DevSecOps is all about introducing security in the earlier phase of the application or software development cycle and continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment pipelines (CI/CD), which helps to minimize vulnerabilities and meet IT and business objectives related to security and compliance. It mainly focuses on securing applications and automating security in the DevOps process. Good DevOps Security Tools and strategies are required to determine risk tolerance and conduct a risk/benefit analysis.
DevSecOps is a practice of implementing security at every step in the DevOps Lifecycle with DevSecOps Tools. According to the traditional method where penetration tests and vulnerability assessments were done after the build, DevSecOps is based on the concept of integrating security assessments and vulnerability tests at each point of the CI/CD pipeline. DevSecOps tools help in implementing security within the DevOps workflow.
DevSecOps is the answer to integrating various enterprise challenges into a coherent and effective approach to software delivery. A central tenet of DevSecOps Tools is that security is an integral and essential element of DevOps – the method by which enterprises innovate at speed and scale.
As software continues to grow rapidly in IT, DevSecOps and DevSecOps Tools are becoming the cornerstone of competitiveness in the modern marketplace. To stay ahead, every business must evolve into an agile and innovative software delivery powerhouse. This evolution presents a crucial challenge for enterprise IT: accelerate development and innovation while maintaining robust security. Modern applications are often “assembled” from various components, which can include vulnerable open-source libraries and frameworks.
In the DevOps world, organizations are increasingly building applications at a rapid pace, sometimes neglecting critical security aspects. Cloud platforms and continuous delivery life cycles can bypass traditional security measures and checks, exposing applications to potential vulnerabilities.
Security Collaboration is key – it’s a shared responsibility across all roles within an organization. Companies must focus on enhancing the proficiency of their teams quickly, ensuring that security practices are integrated into every aspect of the DevOps process.
DevSecOps, it’s going to enhance the purpose of DevOps. Taken From Article, A Quick Guide to DevSecOps Pipeline
[Code]AI is a smart, automated, secure coding application that fixes security vulnerabilities in source code. Instead of listing a list of problems to resolve, it displays a list of solutions to review. Currently, it supports ten programming languages and can easily integrate with GitHub, GitLab, and other platforms.
It is a set of tools that provides automated software testing and static analysis solution. It can perform functional testing, end-to-end testing, security testing, and load and performance testing.
The Checkmarx Software Exposure Platform includes the static analysis tool CxSAST. CxSAST seeks to locate security flaws in both proprietary and open-source code. The programme is compatible with more than 25 coding and scripting languages.
It is a cloud-based software testing tool capable of performing static code analysis, dynamic code analysis, mobile application behavioral analysis, and software composition analysis. It helps to find security vulnerabilities, including detecting malicious codes and breaches caused due to the absence of some functionalities.
A security testing framework that uses Behaviour Driven Development concepts to create self-verifying security specifications.
Chef InSpec is an open-source framework used for testing and auditing applications and infrastructure. It compares the state's actual state with the system's desired state expressed via the Chef InSpec code. It detects violations and generates a report based on the findings.
It is a static code analysis tool. It has an integrated build tool that runs on the source code and converts the source code into an optimized security analysis format.
Log Management helps the organization and its environment function correctly as it helps to analyze and manage a large volume of logs generated in most organizations. Organizations need to discover and identify weak spots through either manual search or automated tools. Log Management tools help to serve this purpose. Many devices can be used for log management, monitoring, and alerting. Some of them are:
It is a log management and analysis tool that searches, monitors, and analyzes machine-generated data through a web-based GUI interface in near real-time. Analyzing and processing machine data to extract required information is the most important because it holds the key to finding the solution to different problems by recognizing data patterns, producing metrics, and diagnosing problems, thereby providing insights on operations-related processes.
With Splunk's help, one can generate dashboards, visualizations, graphs, reports, and alerts by capturing, indexing, and correlating real-time data. It is beneficial and efficient and reduces the time taken to find the problem by quickly aggregating large volumes of logs. Through its advanced log searching and automated analysis capabilities, it can deploy Splunk. The organization also provides on-premises, as well as Splunk Cloud hosting options.
It is a log management and analysis tool similar to Splunk used to collect, manage, and analyze log data. Moreover, it can generate dashboards, visualizations, graphs, reports, and alerts by capturing, indexing, and correlating data in real-time. SumoLogic also provides a web-based GUI interface. It can be availed as a cloud-based service or can be deployed on-premise. In addition to this, it can easily handle tremendous volumes of data and reduce the organization's time in performing the root cause analysis of the problem.
It is also like Splunk and even somewhat looks like Splunk. Scalyr is a cloud-based solution. It includes tools for log management, dashboard building, visualization, and set alerts.
An organization's approach with DevSecOps is to make every person responsible for the software delivery implement their own security practices. Click to explore more, The Ultimate Guide to DevSecOps
Monitoring tools help the organization have an eagle's eye view of their applications, deployments, infrastructure, and users, allowing them to quickly get the required information. These tools can have an auto-scaling feature, enabling the organization to scale the application with their changing needs.
ExtraHop aims to provide visibility into complex, high-performance infrastructure communications and help organizations determine congestions and hold-ups. It helps to widen the organizations' visibility by reconstructing failed data flows, thereby allowing the organization to find the primary cause of the problem and visualize the data flow across the network.
In a complex environment, Datadog, with its application performance management, monitors all aspects of the software infrastructure and helps the organization determine what's going on with different software components from the software internals' perspective. In datadog, an agent receives the data, which it incorporates with other collected data. So, datadog is more suitable for environments that do not generate data continuously.
It is similar to Datadog in many ways, except that the collected data is sent to the SignalFx server for processing. The results are then displayed in a dashboard. SignalFx is more suitable for environments where data do have a specific format, i.e., environments with custom data collection. With SignalFx, tracking lost data becomes easy and can quickly identify incorrect custom data.
An Application Security Management (ASM) framework unifies all the application security needs under one platform. Sqreen protects applications, increases visibility, and helps to secure code.
It is a configuration control solution that helps proactively monitor configurations across data-center to ensure these configurations comply with internal and external policies. It scans, identifies, profiles, and validates all configuration changes on the network to ensure that these configurations remain in known and trusted states.
Alerting Tools help organizations by providing and generating passive and active alerts. These are essential as whatever is observed by the Monitoring Tools and found suspicious should be conveyed to the appropriate personnel; else, having or not having Monitoring Tools will not matter if alerts are not generated. Alerting Tools also allow for teamwide communication and response. Some of the tools used are:
It aims to provide incident visibility and cross-team communications (both broad and targeted) of issues and their status. It offers transparent and meaningful information to the users working outside their domain to work quickly and efficiently.
It provides a SaaS-based full incidence response and on-call management platform, including the artificial intelligence-based automated response. PagerDuty also includes the feature of creating on-the-fly updates. It can easily integrate with Slack, AWS, and many more applications.
It is a cost-effective alternative to PagerDuty and VictorOps. It is an incident management platform with alerting and on-call management and can easily integrate with applications such as Slack, AWS, Splunk, and many more.
Alerta tool accepts alerts from Syslog, Prometheus, Nagios, metadata, etc. With a warning, a single sign can be associated with multiple services. Alerta can receive an alert from any monitoring tool that can trigger a URL request and scripts anything that can also send signals using the command-line tool.
This application security testing tool combines Static, Dynamic, and Interactive Application Security Testing (SAST, DAST, and IAST, respectively) to provide highly accurate and continuous information on your applications' security vulnerabilities.
It is a runtime application protection (RASP), the solution that makes software self-protecting to identify and block application attacks from within a running application and defends itself from vulnerabilities and attacks.
The two most important DevSecOps Dashboard Tools used in the DevOps Pipeline are:
1. Grafana
It is a multi-platform open-source analytics and interactive web-based visualization tool that deploys in combination with different time series databases such as Prometheus, Graphite, and InfluxDB. Grafana works with data stores and provides charts, graphs, and alerts.
It is an open-source data visualization dashboard. Kibana is a part of ELK Stack, which stands for ElasticSearch, Logstash, Kibana, and EFK Stack, which stands for ElasticSearch, Fluentd, and Kibana. It helps in providing visualization capabilities on top of the content indexed on an ElasticSearch cluster. It can be used on large volumes of data and can create bar graphs, lines, scatter plots, and pie charts.
The three most important tools used for DevOps Security in identifying, defining, and mitigating threats are as follows:
It is an open threat model platform that can create threat models and manage security risks throughout the entire software development life cycle using a template-based approach. IriusRisk applies security standards such as OWASP ASVS.
It is an automated threat modeling solution that enhances the organization's security solution and helps the security team to make proactive security decisions. ThreatModeler helps in identifying, predicting, and defining threats. It features automation, integration, and collaboration to determine where the organization should apply most efforts.
OWASP Threat Dragon is an open-source threat modeling tool from OWASP, which uses it to create threat model diagrams, possibly record threats, and decide mitigations. Its features include system diagramming and a rule engine to auto-generate threats and their comforts.
Threat intelligence enables security teams to identify and mitigate security risks, respond quickly to security incidents, and improve overall security posture.Click to explore about, Threat Intelligence for Security Monitoring and Incident Response
It helps maintain compliance, govern security, and enable security operations across public cloud platforms. It supports Azure, AWS, and GCP platforms.
These automate the security requirements based on technology in use, business needs, and compliance requirements across all software development stages. It helps identify critical areas of concern, eliminates vulnerabilities, and needs manual security testing.
It is an open-source security and compliance management solution based on the agile framework and can easily merge into the life cycle stages of software development. WhiteSource detects and remediates compliance issues by automating the entire process of open-source component selection, approval, and management.
It is a SaaS-based platform that delivers complete application security on a vast scale and with very high accuracy by combining automation, human intelligence, and artificial intelligence. It follows a distinctive approach and helps to quantify risk by finding the right balance between people, processes, and technology.
It is a SaaS platform that enables organizations to manage the security and compliance of their public cloud environments of any scale. It supports AWS, GCP, and Azure platforms.
It helps to check codes for bugs and errors. This tool is mainly used for static code analysis and supports more than 27 different programming languages. It can be integrated easily into the CI/CD pipeline and provides the developers with security feedbacks about their codes. Incorporating into the CI/CD pipeline allows the agile software development environment to run security checks for every commit or pull request (PR).
It is a next-gen Web Application Firewall (WAF) and Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) tool that helps the DevOps team ensure web application APIs protection from malicious activities and monitoring performance. Based on the SaaS model, it can integrate with other applications using an agent model. It supports AWS, GCP, IBM Cloud, and other cloud platforms. Signal Sciences agent works under Kubernetes, and the cloud engine automatically updates the signatures and rules related to the latest threats.
It is a set of integrated tools that help manage and test products' security. IriusRisk and BDD Security are the two primary modules that are present in Continuum Security. IriusRisk enables R&D teams to create a threat model, map it to security requirements, and manage the security risks throughout the Software development Life Cycle.
DevSecOps is injecting security into the DevOps lifecycle. Click to explore about, A Guide to DevSecOps Security Checklist
Let's see how and where to add security checks into a Continuous Delivery workflow.
As organizations benefit from agility, scalability, and even migrating to containers and microservices, Security and compliance parameters are often overlooked—some of the most critical security listings for container infrastructure.
When it comes to containers and microservices, all rely on a single kernel of the host machine. Most of the intrusions can be stopped if proper kernel security is implemented. This is really efficient for multiple reasons you probably know already, but from the point of view of security, it can be seen as a risk that needs to be mitigated
If an attacker compromises your host system, then container isolation and security safeguards won’t make much difference. Besides, containers run on top of the host kernel by design.
Distributed denial of service DDOS attacks are some of the most pervasive and difficult attacks to prevent. These kinds of attacks use many distributed endpoints and systems to flood a web domain, application, or service with an excess number of service requests or application calls.
Running penetration tests on software early in development is one way to thwart holes that enable L7 DDoS attacks.
The failed test requires a response. One such response is to build the software when the software fails the test automatically. If development can't move forward without fixing the security holes, the security holes will be fixed.
Developers should not have to do a lot of digging to uncover these methods. Use resources such as the Open Web Application Security Project ( OWASP ) clearly set these approaches apart and label each of them independently.
Many images are available on different repositories on the internet doing all kinds of useful stuff. Still, if you pull images without trust, authenticity, or vulnerability scanning, you are running arbitrary software on your machine.
Certain parameters must be followed before using that docker image:-
Your software needs sensitive information to run, such as user password hashes, server-side certificates, and encryption keys. The microservices deployed on containers are plenty and may constantly be created and destroyed.
You need an automatic and secure process to share this sensitive info.
Do not use environment variables for secrets; this is a widespread yet very insecure practice.
Do not embed any secrets in the container image. Like “The private key and the certificate were mistakenly left inside the container image.”
Deploy a Docker credentials management software if your deployments get complex enough, Do not attempt to create your own ‘secrets storage’ unless you know really well what you are doing.
As we build Docker container images, we need to know exactly what goes into each container layer. We also must ensure that containers installed by third-party vendors do not download and run anything at runtime.
DevSecOps is all about implementing security at every step in the DevOps Lifecycle. it is an approach to secure an application and infrastructure using DevSecOps Tools based on DevOps, making sure the application is less vulnerable and ready for user use. All things automated, and security checks started from the beginning of the application’s pipelines.
With DevSecOps Tools, it is easier to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities and deliver more secure products. It allows the organization to take a proactive approach toward security. DevSecOps Tools enables the development, safety, and operations teams to work closely and deliver better results within the same frame but with relatively fewer efforts. It also allows the organization to monitor the products for new security threats as DevSecOps tools can be easily merged into the CI/CD pipeline.