Understanding CI/CD

Continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices enable DevOps teams to deliver code updates frequently, reliably, and quickly. CI/CD emphasizes automation throughout the development life cycle, which includes building, testing, and deploying applications. By automating these processes, CI/CD minimizes manual effort, reduces errors, and enhances security, allowing for more frequent and reliable code releases. These CI/CD security best practices play a crucial role in modern application development, ensuring that new features and updates can be swiftly and efficiently integrated and delivered to users.

10 CI/CD security best practices

Research by CD Foundation shows that using CI/CD tools is correlated with better software delivery performance, including shorter lead times for code changes, increased deployment frequency, and faster service restoration. Of course, in today's threat landscape, it’s crucial to secure your CI/CD pipeline.

How can you ensure security of a CI/CD pipeline?

Protecting your code, infrastructure, and applications from vulnerabilities and threats ensures the integrity of your software. By embedding strong security controls and practices within your CI/CD process, you can maintain the reliability and trustworthiness of your development workflow.

Let's explore the essential security best practices that every CI/CD pipeline should follow.

1. Establish secure coding practices
2. Perform regular security audits and assessments
3. Employ CI/CD access controls
4. Secure the development environment
5. Secure build and deployment processes
6. Integrate security testing
7. Respond to security incidents
8. Stay compliant
9. Stay ahead of future trends
10. Enhance CDR capabilities

1. Establish secure coding practices

Incorporating security into your CI/CD pipeline is essential for ensuring that your software remains resilient against emerging threats. By embedding security measures throughout the development life cycle, you can identify and mitigate vulnerabilities and maintain the integrity of your applications.

Establishing secure coding standards is fundamental to building robust software. These standards provide developers with guidelines to avoid common vulnerabilities that leave you open to attacks such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and buffer overflows. Secure coding standards should be comprehensive and updated regularly to address new security threats and best practices.

Of course, secure coding practices begin with your engineers, so it’s essential to have a comprehensive training plan to ensure that all team members understand and can effectively apply secure coding practices. Training should cover a range of topics, including the OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities, secure code review techniques, and the use of security libraries and frameworks. Regular training sessions and certifications can help keep developers informed about the latest security trends and techniques.

Code reviews play a significant role in secure coding practices. Conducting thorough code reviews with a focus on security helps you uncover vulnerabilities and address them before  an adversary exploits them.

2. Perform regular security audits and assessments

Regular security audits and unbiased third-party assessments are crucial for maintaining the security of your CI/CD pipeline. These practices provide an objective evaluation of your security posture.

Automated assessments

Automated scanning tools, such as software composition analysis (SCA) tools and vulnerability scanners, provide automated checks for common security issues, such as injection flaws, authentication bypasses, and insecure configuration settings.

Third-party audits

Incorporating third-party security assessments and audits from independent security firms or consultants provides an objective evaluation of your security posture and can help identify blind spots or weaknesses that internal assessments may miss.

3. Employ CI/CD access controls

You should implement access controls to manage who can access tools and resources within the CI/CD pipeline. It's crucial to avoid giving everyone full access; instead, carefully assign permissions based on job responsibilities and tasks. Applying the principle of least privilege (POLP) is essential, ensuring that only the necessary permissions are granted for each role. By following this approach, you can reduce the risk of unauthorized access and limit the potential of a security breach.

Strong passwords, secure access keys, and multi-factor authentication (MFA) are critical components of robust access control mechanisms. These measures help prevent unauthorized access to sensitive resources and data within the CI/CD pipeline. Using a security secrets manager to store sensitive information — such as passwords, API keys, and cryptographic keys — adds an extra layer of security. This approach ensures that sensitive data is only shared on an as-needed basis, reducing the risk of exposure and unauthorized access.

4. Secure the development environment

Separate development, testing, and production environments are crucial for maintaining security. This separation helps prevent cross-environment contamination and unauthorized access, safeguarding against potential security breaches and ensuring the reliability of your software deployment process.

Choosing tools that are secure is crucial in fortifying your development environment. It’s imperative to rigorously vet third-party dependencies so you can avoid those with known vulnerabilities. By prioritizing security in your tool selection process, you can avoid introducing weaknesses into your environment, bolstering the overall security posture of your CI/CD pipeline.

It's also important to keep an eye on things by setting up solid monitoring and logging systems for security. These tools help you keep track of what's happening in your development environment, spotting any suspicious activity early on. By staying on top of monitoring and logging, you can quickly catch any security issues and take action to keep your CI/CD pipeline safe and sound.

5. Secure build and deployment processes

It's crucial to ensure the security of your build and deployment processes to maintain the integrity of your CI/CD pipeline. You can achieve this by incorporating immutable build artifacts, which prevent tampering risks by locking in changes once something is built. This approach enhances stability and reliability, ensuring that your deployments remain consistent and secure.

You can further enhance security by integrating static application security testing (SAST) and SCA tools into your build process. These tools scan your codebase and libraries for potential vulnerabilities so that you can proactively address them before you deploy your build.

Additionally, it's crucial to maintain traceability and auditability in your builds and deployments. You can achieve this by keeping detailed records and logs of all activities throughout the process. In the event of a security incident or issue, having these records readily available enables swift investigation and remediation, minimizing the impact on your CI/CD pipeline and applications.

6. Integrate security testing

Security testing tools are instrumental in uncovering bugs and security vulnerabilities before your code ships. SAST tools, for instance, analyze your codebase for potential security flaws like injection flaws or authentication issues. By integrating SAST into your development process, you can catch these vulnerabilities during coding, which saves time and resources down the line.

Similarly, dynamic application security testing (DAST) tools are vital for simulating real-world attacks on your running applications. Including DAST in your pipeline ensures thorough testing of your applications in both pre-production and production environments. Additionally, regular third-party audits from independent security firms add a crucial layer of validation, turbocharging the overall security robustness of your applications. With these audits, you get expert eyes that will thoroughly evaluate your systems, uncovering any lurking vulnerabilities and ensuring your defenses are top-notch.

7. Respond to security incidents

Even with the best security planning, it’s always possible to experience a security incident, so you should be prepared. Here's how you can fortify your incident response strategy:

Planning

Begin by crafting a robust incident response plan tailored specifically to the dynamics of CI/CD security. This plan should encompass detailed procedures for incident notification, delineating the roles and responsibilities of team members involved. Additionally, outline the steps for executing recovery processes to minimize the impact of the incident on your development workflow.

Continuous monitoring

Implement comprehensive continuous monitoring tools within your CI/CD pipeline to maintain constant vigilance over your codebase and deployment processes. These tools serve as proactive sentinels, swiftly detecting any anomalies or security breaches. Coupled with quick response capabilities, you can promptly address security incidents as they arise, mitigating potential damage and ensuring the resilience of your development pipeline.

Post-mortem analysis

Following the resolution of a security incident, conduct a thorough post-incident analysis to delve into the contributing factors. This analysis provides valuable insights for enhancing your security practices and strengthening your CI/CD pipeline against future threats. By assimilating lessons learned and implementing necessary improvements, you can iteratively enhance your incident response capabilities, fostering a culture of continuous improvement in your development processes.

8. Stay compliant

Adhering to industry standards such as the GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS is imperative for organizations leveraging CI/CD practices. Compliance not only ensures legal adherence but serves as an additional layer of security for your development pipeline. By aligning with regulatory requirements, you mitigate the risk of data breaches and enhance the overall security posture of your CI/CD processes.

Moreover, compliance requirements compel organizations to adopt best practices and standards, fostering a culture of security awareness and diligence throughout the development life cycle. This entails conducting comprehensive risk assessments, implementing encryption protocols, and enforcing access controls, all of which contribute to fortifying your CI/CD environment against potential threats.

To maintain compliance, organizations must invest in tools designed to ensure ongoing adherence to regulatory standards. These tools automate compliance checks, monitor regulatory changes, and provide actionable insights to promptly address any compliance gaps. By integrating compliance tools into your CI/CD pipeline, you can maintain regulatory alignment.

9. Stay ahead of future trends

New innovations are constantly emerging, and staying ahead of these trends is a crucial aspect of your CI/CD security best practices. For example, the wider adoption of AI and machine learning presents exciting opportunities to streamline mundane coding practices and enhance development efficiencies. However, this innovation introduces new considerations about securing AI systems from risks like data poisoning and ensuring the robustness of AI models. As organizations embrace these technologies, it becomes crucial to integrate security measures that safeguard against the vulnerabilities inherent in AI-driven processes.

Furthermore, the threat landscape continuously shapes security practices in CI/CD environments. From sophisticated cyberattacks to emerging malware strains, organizations must stay vigilant to adapt and respond effectively. Embracing a proactive approach involves staying informed about new attack techniques and embracing opportunities to automate security within your CI/CD pipeline. By staying ahead of emerging trends and embracing innovative security practices, organizations can strengthen their CI/CD security posture and navigate the evolving threat landscape with confidence.

10. Enhance CDR capabilities

Cloud detection and response (CDR) capabilities are critical for maintaining robust security in CI/CD pipelines for software platforms that are  hosted in the cloud. CDR continuously monitors cloud environments, detects potential security threats, and responds swiftly to mitigate risks. Given the dynamic nature of CI/CD, where code changes and deployments occur frequently, having robust CDR capabilities ensures that any vulnerabilities introduced during these processes are promptly identified and addressed.

Implementing CDR capabilities is essential for fulfilling your part of the shared security responsibility model with cloud service providers (CSPs). While CSPs secure the underlying cloud infrastructure, you are responsible for securing the data, applications, and configurations within your cloud environment. Effective CDR tools enable you to proactively detect and respond to threats, ensuring a comprehensive security posture and making your CI/CD processes more resilient against evolving threats.

CrowdStrike’s approach to CI/CD security

Security is not meant to impede your business goals or slow down your software development. It’s meant to enable you to reach those goals safely with minimal risk. CrowdStrike Falcon^® Cloud Security provides complete protection that focuses on business impact. It provides comprehensive coverage and integration, advanced threat detection and response, scalability, and shift-left security.

CrowdStrike is the first cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) vendor to natively secure your business in the cloud by providing complete visibility across cloud and app-level risks. Falcon Cloud Security stops breaches faster with the world’s only unified agent-based and agentless approach to cloud security, extending from code to cloud in a single platform. It covers the key areas required for a CNAPP, with both pre-runtime and runtime protection.