What is DevSecOps?

DevSecOps introduces security to DevOps, so it is an app development practice that includes and automates security integration into every stage of the software development process. Initially, security was introduced into the software development process during the final phases, making it seem like an afterthought. This meant the probability of having loopholes and vulnerabilities in the final product was extremely high. DevSecOps integrates application and infrastructure security into the applications at the microservices level, ensuring cheap and simple patches/fixes are included in the simplest part of the software before merging and deployment. Let’s analyze DevSecOps in detail to get a picture of how it works.

How DevSecOps Works

DevSecOps models simply introduce and integrate security practices in the DevOps workflow. So beginning from the basics, the DevOps workflow looks something like this.

1. Planning: Project scope definition after business owners, developers, and operations teams discuss and agree.
2. Coding: Actual project implementation done in small increments and stored/released via a central repository to track and audit changes.
3. Building: Building is done automatically via pipelines set by devops engineers to create artifacts for testing and eventual deployment.
4. Testing: Each artifact undergoes several testing procedures (unit, integration, performance, UAT, etc.) as part of the CI/CD pipelines.
5. Deployment: Once each artifact passes the testing stage, it is deployed into a simulated real-world environment and eventually the actual business operations with the required infrastructure accompanying it declared as code. There is also the possibility of rollbacks if failure occurs.
6. Monitoring: Monitoring of the software’s performance, user feedback, and infrastructure utilization through continuous feedback loops helps to identify areas for improvement in future application versions.

DevSecOps pushes for security in this workflow by hardening the following areas.

Pipeline Hardening

Since CI/CD pipelines are critical automation aspects of DevOps, DevSecOps introduces tests and security checks in them using techniques like container security scanning, SAST (Static Application Security Testing), DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing), dependency analysis, and vulnerability assessment.

Infrastructure Hardening

Infrastructure components like the database and network also undergo stricter security strengthening using techniques like applying secure access controls, using the principle of least privilege, data encryption, implementing secure network architectures, and regular patching. Since automation in DevOps requires configuring infrastructure as code, IaC tools can also be used to enforce and automate security configurations.

Application Hardening

For application hardening, the dev team has to adhere to secure coding guidelines and practices. The organization also has to implement automated security testing and regular code reviews to help catch and fix vulnerabilities early.

DevSecOps Tools and Technologies

DevSecOps tools are the software solutions used in the three hardening processes described above. They fall into these seven categories.

IaC Tools

Infrastructure as Code tools help to manage and provision the underlying components that support the application in code format instead of manual configurations. These definition files can also be used to automatically apply security patches, and some IaC tools enforce security configurations by default.

SAST (Static Application Security Testing) Tools

Static Application Security Testing tools inspect the source, byte, and binary code to identify potential vulnerabilities before the software is run.

DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing) Tools

As compared to SAST, DAST tools analyze the application at run time (Dynamic) by simulating external attacks and identifying security vulnerabilities.

Container Security

Once applications are containerized, which is an initial step in DevOps, container security tools come in to scan each container image for security issues, monitor runtime activity, manage container deployment, and provide control/visibility across network communications. Typical examples are Aqua, Clair, and Twistlock.

Container Networking

With services like load balancing, network segmentation, and service discovery, container networking tools help to manage and secure communications between containers.

Security Monitoring

These tools collect, integrate, filter, and link data in an effort to identify security breaches that might exist in the application. Some common monitoring tools include Prometheus, the ELK stack, and Splunk.

Incident Response

If undetected vulnerabilities lead to a successful attack, incident response tools provide a systematic approach to handle and manage the crisis.

DevSecOps Components

To ensure DevSecOps and its strengthening techniques work, DevOps teams must practice these components.

Code Analysis

This practice involves studying the application’s code to find vulnerabilities and ensure adherence to best security practices.

Security Training

Hackers and bad actors continuously study systems to find vulnerabilities, so developers and operations teams should equally get up to speed on the latest security guidelines to always be a step ahead. This training is particularly important during code analysis.

Threat Modeling

This component incorporates security training, which helps DevSecOps teams to investigate and predict security vulnerabilities that might come up before and after application deployment to inform fixes in updated versions.

Change Management

Change management tools help DevSecOps teams to track, manage, and report software or requirement changes to help address any security vulnerabilities that might arise due to these changes.

Compliance Management

Tools like AWS CloudHSM can help developers ensure their applications comply with privacy, security, and tamper-proof regulations, such as PCI and HIPAA.

Benefits of DevSecOps

Since every member of the development and operations teams writes the application and infrastructure code with security in mind, these benefits emerge.

Better Proactive Security Implementation

DevSecOps addresses any vulnerability issues as soon as they’re discovered before critical dependencies in the code and microservices are introduced, making it an effective proactive approach to developing market-ready software.

Quick and Cost Effective Software Deployment

Fixing security vulnerabilities later after the application is complete is costly and time consuming. Handling this factor early on during production eliminates unnecessary rebuilds and duplicate code reviews.

Quick Vulnerability Patching

Since all or most of the vulnerability loopholes are identified and fixed early during coding, the final software version that is put into production has a lower capability of being exploited without patches being implemented to cover all possible unauthorized access points.

Conclusion

Like with DevOps, the primary challenges to DevSecOps adoption are complexity of the processes/tools and a cultural change resistance. However, this ideology’s benefits far outweigh the downsides because it helps software development teams to produce artifact builds that are market ready and meet all strict security and data protection requirements. With DevSecOps, security is no longer an afterthought, it is a core aspect of business operations and transactions in software.