CI/CD pipelines are the backbone of modern applications in the fast-paced software development world. But in rapidly adopting these automated workflows, organizations have also inadvertently opened up new attack surfaces for cybercriminals to take advantage of. From compromised build systems to poisoned dependencies, vulnerabilities in CI/CD pipelines can have devastating effects that reach far beyond the life of the development environment.
CI/CD security protects the complete software delivery pipeline from code commit to production deployment. This includes securing build systems, securing deployment artifacts, scanning dependencies, and applying strict access controls across the development lifecycle. A result of implementing security scanning through CI/CD integration is that organizations can identify and remediate vulnerabilities before they enter production environments.
This blog post helps to understand CI/CD security scanning, its importance in modern software development, and how organizations can use this practice in their pipelines. We’ll explore different types of security scans, common pitfalls teams face, and ways to keep a secure CI/CD workflow.
What is CI/CD Security Scanning?
CI/CD security scanning is an elaborate automation process that works as a security sentinel across your software development pipeline. It does this by constantly scanning and assessing different parts of the development pipeline, such as source code, server dependencies, container images, and infrastructure templates.
Why is Security Scanning Important in CI/CD Pipelines?
The ever-accelerating pace of software development today requires strong CI/CD security. Development teams deploy multiple releases every day and are usually combined with hundreds of 3rd party dependencies and complex infrastructure configurations. Without automated security scanning, vulnerabilities can easily bypass manual review and end up in production environments, exposing organizations to costly breaches and compliance violations.
CI/CD security scanning plays a pivotal role in security architecture by automating security checks throughout the development pipeline. It constantly checks for vulnerabilities in code, dependencies and configurations and helps to identify and remediate security issues earlier in the development cycle, at which point they are cost-effective to address. This allows development teams to keep their velocity going whilst maintaining consistent security standards across every deployment.
Key Security Risks in CI/CD Pipelines
While organizations race to deliver software more quickly, they frequently ignore serious security vulnerabilities in their CI/CD pipelines. While these pipelines allow for speedy development and deployment of applications, they also become prime targets for attackers who want to compromise the entire software supply chain.
1. Source Code and Dependencies
Each line of code could be a vulnerability that the threat actors might exploit if not managed/written properly. In CI/CD pipelines, these vulnerabilities are especially dangerous since they can spread from development to production in no time. SQL injection vulnerabilities, privilege escalation, and buffer overflow vulnerabilities are common issues found in CI/CD systems. Modern apps use a lot of third-party libraries and packages that depend on one another, creating a complex web of dependencies.
2. Vulnerabilities in Pipeline Configuration
Even pipeline configurations themselves can turn into security liabilities if they’re not adequately secured. These misconfigurations, such as overly permissive access controls, unsecured environment variables, and unprotected secrets and credentials, open doors for attackers to manipulate build processes or gain access to sensitive resources.
3. Build and Artifact Security
Build environments and artifacts are high-value targets in the pipeline often pursued by attackers. Environments can have elevated privileges and access to sensitive resources, which can be attractive targets for compromise. If attackers do end up breaching build environments, they can inject their malicious code into all future builds, essentially compromising every deployment that goes through the pipeline.
How CI/CD Security Scanning Works?
CI/CD security scanning is a set of automated guardrails within your development pipeline that routinely inspects varying stages of your software delivery pipeline.
Triggers for Scans and Points of Integration
Security scanning usually starts when developers push code changes to the repository. The pipeline will automatically trigger the different security scans depending on defined rules based on events. Code commit, pull request, schedule scan, or manual initiation can be such triggers. The scan is part of the automated build and deploys flow, running on popular CI/CD platforms like Jenkins, GitLab, or GitHub Actions.
Scanning Process and Analysis
At the time of a scan trigger, a range of security tools analyze varying components of your app in parallel. Static application security testing (SAST) tools scan source code for vulnerabilities, and software composition analysis (SCA) tools look for known threats in your dependencies where as Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) tests live applications using simulated attacks.
Processing Results and Enforcing Policy
Once these scans are performed, the records are checked against known standards and thresholds for risk. These policies tell the pipeline whether it can proceed or fail based on the severity and count of discovered vulnerabilities. Critical security vulnerabilities are usually the only ones that cause pipelines to fail right away, so it’s vital to ensure no vulnerable code is ever deployed to production. Less severe problems may produce warnings but allow the pipeline to continue.
Vulnerability Management and Remediation
Once vulnerabilities are recognized, the scanning system classifies and ranks them according to their severity rating, the ability to exploit them, and their impact. Integration with issue-tracking systems such as Jira or ServiceNow automatically routes detailed findings to the appropriate teams. They get actionable feedback about security issues in their development environment along with guidance to remediate them. This feedback loop, in real-time, allows teams to remediate security issues more quickly and efficiently.
Ongoing Monitoring and Reporting
Beyond point-in-time scans, modern CI/CD security scanning implements continuous monitoring of deployed applications and infrastructure. This ongoing surveillance helps identify new vulnerabilities that emerge after deployment, such as newly discovered CVEs affecting your dependencies. Regular reports and dashboards provide visibility into your security posture, tracking metrics like vulnerability trends, fix rates, and mean time to remediation. This data helps teams measure the effectiveness of their security practices and make informed decisions about security investments.
Types of Security Scans in CI/CD Pipelines
Security scans come in various types, and knowing what they all are is crucial for developing a security strategy for the CI/CD pipeline.
1. Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
SAST tools do not execute the code. SAST tools scour the source code of the application, bytecode, and binaries. They are like automated code reviewers that scan your codebase for security vulnerabilities, coding issues, and bugs. These tools can catch problems such as SQL injection vulnerabilities, cross-site scripting (XSS), buffer overflows, and hardcoded credentials early on in the development process.
2. Dynamic Application Security Testing (SAST)
An essential tool used in DevSecOps is DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing), used to test your running application as a real-world attack simulation unlike SAST. They work from the outside in, testing your app’s open interface(s) for the vulnerabilities that threat actors can exploit in production. DAST scans can also catch issues that only occur during runtime, authentication bypass, server misconfiguration, or IDORs.
3. Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
Modern applications use a lot of third-party libraries and open-source components. SCA tools check your application’s dependencies for known vulnerabilities, outdated components, and licensing issues. They keep internal databases of known vulnerabilities (CVEs) and will automatically alert you when your dependencies have security holes. SCA plays an important role in managing supply chain risks and making sure that the dependency tree for your application is being kept secure as new vulnerabilities are discovered.
4. Containers and Infrastructure Security
The emergence of containerization and code-based infrastructure means container images and infrastructure definitions need to be scanned. These scanners look for vulnerable packages in container images, misconfigured security settings, and compliance violations in infrastructure code. They are able to discover vulnerabilities such as open ports, or insecure pre-configured parameters ahead of deployment.
5. Secret Scanners
Secrets scanners search for sensitive information within the codebase that could be accidentally committed, such as API keys, passwords, tokens, and private keys. The secret scanning tools use a combination of pattern matching and entropy analysis to identify potential secrets and prevent credential exposure that could lead to data breaches.
CI/CD Security Scanning Benefits
From adding security scanning into your CI/CD pipeline, companies have a lot of value that goes beyond security compliance. Automated security checks integrated into your development workflow can yield multiple benefits that touch both security posture and business operations.
1. Enhanced Security Posture
For an organization, using automated security scanning is the best approach to cater to vulnerabilities due to its continuous security coverage. Instead of conducting periodic security assessments, every code change has to go through a rigorous security evaluation before it can be deployed to production. This proactive stance allows for early detection and remediation of security vulnerabilities, which greatly reduces the risk of security breaches and data exposures.
2. Faster Development Cycles
A persistent myth is that properly implemented security scanning slows down development, but this proactive focus allows teams to avoid spending time remediating vulnerabilities in production by identifying security issues earlier in the development cycle. CI/CD security scanning provides immediate feedback to developers on security issues and enables them to fix issues while their code is still fresh in their heads. Not only does this process contribute significantly to code quality, allowing developers to include a feedback cycle in their coding, debugging, and learning, but it also allows developers to change their coordination between their development and testing practices.
3. Cost Reduction and Efficiency
Automated scans enable the organization to catch vulnerabilities well before production, where the cost of fixing security issues goes up exponentially. The cost of fixing a security flaw grows exponentially as it moves through the development pipeline, with damage due upon unleashing a production fix being as much as 100 times higher for flaws we missed earlier in development. Automated scanning also helps free security teams from having to manually review every contribution, thereby enabling them to focus on more strategic initiatives.
4. Compliance and Audit Readiness
Security scanning automatically documents and provides evidence for security controls, which can simplify compliance audits immensely. CI/CD security scanning is done systematically to ensure security policies are standardized and to create detailed audit trails of all security checks. Such documentation proves to be very helpful during regulatory audits and security assessments.
5. Team Collaboration and Security Culture
Embedding security scanning in CI/CD pipelines helps promote a security-first mindset in development teams. When security is inherently included in all stages of development and not an afterthought, developers end up handling more security around their code. Security scans provide immediate feedback to developers about security best practices and common vulnerabilities.
Common Challenges in CI/CD Security Scanning
Although security scanning in CI/CD pipelines has a great deal of advantages, organizations encounter multiple challenges in adopting and sustaining these security measures. Knowing these challenges can help create effective strategies to address them and ensure to get the most out of the scanning.
1. Mistaken Alarms and Alert Fatigue
With security scans, one of the most challenging things is keeping track of all the false positives. Security scanners frequently report issues that, if examined further, are not real security vulnerabilities. This flood of alerts can result in alert fatigue. Security teams need to find the right tune of their scanners and correct triaging processes, to balance security coverage with actionable alerts.
2. Performance Pipe Speed
Building and deployment times can be affected significantly by the addition of full security scanning in CI/CD pipelines. Full security scans, particularly with multiple types of tests running, can take minutes or sometimes hours to execute in a pipeline. That extra time can cause friction with development teams that want to keep their deployment cycles short.
3. Adoption and Resistance from Developers
Getting development teams to embrace security scanning can be challenging, especially when it introduces new processes or slows down their workflow. Developers may resist additional security steps or bypass security checks to meet delivery deadlines. This resistance often stems from a lack of security awareness, insufficient training, or poor tool usability. Organizations need to invest in developer education, improve tool integration, and demonstrate the value of security scanning to gain team buy-in.
Best Practices for CI/CD Security Scanning
The following are useful suggestions about how to do security scanning in CI/CD pipelines properly.
1. Shift-Left Approach and Early Integration
Following the “shift-left” security principle, security scanning should be done as early in the development lifecycle as possible. Pre-commit hooks and IDE plugins can incorporate security checks into a developer’s local environment and check for issues before code ever gets into a repository.
2. Layered Scanning Strategy
Use a combination of scanner types that focuses on multiple areas of application security. Begin with lightweight scans in the early phases of development, incrementally adding more exhaustive scans as code promotes through the pipeline. For instance, kick-off SAST and secrets scanning on every commit, schedule full dependency analysis as part of your daily builds, and ensure full DAST scanning before production deployment.
3. Data Management and Configuration Management
Define security policies and ensure the scanner configurations are standardized across your organization. Set severity thresholds and automated response actions for various categories of security findings. Write down these policies, manage them as code, and version your security configurations in line with infrastructure-as-code approaches. Keep them updated to incorporate new security threats and changing business needs.
4. Manage and Prioritize Results.
Сreate a straightforward approach to manage and prioritize scanner results. Build a centralized dashboard for security findings to help teams effectively track, triage, and remediate issues. Prioritize the most critical vulnerabilities first, using risk-based prioritization. Integrate security findings with your existing issue-tracking system and set up clear remediation workflows.
How can SentinelOne help?
In the complex landscape of CI/CD security, SentinelOne provides comprehensive solutions that integrate seamlessly with your development pipeline. Their advanced security capabilities help organizations maintain a robust security posture while enabling efficient development workflows.
Advanced Pipeline Protection
SentinelOne’s security platform offers specialized tools designed for CI/CD environments. Their solution continuously monitors pipeline activities, detecting and preventing security threats in real-time. Through behavioral AI and machine learning algorithms, the platform identifies suspicious patterns and potential security breaches that traditional security tools might miss.
Automated Vulnerability Management
The platform streamlines vulnerability management through automated scanning and remediation workflows. SentinelOne’s scanning engines integrate with popular CI/CD tools, providing comprehensive vulnerability detection across your application stack. Their solution analyzes both custom code and third-party dependencies, prioritizing vulnerabilities based on their potential impact and exploitability.
Container and Infrastructure Security
SentinelOne excels in securing containerized environments and cloud infrastructure. Their platform provides deep visibility into container security, scanning images for vulnerabilities and ensuring compliance with security policies. The solution monitors container runtime behavior, detecting and preventing potential attacks in real time.
Conclusion
In a fast-paced software development era where delivery time is a priority, securing CI/CD pipelines has become mission-critical. With the growing adoption of automated development workflows by organizations, it is crucial that companies adopt full security scanning as part of their solutions. The stakes are raised as even a single security lapse in the CI/CD pipeline can undermine not only an application or two but an entire organization’s software supply chain.
Continuous security in CI/CD is an ongoing process that demands organizations remain proactive against shifting threats. If effective security measures and best practices are in place, with automated security scanning and proper configurations, then organizations can substantially reduce their risk exposure while continuing to maintain developer velocity.
FAQs
1. What is CI/CD Security Scanning?
CI/CD security scanning is an automated process that checks your code, dependencies, and configurations for security vulnerabilities as part of your software delivery pipeline. Think of it as a security guard that inspects everything before it reaches production.
2. How does SAST differ from DAST?
SAST looks at your source code without running it, like a code review, while DAST tests your running application by attacking it from the outside. SAST finds coding mistakes early, while DAST finds real-world vulnerabilities that appear when your application is running.
3. Does CI/CD security Scanning slow down development workflows?
Not significantly. While scans add minutes to your pipeline, they save hours or days by catching security issues early. Modern tools can run in parallel and use incremental scanning to minimize the impact on development speed.
4. Is CI/CD Security Scanning necessary for small development teams?
Absolutely. Small teams are often prime targets for attackers due to potentially limited security resources. Automated scanning provides enterprise-level security protection without requiring a dedicated security team.
5. What are the Limitations of CI/CD Security Scanning Tools?
Scanning tools can report false alarms, miss complex vulnerabilities, and require regular updates to stay effective. They complement but don’t replace human security expertise and manual code reviews.
6. How can CI/CD Security Scanning help prevent vulnerabilities in production?
By catching security issues during development, scanning stops vulnerabilities from reaching production. It’s like having a quality check before shipping – problems are caught and fixed before they can cause damage.