The OWASP DevSecOps Guideline can help us to embedding security as a part of the development pipeline.
The OWASP DevSecOps Guideline focuses on explaining how we can implement a secure pipeline and using best practices and introduce tools that we can use in this matter. Also, the project trying to help us for promoting the shift-left security culture in our development process.
This project helps any companies in each size that have development pipeline or in other words have DevOps pipeline. During this project, we try to draw a perspective of a secure DevOps pipeline and then improve it based on our customized requirements.
Initial steps
DevSecOps is all about putting security into DevOps. But to keep up with the pace of CI/CD security has to be injected early, into software writing and testing.
OWASP Proactive Controls lists the top 10 security controls every developer has to implement while coding any application. Consider this set as the starting point when you have to design, write or test code in the DevSecOps cycle.
You can also follow the OWASP Software Assurance Maturity Model (SAMM) to establish what to consider for security requirements (and more) according to your maturity level.
What to add in a pipeline
At first, we consider to implement the following steps in a basic pipeline:
- Take care secrets and credentials in git repositories
- SAST (Static Application Security Test)
- IAST (Interactive Application Security Testing)
- DAST (Dynamic Application Security Test)
- Infrastructure scanning
- Compliance check
We can customize the steps of our pipeline according to our Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) or software architecture and add automation progressively if we are just starting out. For instance we can switch from SAST/DAST to a regular test suite with built-in security controls or add an audit script checking for known vulnerable dependencies.
CI/CD is an advantage for SecOps, being a privileged entry point for security measures and controls. However, when using CI/CD tools to provide automation keep in mind that the tools themselves often expand your attack surface, so put security controls on building, deployment and automation software too.
The project page in OWASP website is here