Vulnerability management is a set of practices, which helps identifying, evaluating, mitigating, and managing security vulnerabilities in software systems. The goal is to proactively safe all the systems against potential security threats. Nowadays software developers use huge amount of automation tools to make their work more efficient, but these tools also can cause security vulnerabilities. Libraries, code bugs, additional packages, pipelines, and docker images are all can became the sources of vulnerabilities, if not used carefully. As you can see, threats can appear in various areas, emphasizing the necessity for developers to move beyond depending solely on operations teams for server patching. Rather, it is imperative for development teams to integrate security seamlessly into their workflow. Simply put, vulnerability management entails continuously scanning, categorizing, prioritizing, and addressing software vulnerabilities. Adopting a DevSecOps approach proves beneficial as it automates these essential tasks.
Begin by identifying the software, pipelines, and container images utilized within your organization. This encompasses both user-facing software and internally maintained packages, development tools, and ongoing projects. Subsequently, assign responsibility to the respective teams for each of these components. While this process may be challenging and occasionally contentious, it’s essential to recognize that many teams will find value in clearly defining ownership boundaries. Keep track of this information using a method that suits your company’s preferences — whether it’s a kanban board, or tools like Airtable. The outcome is a comprehensive inventory of software, pipelines, and images, providing a basis for vulnerability assessments and clearly outlining the teams accountable for addressing any identified issues. Before integration DevSecOps, talk to all the development teams. Make sure, that they understand the following: • Why you are making these changes; • What will be required of them; • From now all members are responsible for updating their source, pipelines, and container images; • They will get all necessary time and resources to add those changes to their workflow; • This practice must be a company-wide effort in order to gain success.
The ‘shift-left’ involves the strategy of conducting testing, ensuring quality, and evaluating performance at the early stages of the development process. By implementing shift-left testing, teams can proactively identify potential challenges emerging in the development process that might impact performance or other aspects of the delivery pipeline, along with the security threats.
In the past, security testing used to occur in the end of the development cycle, following application testing. During this phase, security teams would conduct different types of analyses, including static analysis (SAST) and dynamic analysis (DAST). The outcomes of security testing would determine whether the application could proceed for deployment or if it needed to be sent back to developers for bug fixes. This approach led to prolonged development timelines or increased risks of deploying software without adequate security measures.
Shifting security left involves integrating security measures throughout the entire development lifecycle, as opposed to waiting until the end of the cycle. The objective is to embed security best practices into the software design and identify/resolve potential security issues and vulnerabilities as early as possible in the development process. This makes addressing security concerns easier, quicker, and more cost-effective.
Adding vulnerability scanning means integrating security tools into the your pipelines, that can automatically scan the code or detect vulnerabilities. This will help you avoid skipping the security checks and ensure that all the vulnerabilities are dealt with promptly.
By incorporating scanners into your existing CI/CD pipeline, developers gain valuable insights into vulnerabilities directly from the tools they’re already utilizing. This approach proves more effective than traditional methods such as group-meetings, as those can be distracting, whereas pipelines are integral to daily tasks. Scanners enable the automation of repetitive and error-prone tasks for the security team. Several scanners can be integrated, including:
We all know that we have to update out software packages, so they could meet recent security fixes. But updates can sometimes be a bit finicky and break software.
According to this, it’s wise to stick to good development practices when patching. Embrace DevOps principles like automated unit testing and integration testing. Especially pay attention to integration tests. They give you the confidence that fixing one thing isn’t causing a bunch of new issues. Automating these tests not only ensures a smoother patch release but also saves you from unnecessary manual work.
If you’re sharing cool standardized assets across teams, this approach ensures that everyone gets the memo when there’s an update. It’s like a friendly heads-up for the entire team.
After establishing all security practices as integral components of your default development process, ongoing monitoring becomes crucial. Code that appears secure today might harbor known security vulnerabilities in the future. It’s essential to monitor both the software already in operation and the code actively under development. Tools like Splunk, Datadog or Grafana can aid in this process.
When operating in a cloud environment, explore the monitoring tools offered by that environment. AWS provides CloudWatch Application Insights, while GCP offers Google Cloud Operations Suite. Leverage these tools to track malicious login attempts, unauthorized access, and errors originating from your application.
Third-party tools contribute value by simplifying the initiation process, enhancing accessibility for other teams, generating reports, and monitoring additional metrics.
In conclusion, adopting a DevSecOps approach seamlessly integrates security practices into DevOps, providing an efficient way to utilize CI/CD for vulnerability scanning and management within existing deployment pipelines. This process can be gradually enhanced by introducing basic scanning initially, acclimating development teams to DevSecOps, and progressively expanding the scope of vulnerabilities scanned.
Vulnerability management is just one facet where CI/CD serves as a force multiplier for development teams, enabling the construction of resilient systems and facilitating the delivery of high-quality code in less time with reduced risk. By harnessing the capabilities of your CI pipeline, you gain a significant differentiator and leverage point for your company.
If you’re eager to explore this approach, get started by booking a free consultation with opsRocks. It’s your promising next step.