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The Best Practices for DevSecOps: Technology for a Safer Future

DevSecOps, often known as SecDevOps, is a software development philosophy that encourages security adoption across the whole software development lifecycle. DevSecOps transcends a single technology or technique, but in general, it prioritizes security automation, communication, and scalability. The scope of this development philosophy comprises all SDLC-involved teams, including development, operations, and security.

In the past, the evaluation and validation of the apps’ security did not occur until the very end of the project. The release cycles were lengthier, ranging from months to years, thus the delay of security was less than ideal but tolerable. Nonetheless, the acceleration of software release cycles has rendered this historical development strategy inapplicable and impracticable. Today, it is routine to deliver new code to production every week or every day. This implies that security automation and scalability are no longer optional and must be implemented.

DevSecOps encourages the incorporation of application security operations from the earliest phases of development. Automation is essential for enabling this agile process. Awareness and security culture should take precedence, although some instruments will facilitate the automation of security.

DEVSECOPS BUSINESS BENEFITS

DevSecOps adoption often results in rapid business advantages. The first is a general enhancement in the apps’ security status. As DevSecOps prioritizes the early detection and mitigation of security issues, this expedites time-to-market and reduces development expenses.

They offer the following DevSecOps Best Practices in order to facilitate the adoption of a security automation culture:

Short and frequent development cycles.

Integrate security from the very start.

Containers and microservices are examples of technology that promote agility.

Instill a culture of proactive cooperation amongst SDLC-affected teams as an organizational goal.

As much as feasible, automate security to promote agile development.

  • FROM DEVOPS TO SECDEVOPS: THE 7 KEY STEPS

DevSecOps is the security blanket that the Application Security community has wrapped over the DevOps concept in response to the issues and pain points listed above.

DevSecOps is all about enhancing speed and efficiency via the use of automation, monitoring, and tight security integration. DevSecOps employs Secure SDLC tools while ensuring that release cadences are not interrupted.

  • Ineffective SAST calibration and erroneous positives

Utilize an IAST resource

The majority of software development teams lack specialized security experts; hence, non-specialists will incorporate security protection. Including AST tools in a developer’s toolchain enables the creation of secure code.

Use a more direct detection method, such as an Interactive-AST, to avoid the lack of precision and labor-intensive assessments of SAST results (IAST.) IAST tools do not create false positives, thus they do not need calibration or user inspection. Rank suppliers using the OWASP Benchmark coverage indicator.

With the use of IAST technologies, you may eliminate time-consuming code scanning processes and obtain real-time information on security risks while you develop. IAST tools aid in shifting security testing to the left.

  • A lack of collaboration between the information security team and developers

Integrate security problems into your normal bug tracking system.

Share your team’s bug tracking systems, such as Jira, with your security tools so that engineers may see security problems as routine chores. Create new bugs and tasks representing security vulnerabilities when they are discovered during application inspections and audits.

This guideline aims to ensure that developers are never required to leave their continuous integration and/or continuous deployment toolchain environment. As a consequence, more security vulnerabilities are fixed during the development period, which is preferable to doing so afterward.

  • Continuous deployment chaos

Define measurements and limits for quality assurance

In the same manner that code compilation failures should prevent deployment, so should security vulnerabilities. These automatic checkpoints, also known as “security controls,” verify that the code sent downstream in the CI/CD pipeline adheres to security criteria.

Create automated security checkpoints to enforce quality targets, and halt the pipeline if the number of security flaws exceeds a certain threshold. Consider options that are compatible with your deployment server (such as Jenkins).

It is essential to tailor the criteria to the team’s security maturity, beginning with a more flexible threshold and ending with highly rigid ones.

  • Manual penetration testing causes a bottleneck.

Automate defense against business logic defects

Business logic defects (also known as design flaws) are a significant class of security concerns that cannot be identified by detection techniques. Automate input validation using secure-from-the-outset solutions and architectures to reduce the bottleneck caused by manually examining business logic defects. Create feedback loops to assist penetration testers in focusing their efforts on the appropriate portions of the program. When the penetration testing team gets a detailed picture of the attack surface, their productivity increases.

Then, integrate the solutions’ output with auditing tools. The combination of automating the protection and linking it to audit tools enables the automation of the majority of human pen-testing tasks.

  • Insufficient visibility of security record

Improvements in reporting

Release versioning should not be an afterthought. Implement metrics and reports that monitor the evolution, quantity, and severity of each release’s bugs. Add security concerns to systems such as Jenkins Reports and Web Reports.

Identify measures that improve developer productivity and eliminate significant problems first. Instill a culture that incentivizes the steady decrease of security concerns and rewards good, perfection-oriented improvement trends. Infrastructure assets, including deployment descriptors and build scripts, should be subject to robust version control. The postmortem examination should also include information on security vulnerabilities.

  • Insufficient cloud support

Embedded safety is the answer.

Develop apps with agile security included. When deployment settings and cloud providers are constantly changing, apps with embedded security are able to adapt.

They believe in security as code and flaws as vulnerabilities. By embedding security throughout the earliest stages of development, your apps are born safe and stay so everywhere they go.

  • Systems that cannot be scaled

Linear scalability and cost-effectiveness

Ensure that your application’s security architecture is not a performance constraint. Seek security solutions with constant or linear scalability. Monitor the progress of the security solution’s additional delay and choose those that perform better.

Conclusion: Implement DEVSECOPS immediately.

The core of the aforementioned appealing guidelines and best practices for DevSecOps is the concept of allowing developers to write secure code. This entails providing your developers with a toolchain that gives useful feedback (few false positives), is integrated into their work cycle (security concerns as defects in the bug tracker), and fosters a culture where producing safe code is acknowledged as a priority.

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