortifications — it’s important to secure and protect everything that flows through your pipelines, both through development as well as deployment. Most teams rarely pay attention to this aspect of their security policies and platforms. Keep reading as we give you a crash course on why CI/CD Security is so important, and what are the best actions you can implement, within your framework, to enforce this pivotal security stage.

What is CI/CD security?

CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. Continuous Integration means merging all new code into the main branch of your codebase and then testing it. Continuous delivery means automatically deploying the new code to production after it has been tested and verified.

CI/CD security, meanwhile, is the process of protecting CI/CD systems from both internal and external threats. Most organizations, as a whole, focus solely on software development, testing it, and their general entry points. On their product, they are unaware that sometimes, what hackers will aim for, to destabilize their overall operations, is this CI/CD mainframe — their pipeline. The road they use to transport their products. CI/CD Security is in essence a multi-stage process and the specifics of it vary from team to team. It is customizable and its practice depends a lot on your company’s models, your infrastructure, your overall goals. Nevertheless, all across the board, through various companies, it does have some things or stages in common.

• Source management.
• Building.
• Testing.
• Deployment.

The goal of CI/CD security is to ensure that the CI/CD system can operate without interruption while maintaining data integrity and confidentiality. It targets multiple production environments – including Linux and Windows servers and uses a variety of tools that strengthen you again risk and patch up some of your vulnerabilities. If you still have questions about CI/CD security, it’s better to contact a professional.

Consequences of poor CI/CD security

CI/CD is a process that automates the build, test, and release of the software. It is also a process that is becoming more popular in the software development world because it allows for faster, more efficient deployment. With CI/CD, developers can automate the process of deploying their code to production. However, if this process isn’t done correctly, there are many potential consequences.

The first possible consequence of poor CI/CD security is that developers could accidentally deploy their code to production with bugs and errors in it. This can cause downtime for your company as well as wasted money on resources that have been used to fix these errors. The second possible consequence is that hackers could exploit these bugs and errors in your code to gain access to sensitive data or even take over your company’s network

Why improve your CI/CD security?

It is important to have high CI/CD security to prevent data breaches. With the rapid advancements in technology, it is easier than ever for hackers to steal data and use it against companies. This can lead to a lot of problems with customer relationships, brand reputation, and more.

CI/CD security best practices

In addition to understanding the consequences and why you need to improve your cyber awareness standards, and possibly include CI/CD Security automation tools, it’s important to ID what practices you can implement into your infrastructure and what challenges they short-tail.

Access controls for CI/CD tools

CI/CD is not a free-for-all everyone on your team has access to the platform. It’s important to restrict access to your CI/CD pipeline. This includes your IT operation team. Most companies, in order to expedite production, grant all their team members access to this valuable resource. 93% of all cyber errors, and vulnerabilities, in the world, are a direct result of human error — the more you can limit these types of interactions, between flesh-and-bone individuals and your machines, the better.

Environment parity across the pipeline

Environment parity simply means that all configurations and settings are shared throughout your whole CI/CD pipeline. This is important because it assures your security team that the condition under which the software was tested matches the condition and the environment in which it will run.

Using a secrets manager for storing secrets

Don’t ever EVER store secrets in the source code. To access the pipeline you’ll need access keys and other credentials, it is incredibly tempting to hard-code these secrets directly into the configuration files or the source code — that way they are easier to access.

It’s important to implement secret manager protocols — implement tools that give your team easy access to these keys, but which themselves are heavily protected and supervised, and, more importantly, independent of the CI/CD pipeline.

Testing all resources within the CI/CD

Test resources within your CI/CD artery. Things like IaC files and deployment scripts for vulnerabilities. It’s important to deploy CI/CD security automation tools, they will ensure that your configurations are up to “code” and prevent the insertion of malicious code.

Prepare for rollback

Sometimes an update might not turn out as you envisioned — it might be worse than the previous version of that software. It’s important to have backups and a greased infrastructure that can help wipe off the moths, from that old software version, and roll it out at a moment’s notice.

Secure the software supply chain

Sometimes your biggest issue and greatest vulnerability might not come from your team members, but someone else. How many vendors, third-party application suppliers, outsourced coders, etc do you employ? How many of their products have been integrated into your CI/CD pipeline? Have you scanned them? Are you certain they have tested them or that they as a team give security a great deal of importance? Don’t trust code —- Or better yet, trust, but always verify.

Automated CI/CD security

There are many benefits to automating CI/CD security. Automation can reduce the time it takes to complete a task, and in some cases, it can even reduce the cost of running a process.

Some of the benefits of automation include:

– Reduced human error

– Increased efficiency

– Reduced time for completion

The more automated your system is, the better.