Harnessing the Power of Secure Coding Practices for Effective CI/CD Security

The article discusses the security implications of Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines and how development practices can compromise them. It highlights common ways that pipelines can be compromised, such as unauthorized code commits, introduction of unsafe third-party dependencies, and accidental or deliberate modification of sensitive files. The article also provides practical resolutions for these issues, including branch protection, use of CODEOWNERS file, signed commits, secret detection CI jobs, shift-left security approach, software composition analysis (SCA), permissions management, anomaly detection, and real-time threat detection engines like Arnica. The article emphasizes the importance of vigilance from developers and automated tools to protect against these risks and ensure secure use of CI/CD pipelines.