What does the Log4j/Log4Shell vulnerability mean for your company?

Automating security for a CI/CD pipeline is essential in ensuring the safety and reliability of your applications. Security automation helps organizations automate the process of validating security policies, patching vulnerabilities, ensuring regulatory compliance with industry standards, and maintaining application integrity. When considering automating security for your CI/CD pipeline there are three main components you should pay attention to: Policy Validation, Vulnerability Scanning & Patching, and Regulatory Compliance & Governance. Policy Validation aims to ensure that all changes made during deployment align with existing organizational policies. Automated policy validation should use configuration management tools such as Ansible or Puppet to scan source code repositories like GitHub or GitLab for any changes made prior to deployments into production environments. This can be integrated into continuous integration pipelines so that any non-compliant changes are flagged before reaching an active environment. Vulnerability Scanning & Patching ensures that any known vulnerabilities which may have been introduced via a new code commit or change in existing infrastructure configurations will be identified prior to deployment allowing appropriate remediation action to take place such as blocking the release until fixes can be applied or automatically applying patches where possible before the change is deployed in production environments. These activities can also be automated by integrating scanning tools such as Nmap directly into CI/CD pipelines so they execute at each stage performing active scans on exposed networks and services before allowing progression through the pipeline toward production systems. Finally, Regulatory Compliance & Governance involves recognizing issues that require manual authorization from an administrator before consideration of an automated fix or deployment occurs (such as legal/privacy restrictions). It also includes monitoring external sources related to potential threats relevant specifically related to your organization (such as data breaches on other organizations), overseeing audit logs produced from actions taken within both source control platforms and cloud provider resources used within the CI/CD pipeline itself (for example developer keys used when accessing private resources). Automation here would include continually analyzing audit logs generated from activities performed throughout various stages of the delivery process permitting immediate detection of anomalies against expected behavior based on user roles assigned within each project being worked upon.

When it comes to security and automation, there's no such thing as too much. That's why it makes sense to take steps to automate security for your CI/CD pipeline. Automation can help reduce the time spent on manual tasks and ensure that your code is secure before it makes its way into production. Here are some tips for automating security for your CI/CD pipeline: 1. Use a static application security testing (SAST) solution to scan code for vulnerabilities. SAST solutions can help identify and fix known issues quickly and efficiently. 2. Run regular scans of your codebase using a dynamic application security testing (DAST) tool. This will help identify any new security issues in real time. 3. Use a container scanning tool to check all your images and containers for vulnerabilities or misconfigurations. This will help ensure that no malicious code can enter the pipeline. 4. Utilize an API scanner to detect potential API vulnerabilities in your applications, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and parameter tampering. 5. Implement a Web Application Firewall (WAF) to protect your applications from attacks like DDoS or brute force attacks. This can help prevent attackers from accessing sensitive information.

Using IaC to automate the provisioning of infrastructure removes that task from your devs or admins. They don't need to manually provision and manage infra resources such as operating systems, servers, and storage every time they start deploying or developing an app. With IaC, you provision via templates, which helps enforce rules, policies, and consistency. There are a bunch of cloud-supplier and third-party tools that automate the enforcement of rules and policies for IaC. All of them, to varying extents, aim at making sure your infrastructure is secure and compliant. A couple of the better-known solutions are HashiCorp Terraform and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Both are advanced-level platforms for implementing complicated applications. Terraform is an open-source tool that allows you to define and manage your infrastructure as code. You can define both cloud and on-prem resources in human-readable configuration files that you can version, reuse, and share. It includes resource planning, provisioning, and validation. Terraform can also be used with policy as code tools, such as Open Policy Agent, to enforce security policies on IaC. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform enables you to create, share, and manage automation, including for development and operations as well as security and network teams. The major cloud providers also enter the fray, of course. AWS CloudFormation enables you to model and provision both AWS and third-party application resources in your cloud environment. You can use either programming languages or a text file to model and provision automatically and securely for all application resources, regions, and accounts. Azure Resource Manager enables you to provision and manage infrastructure and configuration with declarative definition files using JSON templates. And Google Cloud Deployment Manager uses template and configuration files to deploy Google's Cloud Storage, Compute Engine, and Cloud SQL, configured to work together. Chef InSpec is an open-source tool with human- and machine-readable language for testing and auditing infrastructure as code. It includes a domain-specific language for defining tests and can be used to validate that infrastructure code meets compliance and security requirements. Pulumi bills itself as "guaranteeing the infrastructure software supply chain." It has integrations with the major CI/CD platforms, enabling validation of change through testing of built-in policies. And Spacelift's calling card says that it is "the most flexible IaC management platform."

IaC tools such as- Terraform Ansible AWS CloudFormation Azure Resource Manager Google Cloud Deployment Manager Chef Puppet SaltStack ( R ) Vagrant Promote the best practices which are necessary to make the process of building and configuring the infrastructure more competitive and effective, reducing the costs and effort involved.

Thanks for this informative article.

OWASP is nice, but very specific and currently limited. How about trying ISO-24772 for all?

Very good insights about correlation for security with performance.

Interesting positioning and way of thinking, thank you very much for the article!