Find out more about relations between DevSecOps and the continuous delivery pipeline (CDP) and their role in supporting the safety measures of agile software development.

What do we mean by concept “DevSecOps”?

The aforementioned concept is about the safety principles. These principles involve implementing safety in the earlier stages of the software development life cycle (SDLC). This concept is based on the developments and innovative methods of the single DevOps approach. Applying DevOps goodies to software protection makes security review active at every stage of the developmental process. Usually, security was considered as a non-essential system, which often led to negative consequences. InfoSec often works with the group of devs in the time of the later stages of the SDLC. Despite the nobility of their efforts, it is very unpleasant to reveal vulnerabilities in the system at the later stages of the SDLC.

DevSecOps supports the implementation of traditional safety measures as ameaningful part of the SDLC. One of the basic concepts while operating DevSecOps is continuous integration (CI), which usually goes together with another concept like continuous delivery (CD). CI and CD provide extensive testing and validation of code during agile development. DevSecOps provides a similar working principle. However, according to DevSecOps, security needs to be embedded in the product within the period of the developmental process, and not implemented at the final stage.

The advantages of DevSecOps

In a few words, security where the main role is assigned to safeguarded and reliable software without which a technological civilization could be in danger.

These days many organizations and governments are frequently challenged by some kind of serious threats well known as security breaches. Recently, several large organizations have been hacked, leading to disastrous consequences and sudden resignations of top managers. Failing executives end up in news headlines. It leads in its turn to decline in interest services provided by your company.

The principles of DevSecOps facilitate joint cooperation, and their implementation involves transferring the work to security professionals as early as possible. The value of this approach is easy to determine when analyzing the cycle time prior to and after its implementation. Before implantation of DevSecOps, a product may be considered unsafe at the very nick of time, which leads to many expensive iterations. After implantation of DevSecOps, the best safety specifications are initially incorporated into the product. Although it remains probability to detect unexpected problems at the very nick of time, however, the likelihood of such an outcome is low.

Therefore, the focus is on how to successfully work in the era of DevSecOps. For professionals who are forced to use traditional security measures, DevSecOps is an icing on the cake. There is no pre-developed universal solution in DevSecOps. Here, a set of specific solutions depends on the technical stack used and the architecture.

Generally, a well-thought-out approach to safety raises the company’s market degree of belief and inspires customer confidence. From here we smoothly move on to how the concept of DevSecOps is related to continuous everything paradigm (CEP).

DevSecOps and CEP

Imported OSS libraries are as vulnerable in terms of security as the programme code.

Taking all the foregoing into account it’s worth mentioning that the main advantage of DevSecOps is that vast majority of manual code reviews don’t scale even though a lot of programmers write a fair amount of code day by day.

DevSecOps and continuous everything paradigm (CEP) complement each other extremely well. DevSecOps works with the CEP. It provides continuous results with our coding.

It is worth mentioning that CDP are realizations of the CEP. They aid in verifying every commit of our programmers. Integrated continuous security approaches become more complex when your bussiness becomes bigger. Integration of automated security checks with the CDP provides you with early notifications. They also provide you with the ability to keep track of weak points in the security.

Unit testing and static code analysis are performed extremely close to the source code. It’s worth noting that the checks are performed without execution of the programme code.

The essential point to remember is that in the test environment, the cost of correcting defects remains minimal, in the intermediate environment becomes average, and in the working environment, it is at the maximum. Therefore, do not neglect means for modular testing and static safety analysis. Such checks are cheap, run quickly and help avoid problems in the next stages of the pipeline.

Continuous Security Implementation: Unit Testing

The first stage in the realization of continuous security is the realization of modular security tests.

Components are the smallest elements into which a product can be divided. It is desirable to test them with unit tests. It’s important to stress that security unit tests should not be ignored.

SAST

Static code analyzers identify not only deviations from programming recommendations, but also code vulnerabilities, as well as in potentially unsafe imported libraries. The approach is known as SAST. SAST stands for static analysis security testing. With the help of modern tools, it can be effectively integrated into a CDP. Always use a static analysis security testing scanner that is compatible with the selected language.

Please note: SAST oftentimesgives false positive results, so you need to plan the level of permanent storage so that the pipeline can “remember” them. False positive results can lead to the fact that developers generally stop responding to error messages in the pipeline, which is dangerous. If after checking you have identified some error as false positive, do not allow the pipeline to issue this error again. Otherwise, this may result in the command disabling SAST or ignoring all SAST errors in the pipeline.

DAST

The subsystem consists of components that are loosely coupled. It is a good idea to deploy these subsystems and then test them for weak spot in your security system. In this case, the approach is DAST. The main difference between DAST and SAST is that in the first approach, its tools analyze the app externally in its working condition. This allows you to simulate a situation when an attack is made. Since the DAST scanners interact with the application from the outside, they are not independent of specific languages.

Both approaches have their own unique advantages. It is very important that both of them are included in the security programme. In order to get notifications, you can integrate these approaches with the CDPs.

DevSecOps — step forward a new secure future

Today, safety (as well as quality) is a great concern for everyone. And you shouldn’t trust homebrew experts. Corporations and executives who allowed themselves to be persuaded and continued to practice reactive approaches faced with unpleasant consequences and were forced to spend money on updating security strategies.

Traditionally, security specialists work in separate divisions whose capabilities are restricted by the total quantity of their employees.

Instead, implement DevSecOps disperse agile approach and teach the teams how to manage work themselves.

In addition, give the group of devs the responsibility to ensure that there is no incoherence between them and the information infosecurity group.

The DevSecOps community is actively developing. In these conditions, ensuring safety isn’t only a preferable task of your bussiness, but also the most relevant and valuable task for introducing a CDP. An effective combination of continuity and security promises us a bright future in software delivery.