What are the best practices of DevSecOps?

What is DevSecOps?

DevSecOps stands for development, security, and operations. It is the practice of integrating security solutions within the DevOps process. It is similar to DevOps and it is just the addition of security into every step of the software development process. the goal and intent of DevSecOps are to build software on the mindset that “your security is our first priority” with the same speed and scale. It adds security at each stage of the software delivery process and protects DevOps with the shield of security.

Organizations that have used DevOps for the software delivery process are been able to deploy the applications at a faster rate. With the increasing concerns for security, organizations are now looking for security solutions to integrate security into their DevOps processes. DevSecOps, the integration of DevOps and security, is rapidly growing along with slowly changing the traditional notions of how, when, what, why, and where security controls should be implemented in a software development process. DevSecOps is also featuring a positive trend of considering security as an after-development activity. In this blog, we will be discussing best practices for organizations looking to implement DevSecOps in their software development process.

Best practices of DevSecOps:

1. Automation
2. keep it simple
3. Test everything
4. Security awareness from day1
5. Effective security process
6. Educate your developers

1) AUTOMATION:

In DevOps or a CI/CD pipeline, the speed at which the code is developed affects every other process. With new versions of code being pushed at a rapid speed, security controls are incorporated into the software development process at the early stages of DevSecOps. Hence, it is only reasonable to automate security testing so that your software development process does not slow down.

Whenever, when you are automating security testing, you should give proper thought to what you are actually automating. You can utilize automated static application security testing(SAST) & dynamic application security testing(DAST) tools so that your code, as well as the software application code, get scanned at regular intervals of time, for example, every night. In the end, automated security tests enable your team to prioritize the issues and dedicate more time to manual testing.

2) KEEP IT SIMPLE:

As your code gets complex, it can contain more security risks. When you are planning to accelerate the overall software development process by integrating development, operations, and security, complexity becomes a threat thereby reducing operational efficiency, predictability, and reliability. For example, there is no use in having five different databases when their work can be done by an individual database effectively.

3) TEST EVERYTHING:

Whenever it comes to the development of software and applications, a business cannot take a risk in the context of security issues. Throughout the development process as well as after the development is completed, you should use continuous testing and conduct regular code reviews and penetration testing.

Moreover, at times, you can also hire an external service provider to test your application. And some of the ways to improvise security in DevSecOps are by using static application security testing(SAST), dynamic application security testing(DAST), and penetrating testing.

4) SECURITY AWARENESS FROM DAY1:

Each and Every member of the operations and development team should be aware of secure coding principles and common exploit vectors so that the chances of security loopholes in an application’s source code are minimized. As a method of general security practice, you should give this responsibility to senior developers in your team to ensure that all junior developers are properly trained. In addition, training should be conducted multiple times a year, given your team’s workload and the complexity of applications being developed.

5) EFFECTIVE SECURITY PROCESSES:

The security processes should be clear and minimal but effective. Whenever it comes to documenting security processes, extra care must be taken to ensure that they are concise and minimal. During the software delivery process, organizations extensively document their security processes and end up creating inconsistent documents for the same security process. The documents which are unnecessary will be more threatening than necessary documents. They will progress as obstacles while implementing develops principles. As a minimum requirement, organizations must have a piece of information about the security plan, data incident response plan (DIRP), and other documents required by your local laws or regulations. organizations should closely work with their security team as well as the development team to work out the minimum security standards for MFAs, encryptions, passwords, authentications, ciphers, etc.

6) EDUCATE YOUR DEVELOPER:

Human errors are one of the biggest contributors to the coding errors in the software delivery process. And they are responsible for the risks or threats in the code. Everyone makes mistakes including developers and the developers should be trained to avoid errors in the code. While writing code all the developers should follow some code standards and guidelines. There are different code standards for different programming languages. They should use proper nouns for the class names, and verbs for the variables and they should know what is the use of that variable, and what it does. They should follow some principles such as duplication is evil(DIE) and do not repeat yourself(DRY) etc. Developers should avoid deep nesting, it makes complex for others to understand. They should aware of their functions, their use of them, what it does, and where and when to use them.

CONCLUSION:

Threats from hackers, cyber-attacks, and other security issues are common to all organizations — irrespective of their size or the market share. The consequences of a data breach are regulatory proceedings, multi-fold — financial losses, reputational loss, fines, etc. Being in this IT industry, it is the responsibility of the organization to advocate for DevSecOps and ensure that when an application is deployed in the market, the software application is tested rigorously and the best possible security practices have been implemented. There is no proper definition for the devsecops because it is a new methodology and still emerging. We should not ignore the security even in the CI-CD pipeline. By analyzing the market trends toward security, we can say that the adoption of DevSecOps will increase rapidly in the next few years.