DevSecOps Best Practices: A Practical Guide

The software development life cycle (SDLC) process continues to present significant security risks to organizations and their customers. By proactively integrating security at the heart of application development, DevSecOps transforms how businesses identify and manage potential vulnerabilities when developing software. DevSecOps ensures that organizations can effectively mitigate potential risks and vulnerabilities within their software applications, helping them to align more easily and cost-effectively with customer requirements, regulatory or legislative mandates and executive orders.

This comprehensive guide provides an overview of the critical role of DevSecOps, the key steps required to integrate security into your DevOps workflow successfully, DevOps tools and more.

What Is DevSecOps?

DevSecOps, (“development, security and operations”) is an application framework that automates how security is integrated into every stage of the SDLC. Covering everything from initial design all the way through to deployment, DevSecOps enables organizations to reduce the risks created by releasing code that may have security vulnerabilities. By doing so, it has revolutionized how software is created, deployed and maintained.

The Value of DevSecOps

With the accelerating pace of product development and the increasingly central role of applications in today’s businesses, the need for secure software is growing. The urgency of securing the SDLC and software at an earlier stage is more important than ever. Alongside the risks presented within organizations’ own systems, they must also address those created by the supply chain, as approximately 70% of applications with third-party code contain flaws. In addition to malicious code, software supply chains are also increasingly impacted by software vulnerabilities.

By bringing security professionals, teams from operations, and developers into the software delivery cycle and key tools and processes,  DevSecOps ensures that security becomes more of a shared responsibility. This means that it is embedded at every stage and saves companies the headache of attempting to identify and address issues at the end of the process, when preparing applications for production. In this way, DevSecOps plays a critical role in reducing the risks associated with software development, helping to drive a culture of collaboration among security practitioners, operations teams and software developers.

Integrating Security into the DevOps Workflow

“Baking security in” throughout the DevOps workflow means that security stays central to every aspect of developing applications. This integration advances software security, increases speed to market, reduces the risk of data breaches and supports the development of technology that is both high quality and highly secure.

There is a significant cost benefit to embedding security into the DevOps workflow too. Because security issues are recognized and addressed as early in the process as possible, the need for costly and time-consuming amendments and last-minute changes is removed. This streamlines the entire process, accelerating time to market. The reduction in delays also helps to enhance software companies’ reputations and relationships with customers.

With regulatory demands increasing in many industries, ensuring that security is at the heart of the SDLC also makes it easier to demonstrate and achieve compliance with regulatory requirements. Collaboration between different teams across a business also helps to reduce the security risks created by working in silos.

Types of DevSecOps Tools

Each type of DevSecOps tool addresses a particular area of security in the SDLC. By bringing together the right mix of technologies, organizations can build a robust security approach capable of addressing vulnerabilities at every stage.

• Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

  SAST tools analyze an application’s source code or compiled code without executing it,. by scanning the codebase to identify potential security vulnerabilities through techniques such as cross-site scripting (XSS) and insecure cryptographic practices.

• Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST)

  By interacting with the application through its exposed interfaces, DAST tools test it while it’s running in order to simulate attacks and malicious user behavior. This enables them to identify runtime vulnerabilities and weaknesses, and perform actions, such as XSS and SQL   injection, to uncover security flaws.

• Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

  By scanning an application’s dependencies, libraries and frameworks to find known vulnerabilities, outdated versions and license compliance issues, SCA tools help to address the security risks associated with using open-source and third-party components in an application. SCA tools work by maintaining a database of known vulnerabilities, comparing the application’s bill of materials against the database and providing alerts and recommendations for updating or patching vulnerable components.

• Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC)  Security Tools

  By scanning IaC files to identify misconfigurations, insecure settings and policy violations, IaC tools ensure the secure provisioning and configuring of infrastructure resources defined through code. By using static analysis techniques to parse and compare the code against best practices and security benchmarks, these tools make recommendations for remediation and can block the deployment of insecure infrastructure.

• Penetration Testing

  Also known as pen testing, penetration testing is an ethical cyber security assessment method aimed at identifying and safely exploiting vulnerabilities in computer systems, applications and websites. By employing the tools and techniques used by real cyber adversaries, pen testing helps to identify weaknesses in authentication, authorization, input validation and other security controls. Integrating these tools into the DevOps workflow enables organizations to automate security checks, identify and remediate vulnerabilities early, and ensure that security is consistently incorporated throughout the development process. This allows teams to find and address issues before they affect production, helping to reduce the risks of security breaches.

Key Steps for Embedding Security in the DevOps Workflow

Complete the following steps to maximize how successfully your organization integrates security within your DevOps workflow.:

• Address Your Organizational Culture First

Making any changes without adapting your company culture will put your efforts at risk of failure. This means ensuring that security is built in at every stage of the SDLC process. Achieving such integration requires your leadership team to be fully invested in the change and for their investment to filter down to every level of the business.

• Implement Security-as-Code

As a core DevSecOps principle, security-as-code involves building security checks and controls into your codebase and into the continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline. This keeps security right at the core of your software development process.

• Make the Most of Automation

Automation at each stage of DevOps and software development can simplify and enhance security, reducing the risks of human error. By leveraging automated security tools, your teams can more quickly make changes, uncover vulnerabilities and ensure compliance. Alongside coding, other areas that can benefit from the use of automation include reviewing, testing and deployment.

• Use Continuous Monitoring

By using dedicated tools to monitor continuously in real time, companies can ensure that nothing gets overlooked at each stage of the development process and that potential issues are resolved before they turn into problems.

• Leverage Incident Response and Threat Modeling

By planning ahead for incidents and threats, your teams will be in a better position to respond effectively. You can achieve such preparation by implementing effective incident response planning and threat modeling to uncover potential weaknesses in your processes and system architecture. As a result, your organization will be better, able to recognize issues in advance and recover from any issues that do result in an incident.

Common DevSecOps Challenges

While each organization will have different issues and concerns, some common obstacles have the potential to undermine the impact of DevSecOps.

• Budgetary Constraints

The required changes in technology and increased practical burdens on internal teams can present significant cost challenges to companies seeking to make their software and development process more secure.

• Lack of Knowledge

A lack of specialized security knowledge is a common DevSecOps implementation challenge. This can have a direct impact on the effectiveness of the teams involved with DevSecOps, not only by slowing down the SDLC but also by undermining security standards.

• Cultural Issues

Organizational resistance to change can be a major pitfall for organizations seeking to adopt a DevSecOps strategy. This may be due to entrenched attitudes or a refusal to recognize the value of prioritizing security.

• Speed vs. Security

This key challenge involves achieving the critical balance between developing software at pace and maintaining a high level of security. While the DevOps team is focused on speed of release, security teams are dedicated to ensuring that software is secure. The demand for fast feedback loops to quickly find and fix issues can also create conflicts with more traditional approaches and practices.

• Tech Overload

DevSecOps enables the use of a range of tools, but this technology can itself become a problem for teams. The teams may become overwhelmed by the use of many different types of tools, or by the varying toolsets used across different teams. Adopting a range of tools can also create an inconsistency in training and standards, with the potential to introduce additional delays and security risks.

• Integrating Different Tools

Integrating a range of different security tools into an already established business infrastructure can be complex and time consuming. Balancing the varying requirements for each technology and managing the issues they present can add to the burden on already pressured internal teams.

Addressing these varied challenges requires a range of strategies. However, an experienced AppSec provider can work with you to address all these pitfalls by enabling a strategic approach and maximizing your technology investment.

Upscale Your AppSec Program with Kroll

As part of Kroll’s application security services, our product security experts assist clients in the end-to-end design, building and deployment of effective and sustainable application security programs. Our experts provide engineering and security teams with the tools, processes, guidelines and confidence required to offer innovative products to their internal associates and external customers without exposing them to security vulnerabilities.

In addition to assisting security teams in implementing SAST and/or DAST, our goal is to help organizations adopt programs that will enable them to manage the security of their application portfolios effectively while staying adaptable enough to address changes in business needs, technologies and operating environments.

Our elite team draws on insight gained by conducting more than 100,000 hours of cyber security assessments every year. They carry well over 100 security certifications encompassing offensive security, cloud, penetration testing, and mobile and web testing. Handling over 1,000 incident response cases worldwide every year enables us to leverage the latest frontline threat intelligence and adversary mindset in every engagement.

Our capabilities span all aspects and are designed to help ensure the security of your software and infrastructure. From application security strategy and program development to application threat modeling, and from tooling and automation to agile pen testing—in addition to our Security Champions Program to secure the SDLC review—our services are designed to upscale your AppSec program with strategic application security services that are aligned with your team’s culture and needs, merging engineering and security into a nimble unit.

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