Your CI/CD pipeline is susceptible to security threats like malware, unauthorized access, and data breaches. Practices like continuous monitoring, software composition analysis, and ensuring virtual machines and containers are terminated after a build runs reduce the attack surface for cyber attackers.
It securely stores passwords, account credentials, API tokens, and keys using a secrets management tool. This mitigates risks like poisoned pipeline execution, which abuses permissions.
Continuous Monitoring
CI/CD pipelines enable code changes to be deployed rapidly and efficiently. However, these rapid code changes also introduce security risks that must be mitigated to ensure the integrity of applications deployed into production environments.
A critical risk is that insecure code may pass through a pipeline without being detected by automated test tools and manual reviews. This could result in the application being pushed into production with unpatched vulnerabilities or a malicious backdoor. In addition, CI/CD pipeline security must be monitored continuously to detect vulnerabilities promptly and take corrective actions.
For this reason, it’s essential to bake security into all stages of the CI/CD pipeline via practices like access control and secrets management. This reduces the likelihood that insecure code will make it to deployment, where it can be exploited by threats targeting the underlying application infrastructure.
Another security risk in CI/CD pipelines is that secrets may be exposed or leaked during build or deployment operations. To mitigate this, a DevOps team should enforce the least privilege principle by granting only the minimum amount of access to each tool. Secure repositories and separating config and code should also be implemented to limit the potential attack surface. If secrets are shared between CI/CD and automation tools, they should be spread among different tools to determine their attack attractiveness further.
Continuous Vulnerability Scanning
When a vulnerability is detected in your CI/CD pipeline, it’s essential to remediate it quickly to minimize risk. This can be done with continuous vulnerability scanning. Vulnerabilities that are not discovered and patched leave your CI/CD process vulnerable to data breaches, unauthorized access, or ransomware attacks.
Ideally, you want to automatically scan your application in each staging environment once integration and unit tests are complete. This will detect vulnerabilities that could be pushed to production. If your deployment stages involve containers, consider including registry scanning. This can catch vulnerabilities that slip past your SAST or SCA tools, which only scan source code and can be introduced through dependencies incorporated into your container images.
To prevent unauthorized access to your CI/CD infrastructure, limit the permissions of each user in your DevOps workflow. Ensure users have the least privileges to perform specific tasks and regularly review and revoke access. This will help prevent security breaches and minimize the impact if one does occur. In addition, use full-stack observability tools to monitor CI/CD processes and environments and detect unauthorized activities. These tools can alert teams to issues or anomalies and provide a rich audit trail for compliance reporting. This will enable you to comply with policies and protect your CI/CD pipeline from attackers.
Secrets Management
While hackers often target application deployment, they can exploit pre-deployment stages in your CI/CD pipeline to leak or alter secrets. This is one of the primary reasons to bake security into every step of your CI/CD workflow.
The best practice for secrets management is to centralize them within a secure, dedicated, and trusted system that can provide access control features. It’s also essential to eliminate hard-coded secrets from CI/CD tools and IaC templates, remove them from source code, and store them only in your repository’s wiki or documentation. Ensure that credentials used to authenticate against your secret management tool are correlated by a unique identifier and not re-used or duplicated. It’s also helpful to use a solution allowing for entropy control to limit the potential attack surface so that attackers will not spoof human-generated passwords and other secrets.
Finally, log and alert at any non-standard manipulation of your CI/CD tools and their administrative interfaces to detect any attempts at exfiltration or misuse. Set up detection rules to monitor if your secrets are being exposed through web interfaces, dumping them while double base encoding, or even forked repositories. This way, you can promptly prevent accidental exposure or unauthorized access.
Automated Remediations
With a full-stack observability solution that integrates with existing infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines can be monitored for threats at each stage. These solutions aggregate and analyze telemetry data from various resources to detect anomalies, unauthorized activity, or threat trends and provide automated remediations.
This includes securing code repositories to prevent unauthorized access or source code leakage. It also involves securing tools to build, test, and deploy applications. And it includes ensuring that secrets, such as passwords or access keys, are not shipped into production. Poisoned pipeline execution is another common threat at deployment stages that can occur when attackers modify CI configuration files or inject malicious code to tamper with the build process.
In addition, securing the CI/CD ecosystem requires constant vulnerability scanning of dependencies in the pipeline. This is particularly important because CI/CD evolved to speed up development processes, often necessitating third-party integrations and open-source components. Not surprisingly, poorly vetted third-party and external integrations can introduce security gaps that allow vulnerabilities to go undetected throughout the pipeline. Such vulnerabilities can open up well-known attack vectors such as buffer overflows, code injection, and information leakage.
This is why scanning for and identifying vulnerable dependencies at each CI/CD pipeline stage using dependency scanning tools is essential. Also, ensuring that the CI/CD environments are constantly updated with secure versions of the required third-party components is vital.
