What is CI/CD Security and How Does it Work?

Summary

“CICD pipeline security is a crucial part of application security, enabling automation and innovation for developers, without adding risk to your organization. This article looks at CI/CD security in detail, covering why it’s important, and how Checkmarx integrates with CI/CD tools with ease. ”

CI/CD, meaning Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (or Continuous Deployment) is a central part of a DevOps-focused organization.

While Continuous Integration involves developers merging their code changes into a centralized repository, triggering an automated build and test process, Continuous Delivery extends this to automating the code’s deployment to production. This is often known as a CI/CD pipeline. 

In modern software development, using CI/CD and CI/CD tools allows your business to streamline the development, testing and deployment of software applications. By adding automation to each of these stages  — organizations can bridge the gap between development and operations teams, facilitating a quicker and more reliable software development lifecycle (SDLC). 

 If you want to integrate security into every stage of modern development environments, it must be integrated into the SDLC at every stage. This article explains CI/CD pipeline security in all the detail you need. 

[Video] True or False?: a Fully Automated CI/CD Process | LivePerson

Watch now to learn how CI/CD process can minimize false positives and negatives, ensuring your code is secure without slowing down development.

Continue reading to learn how CI/CD implementation can improve your organization’s security posture.

What is CI/CD Security?

If security is not integrated adequately into a CI/CD pipeline, it can become an open door for attackers, exposing sensitive data, introducing vulnerabilities into the codebase, and even putting the entire application at risk. CI/CD security is any measures, tools and processes that are adopted by the business to secure the CI/CD pipeline, to ensure that the code that is integrated and deployed is safe, and free from vulnerabilities. The main goals of CI/CD security are to make sure that all aspects of application delivery are secured as each application moves through different stages in the CI/CD pipeline.  Among other benefits, this can prevent:

• Secrets and data leakage: CI/CD pipelines often have high privileges, as well as access to sensitive data including source code, API keys, and passwords. 
• Poor code integrity: If your CI/CD pipeline is not secure, attackers could inject malicious code into an application, or modify existing code for their own purposes. 
• Financial losses: The cost of an attack can originate from downtime and disruption, to fines, data loss or remediation. Robust CI/CD security closes any gaps. 

Why is Modern CI/CD Security Important?

OWASP Top 10 CI/CD Security Risks highlights a wide range of specific security risks that are opened by insecure CI/CD pipelines. These include insufficient flow control mechanisms, inadequate identity and access management and pipeline based access controls, dependency chain abuse, poisoned pipeline execution, insufficient credential hygiene and system configuration, ungoverned use of third party services, improper artifact integrity validation, and insufficient logging and visibility. 

Unfortunately, when it comes to protecting against these risks, not all security solutions will be up to the challenge. In a DevOps environment where CI/CD pipelines and agile working practices are the norm, things move fast. The truth is that traditional application security is often not able to keep up. For CI/CD security to be effective, it means that security testing and other CI/CD tools need to work in real-time, and when a problem is found, it has to be solved fast, so as not to become a blocker to deployment. If security fixes take days or even weeks to complete, the development process is halted in its tracks, which can have a direct impact on release dates. 

In an agile environment that leans on CI/CD pipelines, developers are accountable for their code, as well as for any security vulnerabilities found in their code. Many traditional AppSec solutions will add security on as an afterthought at the end of the development process. This can create a lot of friction, as developers may need to go back to review problems weeks or even months after the development is complete, when it’s far from their mind. At this stage, it also may be too late, if a vulnerability has already been deployed into production. 

Best Practices for CI/CD Pipeline Security

Some key practices that can help organizations to secure their CI/CD pipeline as part of a broader application security methodology include: 

• Access controls: Ask yourself, who can access the CI/CD pipeline and its components? This should be only those who need to — in line with the principle of least privilege. You can establish rules for who is authorized personnel for which tasks, to ensure that velocity is not impeded by security. 
• Secrets management: Use dedicated secrets management tools to store any sensitive data, including passwords and API keys. At Checkmarx, we partner with Prompt Security for example, so that secrets can be obfuscated and only confirmed code is shared when developers use GenAI tools or collaboration tools. 
• Security testing: By testing continuously using SAST and SCA tools to scan static code and third party software packages for security vulnerabilities, any issues can be detected at the earliest stages of the development process. This is especially important when working with AI coding tools, which are subject to a higher level of risk. 
• Developer training: Development teams love CI/CD pipelines because they can open doors to faster releases at lower cost, and hopefully with higher quality. But this can only be the case if security is incorporated throughout. Empowering developers with a security-first mindset helps foster a secure culture across the business. 

Checkmarx’s Integration with CI/CD Tools

At Checkmarx, we offer extensive CI/CD integrations so that you can minimize the complexity of working across departments, streamline the relationship between AppSec teams and developers, and make sure security happens at the speed of development. 

Our AppSec solutions are comprehensive and customizable, and can be run on-premises or in the cloud, automating scanning as a natural step in your CI/CD pipelines, creating security branches or pre-release gateway scans. From your developers’ usual development environment, and within their existing workflow, the business can simply implement scans as a part of its regular pipeline, view results from within the CI/CD environment, implement fixes where necessary, and even enforce policies to ensure that security doesn’t become a blocker to velocity. 

Without any additional development effort, orchestration can pull reports into the UI of the relevant CI/CD tool, and AppSec teams can fine tune and configure the integrations exactly how they are needed, configuring their choice of how and when to scan, whether that’s per day or by commit, inline, or as a parallel task. 

Our specialized plugins allow Checkmarx One to seamlessly integrate with Jenkins, TeamCity, GitHub, Azure DevOps and Maven, and using our CLI tool, you can also integrate with Bitbucket Pipelines, CircleCI, GitLab, Bamboo and Codebuild. For a full list of integrations and specialized use cases, see our knowledge base. Instead of integrating with each individual AppSec tool, Checkmarx One allows you to integrate once with any CI/CD tool, reducing complexity and simplifying the whole process from day one.

The Checkmarx Solution: Checkmarx One for CI/CD Security

Checkmarx One is a complete application security platform that replaces siloed point solutions in your security stack and covers your application security needs from end-to-end.

We include Static Application Security Testing (SAST) for static code, Software Composition Analysis (SCA) to uncover vulnerabilities in third-party software packages, as well as security testing later in the cycle using Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) and runtime security. This means that CI/CD pipeline security is fully integrated across the entire SDLC from code to cloud. 

Developers can learn as they work, empowering them to use the workflows and CI/CD tools they are used to, and all without friction — aiding a better relationship between development, security and operations teams, fostering true DevSecOps trust. 
Learn more about our CI/CD solutions by requesting a demo of Checkmarx One