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DevSecOps Pipeline Integration

Understanding the importance of DevSecOps pipeline integration.

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Article Contents

Defining DevSecOps Pipelines

What are DevSecOps Pipelines?

DevSecOps pipelines are automated workflows that integrate with security practices throughout the software development lifecycle. These CI/CD pipelines integrate security controls, testing, and monitoring at every stage, ensuring that security is entrenched as part of the software development process.

Keep reading to learn about DevSecOps pipelines and how you can begin to secure your CI/CD pipelines effectively.

DevSecOps Pipeline Phases

DevSecOps CI/CD pipelines focus on the integration of DevSecOps tools and practices into the process of planning, building, testing, deploying, and monitoring software.

New security measures across the DevSecOps pipeline can improve your overall application security. Each phase of the pipeline will require updates to achieve the goal. If we look across the pipeline, five phases need to be updated:

  • Code and Pre-build – Critical security steps include code signing, scanning an entire codebase for vulnerabilities, and scanning individual files for code weaknesses.
  • Build – These actions include generating an image SBOM, image signing, and pre-package verification.
  • Post-Build – If the build step above does not include creating an SBOM image, a post-build effort is needed to add security actions for generating a complete SBOM of the entire build image.
  • Publish – Store and share containers, generate container CVEs, and collect security evidence to show an organization’s security profile.
  • Beyond adding security to the phases of the pipeline, auditing the pipeline itself further hardens the application life cycle process.

Why are DevSecOps Pipelines so Important?

DevSecOps pipelines are critical in enhancing security during the software development process. By integrating security early on during the process and automating security practices, organizations can achieve the following benefits:

Organization alignment 

DevSecOps pipelines help align security and software development teams, which can be a bottleneck for older security models.

Integrated security

DevSecOps pipelines incorporate security considerations into every phase of the software development process, including deployment automation, security checks, and continuous monitoring.

Automated testing

DevSecOps pipelines can automate security testing into the software development lifecycle. Compared to manual methods, automated tools can more quickly, accurately, and efficiently identify vulnerabilities and enforce security policies standards.

Encourages collaboration

DevSecOps pipelines can help foster collaboration and communication between development, release management, and security teams. Improved collaboration ensures that security requirements are thoroughly understood by every team member. It can help identify and fix security issues early, before potentially causing damage to an organization.

Benefits of DevSecOps Pipelines

  1. Early Detection: Identify and address security vulnerabilities at an early stage, which allows for quicker remediation. Early detection of vulnerabilities reduces the chances of deploying insecure code to production.
  2. Consistent Security Policies: Enforce consistent security policies across the development lifecycle, ensuring that security is not compromised during different phases of deployment.
  3. Compliance and Governance: DevSecOps helps organizations align development practices with compliance requirements, better enabling them to adhere to regulatory standards and security governance.
  4. Improved Incident Response: when a major security issue arises, DevSecOps pipelines enhance incident response with automated mechanisms, enabling quick identification, isolation and resolution.
  5. Continuous security validation: DevSecOps pipelines automate security testing and validation at every stage of the development process. Automated security tools can scan code, configurations, and dependencies, ensuring that security controls are in place and vulnerabilities are identified promptly.
  6. Consistent security controls: DevSecOps pipelines enforce consistent security controls across the development pipeline. With predefined security checks and practices incorporated into the pipeline, organizations can ensure that security standards and best practices are consistently applied throughout the development process, reducing the risk of insecure code or configurations.
  7. Improved collaboration: DevSecOps pipelines promote collaboration between development, security, and operations teams. By integrating security directly into the development process, these pipelines break down silos and foster communication and cooperation between teams. This collaboration results in a better understanding of security requirements, efficient issue resolution, and improved overall security posture.
  8. Faster and more secure deployments: DevSecOps pipelines enable the continuous delivery and deployment of secure applications. By automating security testing and validation, organizations can speed up the release process while ensuring the security of the deployed applications. This fosters agility and reduces the time between development and deployment, ultimately benefiting the end-user.

What is DevSecOps Pipeline Integration?

DevSecOps pipeline integration combines traditional DevOps tooling with integrated security tasks. New security requirements are forcing updates to DevOps pipelines that have been running without issue for years. With new security needs, such as Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) reporting, DevOps teams are being asked to evolve these pipelines to include critical security tooling. 

DevSecOps Pipeline Integration and SBOM Generation

DevSecOps Pipeline Integration is where SBOM automation is done. SBOMs are created at build time and must be included as part of your CI/CD workflow to gather the forensics of your software supply chain. The information derived from an SBOM is a critical first step in understanding your application security posture including the open-source software consumed. 

The SBOM exposes the open-source packages with attributes that are consumable and delivered to end users. But generating an SBOM as part of your DevSecOps pipeline is not all that is needed. The SBOM results must be consumed to continuously scan for vulnerabilities after the software has been deployed.

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How DeployHub Helps with DevSecOps Pipeline Integration

DeployHub’s DevSecOps Pipeline platform integrates seamlessly with CI/CD pipelines, from Jenkins to GitHub, to ensure the implementation of security tooling from build thru deployment. Automated security checks at each stage help identify vulnerabilities at the point they are introduced, enabling timely and low-cost remediation. 

To support the consumption of SBOMs, DeployHub collects SBOM results with historical tracking to continuously audit every component version for non-stop vulnerability detection in the DevSecOps platform. 

The steps for adding SBOM generation to your workflow are fairly straightforward. With DeployHub, minimal updates to your pipeline workflow files are required.  DeployHub uses the Ortelius Open-source CLI interface to support your DevSecOps Pipeline Integration.

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DeployHub Pro can be called from your CI/CD process, and integrate with external security tools such as Syftand OpenSSF Scorecard.

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Additional Resources

open source security
What is Open Source Software Security?
ASPM
What is Application Security Posture Management?
continuous security monitoring
What is Continuous Security Monitoring?