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Tag: devsecops

  • Where Does Your Data Go?

    Where Does Your Data Go?

    One of the most interesting developments in security and compliance in recent years is the ability to follow a piece of data through an application from input to consumption and see each bit that touches it. For me, the reason this is so interesting is that it allows postmortems to actually determine exactly what was lost in a data breach. “Oh, that library was compromised? Okay, let’s see what inputs that library actually touches …” It’s so very cool, given the free-for-all that data has traditionally been in applications.

    I’m not a huge compliance fan for a variety of reasons, but this is one great result of mandating compliance. I don’t think that we would have this level of data tracking without compliance requirements driving it.

    So what can we do with this information? That’s the interesting part that I think we’ll see developing over time. If we know everywhere that a given piece of data is used, we have a powerful bit of development information. It is still early days for implementation–this is not easy stuff–but think about it. I could see a future where all redundant data access is eliminated. If we’re getting the same set of data from multiple sources, and it is being fed to the same internal consumers, then we can standardize the you-know-what out of it. A singular library to standardize formatting, a singular library to standardize look-ups, etc.

    For the most part, we currently validate and format on input. Like straight away as the data is brought into the system. That is a great idea for a system where we are uncertain where the data is going, and are sure that some attacks are coming through those inputs. But what if we discovered 10,000 more lines of code to maintain than is necessary? What if data tracing allowed us to eliminate that code by centralizing those functions? We would have to harden the routine doing the validation and formatting–because it will be getting dirty data–but no more so than we are doing literally everywhere today.

    If we can reduce source code by using a tool that is designed to improve security, is that not the ultimate shift left? The volume of source code that handles data entering the system is staggering, also. For enterprise systems, most of what we develop is actually data processing, no matter how convoluted it gets. The data store is the central repository and apps are simply accessing and modifying it. So shift left with regard to data is huge.

    Consider it. I know that you are all super-busy with other projects, but less source code lightens the load on everyone; take a look at data tracing functionality in products you already own (mostly available in vulnerability management and source code scanning toolsets), and see if it suits your needs. It might save everyone time and will help with some data-centric compliance requirements, too. That leaves you more time to make systems better.

  • Sonatype Report Surfaces Scope of Known Vulnerability Challenge

    Sonatype Report Surfaces Scope of Known Vulnerability Challenge

    Sonatype this week published a State of the Software Supply Chain Report that found a 633% year-over-year increase in malicious attacks aimed at open source software residing in public repositories.

    In addition, Sonatype launched a Sonatype Safety Rating system that employs machine learning algorithms and other metrics to identify the most secure open source components stored in those repositories.

    The report found 96% of open source Java downloads have known vulnerabilities that could have been avoided if an available, more secure version had been used. Collectively, the report estimated there were 1.2 billion known-vulnerable dependencies that could be avoided if developers had only been aware that a later version of a software component was available.

    According to the report, the average Java application contains 148 dependencies. Updates to Java applications are, on average, made 10 times a year, so development teams are being asked to track 1,500 dependency changes per year.

    Sonatype CTO Brian Fox said the report makes it clear that organizations are not assuming enough responsibility for using open source software that has known vulnerabilities. In effect, organizations are blindly and recklessly using software components without any real appreciation of the associated risks, he said.

    Rather than a knee-jerk reaction to each new zero-day vulnerability that is discovered, Fox said, IT teams need to focus on putting processes in place to make sure the latest, most secure edition of any given software module is being used. A survey of 662 engineering professionals included with the report, however, found 68% of respondents were confident that their applications were not using known vulnerable libraries. Nevertheless, a random sample of enterprise applications conducted by Sonatype found 68% contained known vulnerabilities.

    Overall, the report surmised that consumption of open source software will soon surge past an estimated 3.1 trillion total requests, with six out of every seven vulnerabilities being the result of a transitive dependency created by indirect relationships between software components. At the current rate of consumption, it’s fairly clear that the processes used to build and deploy applications today are insane given how dependent organizations are on applications, said Fox.

    In the wake of a series of high-profile security breaches, there is, fortunately, a lot more focus on securing software supply chains today than there was this time last year. The scope of the challenge, however, is mind-boggling when you consider the totality of applications already deployed in application environments that have known vulnerabilities. Organizations need to first make sure they are remediating vulnerabilities in their most critical applications while at the same time implementing DevSecOps best practices. This will ensure as few vulnerabilities as possible find their way into the next generation of applications.

    Obviously, these application security issues are not going to be resolved overnight. DevOps teams will be spending the next several years addressing a level of technical security debt that has been allowed to accrue for more years than anyone in IT really cares to admit.

  • Making SBOMs Actionable

    Making SBOMs Actionable

    A software bill of materials (SBOM) is a list of all the software components found in a given codebase or used in a given software build. Great. So, now what? Why do we even care about SBOMs?

    Those are great questions—because in and of itself, the SBOM doesn’t really do anything; it is simply a means to an end. That end being greater software security and a more secure software supply chain.

    Let’s take one step back to understand why there is such a sudden and urgent demand for SBOMs. The most recent ‘big bang’ attack on the software supply chain was the Apache Log4j flaw, discovered in December 2021. That vulnerability opened the doors to countless breaches and caused billions of dollars in damage. Before that, the high-profile hacking of SolarWinds caused similar damage.

    Now, will the SBOM prevent that from happening (again)? No. However, what an SBOM can do is tell you exactly where these kinds of vulnerabilities exist in software and enable you to quickly patch your systems or block exploits. Having a software bill of materials enables you to quickly assess the risks in your codebase and mitigate them as needed.

    It’s strongly recommended that you use dynamic SBOMs (versus static) that are automatically updated to the latest SBOM information and provide extensive search capabilities as part of an SBOM database. That allows for immediate identification of a specific dependency version, like the Log4j case. Some solutions also update the SBOM information based on the runtime (like Docker or Kubernetes). That way, you know not only if some component is used, but also where.

    SBOMs are an invaluable tool as they allow an audit of licenses, libraries, modules, applied patches and other components to look for weaknesses. However, for such an audit to reliably trace the components used to build the software, the SBOM must have certain attributes.

    • Unique identities for each software component
    • Separate identities (independent of those used internally in the organization) to identify each machine and user involved in the development process
    • Timestamps to facilitate traceability of each change or component incorporation

    Additionally, from a security point of view, a key element necessary for the reliability of the SBOM is to prevent unauthorized changes to it. And the most effective way to do this is by using an immutable ledger that records a history of when each change was made.

    Once the reliability of an SBOM is assured, DevSecOps teams can use it as part of their threat scanning toolbox and, therefore, improve software security.

    There is no doubt that SBOMs should be requested from your software vendors and that you should consider creating SBOMs along with your own developed software. It’s all about the proper storage of the SBOMs so you can be sure they’re recent, searchable and trustworthy and tamper-proof.

    The benefits and use cases for SBOMs are numerous; they vary across stakeholders who produce, choose and operate software and are amplified when combined. Use cases for SBOMs include better software development, supply chain management, vulnerability management, asset management and high assurance processes. The benefits include reducing cost, mitigating security risk, license risk and compliance risk.

    But the key is making the SBOM actionable.

    No developer, no software maintainer or DevOps engineer wants to manually collect the dependencies and produce SBOM documents. It needs to be fully automated within the software build and deployment pipeline and there needs to be a proactive check of where it’s currently running.

    The most efficient approach to work with a pervasive SBOM policy is to have them generated as a byproduct of a modern development CI/CD process.

    In today’s complex development environments, it is imperative that SBOMs can be shared frictionlessly between teams and organizations as a fundamental part of software management transparency. This transparency model is supported by the ISO association through its OpenChain Specification, and it is part of an effort to improve security in the digital industry.

    There are two SBOM specifications: The Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) backed by the Linux Foundation and the CycloneDX specification managed by the CycloneDX Core working group. For more details, have a look here.

    Make sure to choose the SBOM standard that makes the most sense for you and stick to that for all of the software developed or used in your infrastructure. The test of whether your SBOM is actionable will come when the next Log4j moment arrives. You should be able to pinpoint the existence and the location of the component in question to mitigate risk effectively.

    To hear more about cloud-native topics, join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and the cloud-native community at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon North America 2022 – October 24-28, 2022

  • Implementing Data-Driven DevSecOps

    Implementing Data-Driven DevSecOps

    Right now, the way DevSecOps is typically implemented doesn’t fit with the rapid and agile DevOps CI/CD pipeline at all. It’s like applying 19th-century firefighting methods to a modern forest fire.

    Back then, firefighters employed a “bucket brigade,” where they would form a queue and pass buckets from one hand to another to put out a blaze. No doubt, it’s a lot of work, but much of the effort is wasted. Water inevitably spills out of the buckets as they are handed from one person to the next and by the time the bucket is emptied into the fire, half the water is gone. And not only is so much effort wasted, it’s far too slow and ineffectual to combat the kind of wildfires we face today.

    Likewise, the largely manual methods of current DevSecOps initiatives are ineffectual in fighting the fires of digital threats and cyberattacks modern mobile apps face. Like a modern megafire, these threats and attacks are growing and changing every second, seeking new vectors to spark new attacks elsewhere. Traditional DevSecOps tools like code scanning and penetration testing identify vulnerabilities and then the security teams start the manual “bucket brigade” to add as much protection as they can against them before the app has to be released. But neither the threats nor the CI/CD process has paused. New features have been added that have created new vulnerabilities, and the threat landscape has evolved. It’s inefficient because pentesting can’t provide the kind of real-time data about attacks and threats that developers need to provide protection against current threats. The result is the release of vulnerable mobile apps. 

    A Data-Driven Process

    In business, the C-suite is working hard to transform their companies into data-driven organizations where decisions are made not on the basis of gut feelings or expert opinion, but rather on analysis of hard data. That same approach needs to be brought to security implementation for mobile applications.

    Additionally, the implementation of security into a mobile app needs to be automated. With so much of the CI/CD process already automated, security cannot lag behind.

    These two elements combined create data-driven DevSecOps. In this method, the development and security teams have a system of record that provides real-time cyberattack and cyberthreat information about apps in the field, which drives decisions the team makes about the protections that are most urgent and that must be included in the next build. 

    It’s now well within the realm of possibility for mobile app developers to gather near-real-time information on exactly the kinds of threats and vulnerabilities that their mobile apps are facing in the field. When combined with location, network and other kinds of data, developers can gain a granular understanding not only of the most common threats their apps experience, but also which threats are most prevalent in specific geographic regions. They can also proactively identify the rapidly mounting threats that will become an enormous problem in the near future.

    With this data in hand, development teams can make informed decisions about which protections they should prioritize in the next build to make the best use of their time and resources to provide maximum protection to their end users. 

    The Need for Automation

    But having data isn’t enough. Development teams need the ability to act quickly on the insights provided, and manual implementation methods are too slow and cumbersome to keep up with the rapidly changing threat landscape for mobile apps. Once the decision is made, a system must also exist to automate the incorporation of mobile app security, anti-fraud and anti-cheat protections from within the CI/CD pipeline, so that security implementation runs as smoothly as feature creation.

    The advantages of data-driven DevSecOps are many. First, publishers, developers and security teams can understand exactly what cybercriminals are doing against their own apps with real users. With this data and the wealth of other data that organizations can collect from their apps, they can determine which threats are the most pressing, which are rapidly emerging and even how they are distributed among different geographic regions—all of which is extremely valuable information when deciding which protections to build into the next release.

    Finally, once the app is released, teams can use the data they receive about threats and attacks to prove the effectiveness and value of each protection that was included. It’s important information not only for continuous improvement, but also to justify the value of data-driven DevSecOps to management and the C-suite.

    With data-driven DevSecOps, organizations can provide data, transparency and visibility around security to all stakeholders in the CI/CD process—all while making the incorporation of security far more efficient and effective, along with the real-time data to prove it.

  • Business Leaders Will Trade Speed for Security

    Business Leaders Will Trade Speed for Security

    A global survey of 600 C-level executives conducted by CloudBees found that when it comes to building software, more than three-quarters of respondents said it is more important to be secure and compliant than fast and compliant.

    As a result, more than three-quarters (77%) also noted their organization is implementing a shift left strategy for implementing security and compliance even though 58% recognized that those efforts created additional burdens for developers.

    Three-quarters of respondents also conceded that compliance (76%) and security (75%) challenges limited their company’s ability to innovate. Nevertheless, 83% said shift left is important for them as an organization despite the fact that 88% of executives said their software supply chain is secure or very secure. However, only 33% of respondents said their software supply chain is completely compliant.

    Not surprisingly, 86% are focusing on compliance more now than they were two years ago and, in the wake of a series of high-profile breaches of software supply chains, 82% are more concerned about attacks.

    CloudBees CEO Anuj Kapur said it’s clear there is a greater need to reduce security and compliance burdens for developers by putting guardrails in place that automate DevSecOps processes. The survey noted that only 22% of executives believed their software delivery supply chain is completely automated, while another 37% said it is close to being automated. Only 22% said their compliance process is completely automated, with 35% believing it is almost completely automated.

    Three in five (59%) executives said they have all, or mostly all, external tools for security and compliance issues and 29% said they have a mix of internal and external tools. Only 11% use mostly internal tools. A full 90% said their risk management team has the tools, knowledge and expertise to build and/or maintain a secure software supply chain.

    The real challenge, of course, is that while compliance issues are relatively static, new security issues arise all the time. Developers make mistakes or a new zero-day vulnerability is discovered after an application has been deployed in a production environment. It’s critical for organizations to embrace automation to enable developers to address those issues as part of a continuously automated update cycle, noted Kapur.

    As more responsibility for compliance and security is shifted left, the degree to which DevOps workflows will need to be adjusted will naturally vary by organization. However, the days when developers could ignore security issues during the application development process are all but over. The leadership of organizations of all sizes are making it clear they want to see a reduction in the number of security and compliance issues that arise in production environments.

    Ideally, efforts to build more secure and compliant applications would not slow down the rate at which applications are being built and deployed. However, the CloudBees survey made it clear that more executives are willing to prioritize security and compliance over speed of application development. The issue is how to strike a balance between what are clearly two competing priorities.

  • What Developers Need for Software Security Success

    What Developers Need for Software Security Success

    Given today’s evolving threat landscape, organizations and businesses in every sector now have a critical need to produce secure software. Criminal gangs, professional attackers and hostile nation-states are employing advanced tactics designed to exploit any vulnerabilities in programs, applications, networks and even raw code. Attackers are constantly finding new ways to bypass even the most advanced protections and defenses. For example, many have shifted their focus from delivering malware to instead compromising credentials, or launching targeted attacks against a supply chain. And while those high-level incursions are happening with much greater frequency, so too are the more basic attacks like ransomware and SQL injections that have been a scourge on cybersecurity defenses for many years. It’s becoming apparent that while cybersecurity platforms and defenses are critical components in defense against modern attacks, what is truly needed is secure code that can be deployed free from vulnerabilities. And that requires security-aware developers with verified security skills.

    Most developers say they are willing to champion security and commit to higher standards of code quality and secure output, but they can’t do it without a lot of support, as well as a reworking of the traditional metrics by which they are often judged by their employers and organizations.

    Why Most Developers Don’t Prioritize Security

    Coding best practices have continued to evolve over the years in response to business needs and market trends. In the past, most applications were created using the so-called waterfall development model where software engineers worked to get their code ready to meet an ongoing series of milestones or goals before moving on to the next phase of development. Waterfall tended to support the development of programs that, having met all of the previous milestones along the way, were free from bugs or operational flaws by the time they were ready for the production environment. But it was slow going, with sometimes 18 months or more between starting a project and getting to the finish line.

    The Agile method tended to replace Waterfall, putting a much greater emphasis on speed. And this was followed by DevOps, which is built for even more speed by combining development and operations together to ensure that programs are ready for production almost as soon as they clear the final development tweaks.

    Putting speed over security—and nearly everything else beyond functionality—was a necessity as the business environment evolved. In a cloud-based world where everyone is online all the time and mobile transactions by the millions can happen every few seconds, getting software deployed and into the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline as quickly as possible is critical for business success.

    It’s not that organizations didn’t care about security. It’s just that in the competitive business environment that exists in most industries, speed was seen as more important. And developers who could match that speed thrived to the point where it became the primary means by which their job performance was judged.

    Now that advanced attacks are ramping up so dramatically, deploying vulnerable code is becoming a liability. The preference is once again shifting, with security increasingly becoming the primary focus of software development, with speed a close second. Bolting on security after the fact is not only dangerous, it also slows the process of deploying software. That has led to the rise of programs like DevSecOps that attempt to merge speed and security together to help generate secure code. But developers trained for pure speed can’t become security experts without a lot of help and support from their organizations.

    What Developers Need

    The good news is that most developers want to see a shift to secure coding and a reprioritizing of security as part of the development process. In a comprehensive survey conducted by Evans Data of over 1,200 professional developers actively working around the world earlier this year, the overwhelming majority said they were supportive of the concept of creating secure code. Most also expected it to become a priority in their organizations. However, only 8% of the respondents said that writing secure code was easy to accomplish. That leaves a lot of room for improvement within most organizations’ development teams between what is needed, and what is required in order to get there.

    Simply mandating secure code won’t get the job done. Development teams need training, support and a change in how software engineers are valued and judged within their organizations.

    The biggest thing that is needed is more and better training for them. And it should be customized so that less experienced developers can begin their training by learning how to recognize the kinds of common vulnerabilities that often creep into code, with lots of hands-on learning and examples. Meanwhile, more advanced developers who demonstrate their security skills can instead be tasked with things like advanced threat modeling concepts.

    Teamwork should also be emphasized so that the developer community can help one another grow their skills. Skilled and willing developers who know security should be appointed as security champions. Their responsibility as a champion will be to help fellow developers improve their skills. And while a security champion is almost always an informal title, they should be given the respect, rewards, and compensation that such an important position deserves.

    In addition to funding and supporting training programs and security champions, including giving developers enough time away from coding in order to properly participate in those programs, organizations also need to change the way that developers are evaluated. The primary metric for rewarding developers needs to shift away from raw speed. Instead, evaluations could reward those developers who can create secure code that is free from vulnerabilities or exploits. Yes, speed can be an evaluated factor as well, but first and foremost, code needs to be secure and free from vulnerabilities.

    Producing insecure or vulnerable code is no longer an acceptable risk for most businesses. And bolting on security after the fact is becoming increasingly ineffective. Thankfully, the best weapon to fight this disturbing trend is having the developer community produce secure code that attackers can’t exploit. Most developers are willing to step up to that challenge. They just need the proper training and support to help make it happen.

  • What a Dev Wants: Security Training for Today’s Developer Workforce

    What a Dev Wants: Security Training for Today’s Developer Workforce

    It’s no secret that developing a strong security culture is a critical component of the production of secure products, yet organizations often overlook the fact that their security training programs set the foundation on which this culture is built. When it comes to developer training, our goal should be to align the intrinsic motivations of a learner with the company’s strategy and objectives. But if either of these is misaligned, the training program, and ultimately the organization, will suffer because it is either irrelevant or perceived as a compulsory box that needs to be checked.

    Addressing the Interests of Developers Vs. the Organization

    Unfortunately, there is a gap between the buyer persona and the developers themselves, even though developers tend to have a fairly consistent response about the ways they want to be trained. Rather than implement a program that is doomed to be viewed as a time-consuming compliance requisite, organizations should rather ask this simple, yet pertinent question: What do developers really want out of their security training program?

    When it comes to today’s security training programs for developers, there’s often a separation between compliance-based training and developer-centric training; in other words, the interests of the organization don’t always align with the interests of the developers. In most highly regulated organizations, there is a mandated security training curriculum that all employees, including the development teams, are required to go through on a yearly basis. This leads to a drawn-out, painful process that leaves employees clicking through modules as fast as possible. Developers may then need to go back and look up security topics on a regular basis if they are looking to implement them into their code.

    While developers are certainly making an effort to adhere to security requirements, this greatly slows the ability to get the product to market in a secure and efficient way.

    What Training do Developers Really Want?

    Organizations should prioritize programs that will specifically target their development teams by asking what those developers are actually looking for. With so many training programs on the market, it can be difficult for an organization to determine which will resonate the most with their employees, specifically their development teams. The fact of the matter is that, when it comes to security training, the majority of developers want to do as little of it as possible. They are willing to check the boxes for compliance purposes, but they want it to be as seamless as possible. As the complexity of training tactics continues to evolve, an ideal curriculum is simple, like programs that can be embedded in the tools developers use on a daily basis.

    The most effective training programs are engaging and relevant. Managers tend to see better results from training that is hands-on, interactive, engaging and related to developer tasks. Gamification is also a great way to engage developers. For instance, organizations have started livening up their training curriculum with leaderboards. In fact, recent studies have indicated that developers would opt into shared company leaderboards with points for content consumed. Not only are these programs engaging for the developers, but they are also incredibly effective, as they motivate teams to view more content by leveraging individuals’ pure competitive drive.

    Security Champion Programs for the Win

    Organizations could also implement a security champions program. These programs vary depending on the organization, but in its simplest form, a security champions program designates a “champion” from each team. The champion is then tasked with leading the team as a subject matter expert as far as security goes. One thing to keep in mind here is that this program could be a major failure if done improperly. Remember, you don’t want to designate just anyone as the team security champion; you want to be sure you’re selecting an engaged employee that will prioritize secure practices and proactively communicate updates across the team.

    Regardless of what avenue an organization chooses, the name of the game is ensuring development teams are actively engaged with a relevant and realistic training program. The result of which will have an important downstream impact as organizations work to build a culture with a strong foundation in security. After all, “checking the box” can only go so far when it comes to developing a winning—and secure—solution.

  • Survey Surfaces Massive Number of Application Vulnerabilities

    Survey Surfaces Massive Number of Application Vulnerabilities

    A survey of 16,510 IT and IT security practitioners published today by Rezilion, a provider of a platform for automating the remediation of software vulnerabilities, found nearly half of respondents (47%) worked for organizations that have a backlog of vulnerable applications. More than half (66%) said their backlog consisted of more than 100,000 vulnerabilities and the average number of vulnerabilities that need to be remediated is 1.1 million.

    The survey, conducted by the Ponemon Institute, also found more than half of respondents ( 54%) said they can only patch less than 50% of the vulnerabilities.

    Factors that keep teams from remediating included an inability to prioritize what needs to be fixed (47%), a lack of effective tools (43%), a lack of resources (38%) and not enough information about risks that would exploit vulnerabilities (45%).

    More than a quarter (28%) also said remediation is too time-consuming. The survey found that 77% of respondents said it takes longer than 21 minutes to detect, prioritize and remediate just one vulnerability in production.

    In addition, 85% said they spend more than 16 minutes detecting one vulnerability in development. A full 82% also noted it takes longer than 21 minutes to remediate one vulnerability in development. A majority of respondents said it is either very difficult (36%) or difficult (25%) to remediate vulnerabilities in applications.

    On the plus side, more than half (56%) said they use automation for vulnerability remediation, with 43% reporting times to respond are significantly shorter as a result.

    Rezilion CEO Liran Tancman said the survey makes it clear there’s still plenty of room for improvement. The number of vulnerabilities that need to be addressed is staggering, he said. IT teams need to focus their immediate efforts on identifying the vulnerabilities that are the most critical, he noted.

    Remediating those vulnerabilities will soon become a higher priority as more regulations focused on securing software supply chains come into effect. In fact, the software bills of material (SBOMs) that these regulations require will expose much of the dirty laundry that currently exists in application environments, said Tancman.

    Ultimately, the goal needs to be enabling organizations to address vulnerability issues without slowing down the rate at which applications are being built and deployed, Tancman added. The degree to which that goal can be achieved will vary widely as more responsibility for security is shifted left toward application developers. However, the need to provide tools to developers that enable them to address vulnerability issues has never been more apparent, noted Tancman.

    It’s clear the level of application security vulnerability debt that organizations will need to address can no longer be ignored. The issue now is to determine how best to resolve these issues either by fixing existing applications or replacing them with new ones. Either way, it’s clear that there is a need to adopt DevSecOps best practices to better secure software.

    In the meantime, as application security becomes a boardroom-level issue, there be a lot more scrutiny applied all across the software supply chain.

  • DevOps World 2022: Developer and Security Links Protect Your Supply Chain

    DevOps World 2022: Developer and Security Links Protect Your Supply Chain

    Ever since the SolarWinds attack back in December 2020, software supply chain attacks have been top-of-mind for any company that builds software. The idea of endangering not just your organization by being attacked but also your customers really sharpens your focus.

    Another complicating factor is that applications use a combination of open software components and homegrown code to deliver applications. This software supply chain means your software can be compromised through no fault of your own but instead based on the components you use. The Log4j attack is an example of a component creating vulnerabilities in any software that uses it. So how do we defend our software? We need to think differently about where security starts and how security concepts can be integrated into software earlier in the development process where it interfaces with the rest of the technology infrastructure.

    Building a Secure Pipeline

    Modern software development is built on the CI/CD pipeline. It allows the application security testing and software composition analysis to happen way earlier in the integration process (shift left), and that allows you to identify and fix issues before the code gets anywhere near customers. Sounds simple, no? Just run your code through a pipeline, integrate security testing, identify issues, fix them, and deploy secure software.

    As with most things, what sounds simple in theory can be challenging to implement in reality. First, shifting left requires a collaboration between developers and security teams. Finding the security issues don’t matter if they don’t get fixed. To increase the likelihood of these issues getting fixed, the security team needs to provide context to the developers regarding the urgency of the flaw or vulnerability and some guidance on the best way to fix the issue. To be successful, security folks can’t just drop a report with hundreds of defects and vulnerabilities on the developers and expect that anything productive is going to happen. If this scenario reminds you of getting a report from your vulnerability scanner with hundreds of issues you won’t fix, well, that’s because it’s very similar.

    Second, security must add value to the development and architecture process by offering up infrastructure-as-code (IaC) templates and a toolchain that makes it easy to implement secure application stacks. Maybe that looks like a template library managed by a cloud security Center of Excellence, which can provide these tools across all of the application teams leveraging efforts.

    Combatting Supply Chain Attacks

    Finally, you can implement a security champions program, training a developer (or two) on each team about security issues and they can act as a security emissary to the developers. This provides scale, ensuring that the security team doesn’t become a bottleneck to fixing the security issues.

    Given the sophistication of the software, the attack surface of the code, and the velocity of the development process, combatting supply chain attacks requires tight and ongoing collaboration with the development team and shifting left to catch the security issues earlier in the integration process.

    Want to learn more about this and other related topics? Join CloudBees for DevOps World 2022, held in Orlando, Florida, at the World Marriott Center. Use discount code DW22 when registering and get access to all the fantastic offerings, including keynotes, sessions, training and other interactive activities. We can’t wait to see you there for the DevOps Remix!

  • Federal Agencies Share DevSecOps Guidelines

    Federal Agencies Share DevSecOps Guidelines

    The National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) have published a set of DevSecOps best practices based on the Enduring Security Framework (ESF).

    Developed by a public-private cross-sector working group led by NSA and CISA, the ESF framework was created in the wake of the breach of the SolarWinds software supply chain that led to malware being distributed downstream to a number of organizations that relied on the company’s IT management platform.

    The Securing the Software Supply Chain for Developers set of best practices published by NSA, CISA and ODNI takes the ESF a step further. The guidance walks organizations through the processes required to develop secure code, verify third-party components, harden build environments and deliver code.

    The best practices provided are the latest dividend of an executive order issued by the Biden administration that requires every federal agency to review the security of its software supply chains. The expectation is that enterprise IT organizations will conduct similar reviews using the best practices and frameworks defined by the federal agencies that specialize in cybersecurity.

    The challenge, of course, is embedding those best practices within existing DevOps workflows. In theory, more responsibility for cybersecurity is shifting left toward application development teams. However, the level of cybersecurity expertise that exists today among application developers is limited at best. Cybersecurity was an elective in most developers’ training and education programs, so it should come as no surprise that few of them ever attended a cybersecurity class.

    There’s a clear need to improve cybersecurity training for developers, but the real work involves automating cybersecurity processes within the workflows managed by the tools developers employ to write code and the platforms that DevOps teams use to deploy applications, said Mitch Ashley, principal analyst for Techstrong Research, an arm of Techstrong Group that is also the parent company of staging-devopsy.kinsta.cloud. “Security needs to be part of the toolchain, workflows and how the software is designed,” he said.

    Ideally, organizations should appoint a security champion that will work with development teams to consistently implement a set of DevSecOps best practices, added Ashley.

    Of course, the security champion doesn’t eliminate the need for cybersecurity professionals. Rather, it reduces the pressure when there is a chronic shortage of cybersecurity professionals. In the absence of any formal cybersecurity review during the application development process, it’s simply too easy for developers to inadvertently introduce malware into a software component or misconfigure a cloud infrastructure service. In either case, cybercriminals are increasingly finding it easier to compromise software supply chains at multiple points.

    It’s not clear how much the federal government’s guidance might impact the overall state of application security. However, one way or another the level of security scrutiny being applied to how applications are built and delivered is only going to increase in the months ahead. The challenge is finding a way to deliver secure code without necessarily slowing down the rate at which applications are currently being built and deployed.