What are the Challenges in DevOps Security?

DevOps has many advantages, but new risks and cultural shifts can create security problems that traditional security management practices and solutions cannot solve. These traditional approaches are often too slow or expensive to support automated software delivery or deployment to the cloud or containers. These are some of the challenges:

DevOps Environments are a target for cyber attackers. Privileged Access Management is one of the most challenging DevOps security issues. DevOps processes rely on using privileged credentials, both human and machine. These credentials are highly vulnerable to cyber-attacks and can be very powerful.

• Access to humans: DevOps professionals need privileged access across development and production environments.
• Machine access: Automated processes and tools need elevated privileges (or permissions) to access resources without human intervention. Examples include:
• Automation tools: Ansible Puppet, Chef, and Puppet
• CI/CD tools for Jenkins, Azure DevOps, and Bamboo
• Container management tools: Linux Containers (LXC), Docker, and Linux Containers (LXC).
• Container orchestration tools: Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, Pivotal, Cloud Foundry

Tier Zero assets such as Jenkins and Ansible have access to many other tools' credentials.

An attacker can obtain privileged credentials to gain full access to DevOps pipes, sensitive databases, or even the entire organization's cloud. It is a well-known fact that hackers are increasingly looking for privileged credentials, such as passwords, access keys, and tokens, as well as other secrets like API keys, encryption keys, certificates, and keys. DevOps environments can be hacked by attackers, which could lead to data breaches, crypto-jacking, and the destruction of intellectual property.

DevOps Teams Are Focused on Velocity, Not Security. These practices include leaving credentials and embedded secrets in applications and configuration files, reusing code from third parties without enough scrutiny, and adopting new tools and tools without adequately protecting infrastructure and tools.

Security Gaps Created by Tool-centric Approaches to Secrets Management DevOps Tools often include built-in security features to protect secrets. These features do not allow for interoperability and secure sharing of secrets across platforms, clouds, or tools. DevOps teams often use the built-in features in their tools to manage secrets. Because secrets cannot be managed or monitored consistently, this approach can make it difficult for you to protect them adequately.

Fatima is the marketing manager at ClickIt, a Sofware development company. She loves to travel, technology, and read novels.