The 7 Most Important CI/CD Security Best Practices in 2022

Studying time 7 minutes

Steady integration and steady supply (CI/CD) pipelines are the inspiration of any fashionable software program group that builds software program. Mixed with DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines enable your organization to ship software program sooner and extra often. However with nice energy comes nice accountability. Whereas everybody focuses on writing safe functions, many typically overlook CI/CD pipeline safety. However there are legitimate causes to pay shut consideration to how your CI/CD is configured. On this publish, you’ll study why and how you can safe your CI/CD pipelines.

Is CI/CD Safety Actually That Necessary?

CI/CD pipelines normally want a number of permissions to do their job. Additionally they must take care of secrets and techniques for functions and infrastructure. Which means whoever can get unauthorized entry to your CI/CD pipeline will get virtually limitless energy to breach all of your infrastructure or deploy malicious code.

Due to this fact, you need to take securing CI/CD pipelines as a high-priority job. Statistics present that there was a major surge in software program provide chain assaults in recent times. We’re speaking about a rise of over 400%. Due to this fact, leaving CI/CD safety as a final additional step in your safety to-do checklist is unquestionably not one of the best concept. Listed here are some finest practices for growing your CI/CD safety posture.

CI/CD Entry

First issues first: the entry to the CI/CD device itself. It’s fairly simple⁠—you need entry to your CI/CD to be nicely managed and arranged. Not everybody within the firm ought to have entry to your CI/CD, and even when somebody will get entry, they shouldn’t mechanically get entry to all pipelines and have all prospects. SSO and RBAC capabilities are your mates right here. Ensure that to comply with the least-privileged strategy. Builders ought to solely have entry to the pipelines they want. There isn’t a level in getting access to different groups’ pipelines. Managers or staff leads ought to most likely have entry to CI/CD for reporting functions, however they shouldn’t essentially be capable to create pipelines.

Safe Your Secrets and techniques

The following tip on our checklist could sound apparent, however safe dealing with of your secrets and techniques, tokens, and different credentials is essential in CI/CD. There are secrets and techniques that your CI/CD device itself could must deploy functions and in addition secrets and techniques that your software wants. There are two major guidelines right here. Firstly, you don’t wish to move any secrets and techniques in plain textual content anyplace within the pipeline. Most fashionable CI/CD instruments include a secret administration answer, which implies you possibly can securely retailer your secrets and techniques in your CI/CD device and move them as atmosphere variables to your pipelines.

Safety Scanning As A part of Your CI/CD

One other finest follow on our checklist shouldn’t come as a shock both. You must embrace safety scanning early within the CI/CD course of. There are many open-source instruments that allow you to try this, so there’s no good purpose to not do it. There are just a few methods to do safety scanning in your pipelines.

The primary and the obvious is static code safety scanning. This course of reads the code of the applying you’re making an attempt to deploy and tries to seek out frequent safety vulnerabilities or indicators of malicious behaviors. However that’s not the one safety scanning you are able to do.

There’s additionally registry scanning, particularly frequent within the case of deploying Docker containers. Registry scanning scans each picture you attempt to pull into your pipeline.

Final however not least is runtime scanning. On this case, you deploy an occasion of your newly constructed software to a testing atmosphere and run the checks “on the residing organism.” Mix all three methods, and also you’ll undoubtedly enhance your organization’s safety posture.

Don’t Depart Check Environments Large Open

Normally, you possibly can deploy to varied take a look at environments to check your product. However these take a look at environments are normally additionally freely out there to builders to do some extra guide testing. Such take a look at environments may lack the safety of staging or manufacturing environments. However they’re absolutely working environments, which implies if an attacker will get entry to it, they might use it as a stepping stone to different locations in your infrastructure. Due to this fact, it’s essential to safe your take a look at atmosphere so it’s simply as safe as your different environments.

Clear Up Any Short-term Sources

Along with testing environments, your CI/CD pipeline may additionally create non permanent assets, like digital machines or Kubernetes clusters, to run checks. And whereas take a look at environments are normally all the time alive, these non permanent assets are supposed to be created for a single take a look at goal and destroyed after the pipeline run. However generally, we overlook about that “destroy” half. And over time, you may accumulate dozens of unused assets, which not solely waste cash but in addition pose a safety menace.

Think about a digital machine that was created months in the past and hasn’t been patched since. It might have some pointless ports open and even some previous take a look at functions operating. For an attacker, these forgotten assets are a gold mine. Typically, these previous assets aren’t even coated by your firewalls. The answer right here is easy: clear up assets you don’t want anymore. If you happen to create them from the pipeline itself, don’t overlook the destroy stage. If you happen to create them manually, create some processes or reminders that can assist you hold them underneath management.

Hold Your CI/CD Device As much as Date

Typically missed, generally even feared, updating your CI/CD device shouldn’t be one thing you wish to postpone. Your CI/CD device may even have bugs and vulnerabilities. If you happen to don’t replace your CI/CD, you’ll be susceptible⁠, and the aforementioned finest practices will go to waste. There’s little worth in implementing good entry administration when you depart your CI/CD device in a model that has a vulnerability that enables an attacker to easily bypass authentication.

Auditing

Final however not least: audit logs. Even with one of the best safety measures, somebody nonetheless may handle to run a malicious pipeline. And whereas your safety scanning phases ought to assist inform you when your staff deploys one thing fishy, safety measures aren’t excellent both. And what does an attacker do after efficiently deploying their malicious code? They cowl their tracks by deleting the pipeline, so that you’ll by no means discover out one thing undesirable occurred.

Audit logs will provide help to out on this case. Pipelines might be deleted for numerous causes, and it’s not one thing that you simply wish to forestall fully. What you need is to create an audit log and put it aside someplace utterly completely different out of your CI/CD system. Such an audit log ought to provide you with clear info on who deployed what, when, and from the place. If all earlier measures fail, an audit log will a minimum of provide help to discover the again doorways afterward so you possibly can rapidly delete them.

Abstract

Securing CI/CD pipelines is a really essential but typically missed job. CI/CD typically holds keys to your kingdom; due to this fact, as we talked about in the beginning, defending your pipelines shouldn’t be merely an additional job in your safety to-do checklist. The CI/CD safety finest practices we mentioned will certainly assist enhance your safety posture. However don’t overlook that you simply’re by no means performed with safety. It’s a continuing course of as vulnerabilities and threats evolve constantly. If you wish to study extra about DevOps Safety typically, check out our publish right here.

Dawid Ziolkowski

Dawid has 10 years of expertise as a Community/System Engineer in the beginning, DevOps in between, Cloud Native Engineer not too long ago. He’s labored for an IT outsourcing firm, a analysis institute, telco, a internet hosting firm, and a consultancy firm, so he’s gathered a number of data from completely different views. These days he’s serving to firms transfer to cloud and/or redesign their infrastructure for a extra Cloud Native strategy.