How to Make DevSecOps a Reality

DevSecOps is an increasingly popular term; however, security vulnerabilities in software continue to proliferate. 2019 saw a surge in web application breaches shining a spotlight on the fact that DevSecOps remains elusive. The latest data from the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) identified that web application vulnerabilities had doubled in the last year alone.

With the rapid pivot to all things digital in 2020, the pressure on software and applications continues to intensify. Security needs to be a fundamental part of software development in our digitally dependent world. This requires organizations to focus on more than the speed of delivery and turn their attention to the quality of software as they try to accelerate the pace of digital transformation.

Achieving DevSecOps

Organizations striving to achieve DevSecOps need to adopt the following steps to embed security throughout the entire software development life cycle (SDLC).

Make Security a Priority From Day One

Security can’t be a bolt-on at the end of the SDLC if your goal is to make DevSecOps a reality. The recent Zoom failures put security flaws in the spotlight and showcased the risks resulting from delivering innovative services without factoring in security. Every member of the team spanning product developers to technical architects to scrum specialists must consider security for it to be an intrinsic part of each stage of development.

Achieving this transformation to DevSecOps means rethinking how to determine success. Many organizations measure it solely in terms of velocity of time to market without evaluating software quality. Developers remain reticent to incorporate security and turn attention to the quality of code. As a result, software is released more rapidly but with scant regard for the quality, resulting in many applications not being ready for mass adoption.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All With Security

Don’t make the mistake of approaching security as a monolith. Instead, accept that it’s wide-ranging, incorporating multiple different areas spanning authentication to access control to confidentiality to integrity to non-repudiation, to name a few. Based on this broad scope, a single approach can’t hope to address all the different facets of security.

Teams need to rethink security and look at what it means to them and what is essential to their users. This could be keeping customers’ personal identifying information confidential and establishing the types of attacks that are most likely to occur. For example, if your product is inside a corporate file, then compromised credentials and password attacks are a significant risk while denial-of-service attacks are unlikely.

Every member of the team needs to understand security threats and techniques, so they have enough knowledge to deal with recurring issues. Threat models can include an employee unwittingly doing something wrong to trying to protect data from government-sponsored cybercrime professionals. Focusing your training on these areas will help address the vast majority of problems and ensure applications are secure. It’s vital to view security as a science rather that than an art.

Don’t Overcomplicate Security

Security is viewed by many as a problem that can only be solved by highly skilled and paid consultants who specialize solely in security. While there is an absolute need for these skills when reviewing architectures and carrying out audits, there is no requirement for this level of expertise when it comes to basic security checks, such as ensuring that the latest release hasn’t changed the authentication mechanism.

The vast majority of threat models are solved using standard static and dynamic analysis tools. Once this is accepted, you can resolve 90% of security issues through a combination of tools testers and developers. This enables security to infuse every part of the development life cycle and puts an end to the practice of being an afterthought.

Conclusion

Once organizations incorporate these three steps in implementing DevSecOps, they can ensure that achieving security becomes a core component of software delivery. Failure to do so will see that it remains an afterthought and security vulnerabilities will continue to grow.