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5 DevSecOps Best Practices for Your Security Team

Pamela, Product Head of an ISV, envisions the transformation of her team’s Dev and Ops processes. Pamela establishes a DevOps team to facilitate ‘continuous everything.’ She intends to achieve unmatched product quality, process automation, and risk-averse digital infrastructure. Six months down the line – her team witnessed a faster development cycle. But Pamela isn’t satisfied. This is because, in the last six months, a couple of security incidents have been reported. After investigation, the cause was identified as undetected bugs, which were there right from the coding environment. Well, the fact remains that Pamela and her team aren’t only one to suffer. Per the 2019 Sonatype DevSecOps survey, every one in four companies has experienced a breach in 2018-2019. DevOps Mantra – Make Security its Core and not just a Preservative It is awesome how DevOps automates development, production, testing, and deployment environment. However, the automation chain often ignores the essential security protocols. Therefore, data, which is left unencrypted in the development environment, becomes an easy target for breaches. So, the key is to integrate security right at an earlier stage. When practicing DevOps, there are multiple changes in codes in less time. The speed often outdoes the security team’s efforts and leaves them flat-footed. This poor alignment between teams results in a lack of security disciplines – unplanned vulnerabilities, less robust codes, insecure passwords, to name a few. The Sonatype survey states that 48 percent of respondents admitted lack of time for not practicing security at an early stage of the SDCL lifecycle. An interesting thing to note is that this number hasn’t gone down since 2018. Honestly, DevSecOps completes the DevOps lifecycle by injecting security into its core. It helps companies transcend into a broader security blanket with source code analysis, vulnerability testing, penetration testing, and access management, among others. However, having in place a DevSecOps guide has been a matter of concern. Let us analyze the top two challenges experienced by organizations in implementing DevSecOps. People Neutralizing corporate mindsets to accepting the change is like untying an intricate knot. You need to bring the team on one page and show them the bigger picture. Make them realize the long-term benefits of practicing security since inception. The Sonatype survey says that only one in four respondents believe that safety and quality run parallel. Expertise A 2018-2019 survey, which was based on DevOps, showed that 58 percent of tech leaders think lack of skills hinders the embedment of security and testing within the SDCL. Lack of expertise will make the complete DevSecOps plan vulnerable. What to do is essential, but how to do is the key. Often organizations lack the skills to design an effective DevSecOps plan with defined milestones, clear operative procedures, and deliverables and project owners. Mapping DevSecOps process flow within an organization and ensuring its success requires the right mix of tools, policies, methodologies, and practices. The bottom-line remains smooth synchronization between Dev, Ops, and the Infosec team. So, let us now look at the five-pointer DevSecOps security checklist that can be included as DevSecOps best practices. 1 Embrace Automation The standard requirement for continuous testing and continuous integration is speed, which makes automation a fundamental requirement. Therefore, having essential security controls and trigger points is essential. Per the Sonatype 2019 survey, 63 percent of the respondents said to have automated their security practices. Further, it is also vital to have mindful automation is place. For example, your source code scan need not be done for the whole application daily. It can be confined to the daily codes committed only. Also, the key is to have not only static application security testing but also include dynamic application security testing. This way, we will ensure vulnerability scanning in real-time. It is equally important to have a relevant and optimal set of tools that will infuse automation to your configuration management, code analysis, patching, and access management. 2 Risk Management of Third-Party Tools & Technologies The use of open source technologies for application development is on the rise. Per the 2019 Red Hat report, 69% of respondents believe that open source technology is crucial. However, there are security concerns around the use of open source technologies that must be addressed. The Red Hat report cites – “Security is still cited as an open-source concern. Some of that fear likely stems from general security concerns since hacks and data breaches seem to be daily news. This concern may also reflect how unmanaged open source code—found across the web or brought in through dependencies—can introduce vulnerabilities in both open source and proprietary solutions.” Developers are too busy to review open-source codes. This might bring unidentified vulnerabilities and other security issues on the codes. Therefore, code dependency testing is necessary. Having an OWASP utility check will ensure that there is no vulnerability in codes, which are dependent on open-source components. 3 Uniform Security Management Process The security team will usually post the bugs report in different bug repositories. Developers don’t have the bandwidth to check all the reports. And top of it, multiple priorities result in precedence to functional testing over security issues. Therefore, it is fundamental to DevSecOps to have in place a uniform security application management system. This way any modification in codes is reflected in one place. The security team is also immediately notified of executing the authentication-testing protocol. Another critical point is to follow the ‘secure by design’ principle via the automation of security tasks. This helps to create and maintain collective software and security elements like correct authorization, control mechanisms, audit management, and safety protocol. Resultant – a transparent security culture. 4 Integrating Application Security System with Bugs Tracker The application security system should be integrated with your task management system. This will create a list of bugs tasks automatically that can be executed by the infosec team. Additionally, it will provide actionable details such as the nature of the bug, its severity and treatment required. Thus, the security team becomes empowered to fix issues before they land to the production and deployment environment. 5 Threat Modeling – The Last Key The SANS Institute advocates risk assessment before implementing DevSecOps methodology. Following threat modeling will result in risk-gap analysis – helping you identify software components, which are under threats, level of threats, and possible solutions to counter those threats. In fact, with threat modeling, the development team is equipped to locate fundamental glitches in the architecture. This way they can make necessary changes in application designs. Conclusion The ferocious rise in the competition demand reduction in time-to-market of the application. This must be supplemented with superior quality. Therefore, DevOps as a practice is only expected to increase. Rendering DevSecOps services for a while now, we have realized that imbibing security right from the early stages is only the key to maintain zero deployment downtime. Organizations must be thoughtful while shifting to Dev + Security + Operations. They should follow the idea of the People>Process>Technology. And, while doing so, the above 5 DevSecOps best practices will lay the foundation.

Aziro Marketing

devops DevSecOps security

5 Tips To Build A Fail-Proof DevSecOps Culture

A simple yet overlooked concept lies at the heart of a successful DevOps initiative: Developers drive the software agenda, so developer participation is essential for achieving a more secure framework. That is where the term DevSecOps comes into play – and more importantly, the practices and culture it represents – can begin to make a huge difference. A solid DevSecOps culture suits our evolving hybrid computing environments, faster and more frequent software delivery, and other demands for modern IT. This is the main reason why DevSecOps matters to IT leaders. DevSecOps helps ship safer applications by prioritizing secure development alongside speed by making security part of the current DevOps pipeline. It’s more than just reviewing the security vulnerabilities or sorting through false positives. Here are 5 essential tips for nurturing a DevSecOps culture of your own – and using the metrics to gauge success. 1. No “one size fits all” concept A downside of a methodological and cultural shift like DevSecOps is that people might assume there’s just a single “right” way of doing DevSecOps. But that’s not true. Not all enterprises are built equal, which is why there’s more than just one model to implement DevSecOps. You can take your security staff and embed them into your DevOps teams. Or you can train up your developers to become the embedded security experts. Or you can build cross-functional teams or task forces. It’s simply any combination that works organizationally and culturally. These setups share a standard denominator core to DevSecOps: Recognizing and addressing security concerns as early as possible. So that any of them can help endorse a powerful DevSecOps culture, given they make better sense for your organization and culture. 2. Transparency If you think the battle between traditional development processes and operations silos was bad, well, those teams were comparatively agile compared to the traditional isolation of security teams. Strangely, most of these silos are deliberately created by the workforce because they believe it makes them more secure. But it doesn’t. All these silos create an incapacity for each team to speak the same language. As a result, they face difficulty in translating what they do back into people and processes. Getting rid of the isolation of security teams and making use of some model that better combines multiple roles and responsibilities together and can yield meaningful benefits. The foundation of a thriving DevSecOps culture is total organizational transparency, including all the aspects of the IT department, which implies that security can no longer be siloed. Enterprises going through a digital transformation or developing modern applications work off the same data through various lenses, bringing together everyone instead of creating silos. 3. Security education and training investment for Developers Training and educating software developers (and related job titles and roles) is an excellent step toward a healthy DevSecOps culture. It’s because security is everyone’s responsibility, and it’s essential to arm everyone with the right knowledge and tools required to make that so. The developers who previously didn’t have to bear much responsibility for the security of their code can’t be suddenly expected to bring in the hardcore security know-how of a white-hat hacker. But if you do invest in enhancing your developers’ security knowledge and tools, everyone benefits from it. Today’s IT leaders must invest in security training, which can come in the form of short sprints, code review, understanding which libraries are safe to use, or setting up feature flags that will review the code accurately, one piece at a time. This way, if anything goes wrong, the DevSecOps team can immediately get into the quality assurance mindset for applying fixes accordingly, with security as a top priority. 4. Make “sec” in security silent The key to a perfect DevSecOps culture is to eliminate as much friction as possible from processes. The perfect way to think about implementing security into DevSecOps is to make ‘Sec’ silent. To lessen friction or make security “silent,” include automation into your security processes and tools. The ultimate purpose is to enable DevOps teams to implement security automatically as part of their everyday processes. By implementing security controls directly into the CI/CD pipeline and taking development tools as an example, you’ve got good options at your disposal, including plenty of open source platforms. From a technical perspective, an excellent place to start is to make sure each team makes use of the available open source tools to perform security-related tasks. Configuration management tools also have made the integration of operations and security a much easier proposition. 5. Shared goals and KPIs A robust DevSecOps culture also depends on eliminating the conflicting performance incentives across various roles on the same team. A typical struggle in this category would be for developers who are measured almost solely by how quickly and frequently they ship code and security pros tasked with limiting vulnerabilities in production. One wants to move as fast as possible; the other is motivated to slow down everything. DevSecOps must be, in part, about getting people on the same page, working toward collective goals – with shared responsibilities and metrics. There are numerous key performance indicators as examples for measuring the DevSecOps efforts. Everyone should share in the responsibility for these measurements and not just the security team: Number of app security issues discovered in production: You want this number to decrease. Issues identified in production are issues missed during the development period, so this number should be minimized. Percentage of deployments stopped/delayed due to failing security tests: Ideally, such issues should be resolved before deployment. Time to fix security issues: This is a time-consuming approach that must decrease over time; it should be a reward for a healthy DevSecOps culture. In that, it reduces the effort and pain involved in resolving security issues when they do occur. Hopefully, issues that are discovered pre-integration are easier and faster to fix, so this is also a perfect picture of how well the team is performing. Takeaway Enterprises that values security see it to be a culture rather than just a step. And for this to be accomplished, it’s crucial to have a robust DevSecOps culture. With this, security won’t be viewed just as a technological flaw and won’t be ignored. It’ll be prioritized, and the ways discussed above are a few of the ideas on how your organization can go ahead and implement this.

Aziro Marketing

devops DevOps Security DevSecOps

How to Secure CI/CD Pipelines with these 5 Key DevSecOps Practice

While we understand the importance of ‘Continuous Everything’ and stress on CI/CD pipelines, we must also pay heed to its safety requirements. There are hidden security vulnerabilities in our codes that often hamper the operations and testing lifecycle phase. And on top it, vulnerabilities, which we import with third-party libraries via OSS – open-source software could make things worse. While we are building CI/CD pipelines, coders are working on plethora of codes. These codes need a thorough checking mechanism. Checking all the codes manually is a task impossible. Thus, we have DevSecOps. Continuous Everything and DevSecOps work in tandem. For the environment to have continuity, there mustn’t be any kind of threat. Because if there is, it will make the Continuous Everything to crumble down. The process of following Continuous Everything culminates into continuous delivery pipelines. These pipelines help in vetting daily committed codes. Therefore, it makes sense to patch security checks within these pipelines and run them automatically. This way any unseen vulnerabilities will be nipped in the bud. Let’s see the five key DevSecOps steps to ensure security in CI/CD pipelines. 1. Pre Source Code Commitment Analysis The DevSecOps team must check the codes thoroughly before submitting it to the source code repository. The DevSecOps team can leverage SAST – (Static Analysis Security Testing) tools for analyzing the codes. Therefore, the team can detect any kind of mismatch in coding best practices and prevent the import of third-party libraries, which are insecure. After the check, the team can fix recurring security issues before it goes to source code. This way, manual tasks can be easily automated, and productivity can be boosted. However, the DevSecOps team must ensure that the SAST tool works well with the programming language. Lack of compatibility between the two could hamper overall productivity. 2. Source Code Commitment Analysis These checks apply to any changes a coder executes in the source code repository. It is generally an automated security test to give a quick idea of changes required. Therefore, implementing a source code commitment analysis could help to create processes, which are strategically defined to ensure security checks. Further, it also assists the DevSecOps teams in debugging issues that might create unnecessary risks in the projects. Here too, you can use the SAST tool by applying certain rules, which suit your application. Also, you could identify top vulnerabilities for your applications and run checks for them automatically. These can be either XSS scripting or SQL injection. Developers also can perform extended unit testing. The unit test use cases can differ according to the application and its features. Lastly, coders must gauge results from the automated test and make necessary changes in their coding styles. 3. Advanced Security Test – Post Source Commitment Analysis On completion of the aforementioned steps, the DevSecOps team must ensure an advanced check, which is triggered automatically. This is a necessary step, in case the unit test fails, and/or the SAST test isn’t helping, there is an issue of programming language compatibility. Vulnerabilities are then detected and if a threat of grave nature is found, it needs to be resolved. The automated post source commitment analysis would typically include open source threat detection, risk-detection security tests, PGP-signed releases, and using repositories to store artifacts. 4. Staging Environment Code Analysis The staging environment is the last stage before an application is moved to production. Therefore, the security analysis of every ‘build’ from the repository becomes essential. Here, apart from SAST, the security team must also execute DAST, performance, and integration checks. The advanced rules set in SAST and DAST must be aligned to the OWASP checklist. DAST would assist security teams in testing sub-components of applications for vulnerabilities and then deploying it. Moreover, an application, which is in the operational state, can be likewise examined. This also means that DAST scanners are independent of programming languages. The test of third-party and open source components including logging, web frameworks, XML data, or parsing json is also significant. Any vulnerabilities here must be properly addressed before moving to the production stage. Pre-Production Environment Code Analysis In this step, the DevSecOps team must ensure that an application deployed to a production stage has zero errors. This is done post-deployment. An optimal way to conduct this check is by triggering continuous checks automatically once the aforementioned steps are complete. DevSecOps team can identify vulnerabilities, which possibly went unnoticed in the previous steps. Further, continuous security checks would offer real-time insight into the application performance and fathom users with unauthorized access. Conclusion The growth of DevOps as a culture and implementation of CI/CD, as a result, would ultimately create tighter security requirements. Any kind of vulnerability and its impact increases from coding, testing, deployment to the production stage. Therefore, it is important to make security an important part of DevOps, right from the start. Additionally, it is crucial to break the silo approach, and embrace DevSecOps. Security teams that implement DevSecOps in a methodological process as listed below, make it easier to integrate processes and bring consistency in the cybersecurity. a. Pre Source Code Commitment Analysis b. Source Code Commitment Analysis c. Advanced Security Test – Post Source Commitment Analysis d. Staging Environment Code Analysis e. Pre-Production Environment Code Analysis

Aziro Marketing

ci/cd devops DevSecOps

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