According to the “2017 DevSecOps Community Survey,” by Sonatype, almost 60 percent of the respondents consider security to be an inhibitor to DevOps agility, while more than 50 percent of developers say they do not have sufficient time to allocate to security.
Hence arises the need for enhanced security automation in DevOps. Security automation helps in refining and improving application security by reducing the time taken for detecting an attack and responding to any identified issue.
Tools for Security Automation
Organizations looking to implement DevSecOps by integrating security into their DevOps pipelines have an increasing number of tools such as Tanium, InSpec, Splunk, Checkmarx, Metasploit, FireEye and Contrast Security for security analysis and testing throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC), right from source-code analysis to post-deployment monitoring.
For security to become an integral part of the DevOps workflow, which includes continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), automation is essential. As most organizations are pushing tens of new versions of code into production for each application every day, it becomes necessary to embed security controls early in the development life cycle, which is possible only through automation.
Around 40 percent of the 2,300 IT professionals surveyed have said that they have deviated from the waterfall development model, where automated security tests are run just ahead of production, by running them throughout the development life cycle.
Using SAST Tools
Static application security testing (SAST) tools help in scanning code and providing instant feedback to developers on security-related issues who, in turn, can remediate the potential vulnerabilities as part of the standard workflow.
However, static analysis may not be alone sufficient for detecting all problems in the code.
Automating DAST
Automated dynamic application security testing (DAST) searches for vulnerabilities in real time while the application is running and is really a major improvement over static analysis that only looks for potential security issues in the code.
Inclusion of automated security analysis helps in limiting the introduction of vulnerable code earlier in the development life cycle. The runtime analysis of the issues detected through automation enables developers to prioritize the code problems that need to be fixed.
Red Teaming and Threat Modeling
Organizations have begun to employ the concept of red teaming, a military terminology, by having separate teams to simultaneously take up attacking the code and performing security testing respectively. This ensures that any potential flaws are uncovered in the production stage itself and code fixes are pushed as soon as possible.
Threat modeling is critical for the success of DevSecOps as it leads developers to look at software from an attacker’s perspective. While the threat modeling process cannot be automated, it helps in identifying flaws in the application design and architecture better than other security approaches.
Are You Ready for Automation?
Organizations can automate the provisioning and commissioning of DevSecOps environments to achieve a predictable, consistent and secure service delivery.
While the goal of DevOps Services automation is to help development teams in faster deployment and monitoring of applications, DevSecOps adds security to the automation and contributes to enhancing the quality and efficiency of the software.
DevSecOps adoption provides organizations with a strong foundation for mitigating risk in a proactive, efficient and streamlined manner.
