How To Secure DevOps Through DevSecOps Automation?

DevOps automation offers many benefits for your organization enabling development teams to automate tedious manual development tasks while promoting better team collaboration and communication. However, with the ever-growing ransomware groups, industrial spies, identity thieves, and other attackers plaguing today's cyber world, security can no longer be an afterthought. DevSecOps brings security to the forefront while removing the pain of complex security protocols needed for modern applications.

Managed Security Automation for DevOps

DevSecOps is an extension of DevOps that focuses on bringing security at every stage of the app development lifecycle. Gsoft’s managed DevSecOps automation service implements a combination of a culture shift, practices, and tools that combines application development (Dev), IT operations (Ops), and Security (Sec) to help your organization develop efficient and secure applications at a high velocity. Security automation is the key ingredient that makes all this possible.

Security automation involves the Shift-Left strategy where you move testing, scanning, and quality/performance evaluation to the early stages of development through automated processes. This article helps you have a better understanding of how your organization can extend certain security tools, policies, and procedures to automate security in each phase of the DevOps process.

Planning

Our DevSecOps practices begin with collaborative discussions, review, planning strategies for security analysis, and creating a schedule for security testing specific to where, when, and how it will be carried out.

DevSecOps Methodology

• Analyze potential threats and risks for data breaches or leakages

• Integrate IDE security plugins

• Design security metrics

• Create Threat Modelling

• Evaluate security policies, local and global compliance requirements

Tools

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  Collaborative threat modelling - IriusRisk

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  Collaboration and communication - Slack

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  Issue and Ticket management - Jira

Coding

This phase involves developing secure code bases and plans to handle components presenting security risks. We also foster a culture of defensive programming utilizing policies that help our customers proactively navigate security and compliance issues. Each commits/merge automatically triggers security testing and review with the help of security tools integrated into the development workflow.

DevSecOps Methodology

• Set Secure coding standards

• Code Review

• Static Code Analysis

• Security units and functional tests

• Pre-commit hooks

• Secure pipelines

• Dependency Management

Tools

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  Source code quality - PMD, SpotBugs, CheckStyle

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  Code Review - Phabricator, Gerrit

Build & Test

The build phase includes automated security analysis of the build artifacts. Dependency checks are carried out on external code which may come from unreliable or unidentified sources to identify security flaws and vulnerabilities. Static and dynamic application security testing enables the detection of application flaws within user authentication, authorization, and API endpoints.

DevSecOps Methodology

• DAST - dynamic application security testing

• SAST - Static application security testing

• Software component analysis

• Cloud Configuration validation

• Penetrations Testing

• Interactive Application Security testing

• Vulnerability Scanning

• Infrastructure scanning

Tools

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  SAST/Infrastructure Scanning - Checkmarx, SonarQube

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  Risk Analysis SourceClear

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  Vulnerability Scanning retire.js, Synk

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  Software Component Analysis OWASP

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  Automated security testing Boofuz, SecApp Suite, Redlock, Veracode

Release

This phase focuses on protecting the runtime environment architecture by reviewing environment configuration values, including network firewall access, user access control, and personal data management. The Principle Of Least Privilege (POLP), when implemented, limits the access of each user or tool strictly to specific requirements.

DevSecOps Methodology

• Controlling access tokens and API keys

• Access control Audit

• Configuration management solutions

• Reviewing and auditing system configurations

• Compliance

• Threat Modelling

• Live site penetration test

Tools

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  Configuration Management a. Chef, Puppet

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  Infrastructure automation a. Terraform, Ansible

Deployment

Addressing the security problems affecting live production systems is the principal DevSecOps concern in this phase. It is important to clearly identify configuration changes between the production environment and the staging or development environment to prevent any unintended security consequences. Applying chaos engineering principles helps check resilience to turbulence. This can be implemented through replicating real-world scenarios such as network connectivity loss, disc/server crash, and so on.

DevSecOps Methodology

• Logging

• Security smoke test

• Threat Analytics

• Chaos testing

• Check and validate TLS and DRM certificates

Tools

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  Runtime verification tools - Osquery, Falco, and Tripwire

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  Deployment versioning - Helm

Operate and Monitor

The solution is continuously monitored once it is deployed in a live production environment. Automated security checks and security monitoring loops help identify abnormalities and prevent cyber-attack and leaks. When an incident occurs, the built-in logging and instrumentation help pinpoint the issue and its impact.

DevSecOps Methodology

• Continuous Monitoring

• Implementing IaC tools

• Threat Intelligence

• Penetration Testing

• Event M

• Patching

Tools

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  Monitoring & Alerting - Splunk, FairWarning, New Relic

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  Runtime defense - Imperva RASP, Alert Logic

DevSecOps is a continuous process that needs to be iterated and continuously applied across development cycles to minimize the chance of data breaches, and security flaws and increase customer trust in your organization. Therefore, choosing and implementing the right methodology and tools is crucial requiring expert assistance. Gsoft is a top-notch cloud computing service provider, our managed security services offer tailor-made solutions that automate security across the development cycle to enable a secure and efficient infrastructure for your applications. Chat with our experts to know more about Gsoft’s cloud security services.