table of contents
- 01.What is DevSecOps?
- 02.The Importance of DevSecOps
- 03.Benefits of implementing DevSecOps
- 04.Disadvantages of implementing DevSecOps
- 05.How to achieve DevSecOps
- 06.Specific steps for implementing DevSecOps
- 07.Tools used in DevSecOps
- 08.summary
DevSecOps is a concept that incorporates security into all software development processes from the beginning.
By adopting DevSecOps, it is possible to identify and fix vulnerabilities from the early stages of development, reducing rework in later processes and enabling the continuous provision of highly secure products without sacrificing development speed.
This article provides a clear explanation of DevSecOps, from its overview to the benefits of its implementation and specific ways to put it into practice.
â–¼What you will learn from this article
- DevSecOps Overview
- The Importance of DevSecOps
- Advantages and disadvantages of DevSecOps
- How to practice DevSecOps
If you are a company or organization that wants to build a secure and speedy development system, please read this.
This article also introduces LANSCOPE Professional Services’ “Vulnerability Assessment” service as a support service for realizing DevSecOps.
What is DevSecOps?
DevSecOps is a concept and practice that incorporates security into the entire software development lifecycle, including planning, design, development, testing, release, and operation.
By considering security from the early stages of development, rather than conducting security checks at the final stage as in the past, it is possible to reduce rework in later processes (returning to previous processes and redoing work).
As a result, more secure applications can be brought to market without sacrificing speed.
Differences from DevOps
The biggest difference between DevOps and DevSecOps is where security is positioned in the development process.
DevOps focuses on improving collaboration between development and operations teams and accelerating the development-to-release cycle.
On the other hand, DevSecOps aims to incorporate security into the DevOps framework and ensure safety from the early stages of development.
The table below outlines the differences between the two.
| DevOps | DevSecOps | |
|---|---|---|
| Main Objective | ・Rapid release through collaboration between development and operations | ・Fast and secure release |
| Security | ・Mainly carried out at the final stage of the development cycle | -Continuous implementation at all stages of the development cycle |
| Who is responsible? | ・Development team and operations team work together | ・Development, operations, and security teams work together |
| approach | ・Efficiency through automation | ・Automate security testing and integrate it into the development process |
In this way, while DevOps aims to “release faster,” DevSecOps is an approach that aims to “release faster and more safely.”
The Importance of DevSecOps
In the traditional development model, where security assessments are conducted immediately before release, fixing discovered vulnerabilities takes a great deal of time and money, which is a major factor in release delays.
In the worst case scenario, a product may be released with vulnerabilities overlooked, leading to security incidents such as large-scale information leaks.
DevSecOps plays a vital role in preventing these risks from occurring.
By implementing DevSecOps, it becomes possible to implement continuous security measures from the early stages of development and identify and fix vulnerabilities early.
Furthermore, by incorporating security assessments and vulnerability response into development and operation processes, it is expected that continuous vulnerability management will become established.
Security assessment is not something that can be completed only during development. Even after the system goes into operation, new vulnerabilities may emerge as the system is modified, new features are added, or updates are made.
In DevSecOps, it is important to continuously perform security checks, taking into account changes that occur during these operational phases.
As a result, we will be able to continuously provide highly safe products without compromising development speed.
Benefits of implementing DevSecOps
By adopting DevSecOps, you can expect the following benefits:
- Early detection of security vulnerabilities
- Expected to improve development speed and reduce rework
- Increased security awareness across the team
- Strengthened compliance and governance
Let’s take a closer look.
Early detection of security vulnerabilities
Incorporating security testing early in the development process increases the chances of finding vulnerabilities early in the coding process.
Early detection allows for correction before the problem becomes more complicated, which can lead to significant reductions in correction costs.
Expected to improve development speed and reduce rework
With the conventional method of conducting security checks at the final stage of development, if a problem were to be discovered, it would result in significant rework.
However, with DevSecOps, security checks are performed continuously in parallel with development, reducing rework and, as a result, increasing the overall speed of development.
Increased security awareness across the team
By adopting DevSecOps, security checks are carried out at every stage of the process, including planning, design, development, testing, and release, so that not only the security team but everyone, including developers and operations staff, will develop with security in mind.
As a result, we can expect to see an improvement in the security level of the entire organization.
Strengthened compliance and governance
Automated security checks and logging make it easier to provide objective evidence of compliance with industry regulations and standards such as PCI DSS and GDPR.
As a result, not only can the amount of work required to respond to audits be reduced, but the risk of compliance violations can also be expected to be reduced.
Disadvantages of implementing DevSecOps
While there are many benefits to adopting DevSecOps, there are also some points to be aware of and disadvantages to be aware of when implementing it.
- Cultural change is likely to be resisted
- Tool implementation requires cost and learning time
Let’s take a closer look.
Cultural change is likely to be resisted
Adopting DevSecOps requires not only changes in tools and processes, but also a change in organizational culture.
Developers, operations personnel, and security personnel must work together beyond the boundaries of their respective roles and share the awareness that “security is not the responsibility of just one department, but is a shared responsibility.”
Therefore, it is important to recognize in advance that resistance from teams accustomed to traditional ways and siloed structures between departments may become barriers to progress with change.
Tool implementation requires cost and learning time
To put DevSecOps into practice, it is necessary to introduce various tools to automate vulnerability diagnosis and security testing.
Utilizing these tools requires not only financial costs such as license fees, but also the learning costs and time required for team members to master the tools.
Therefore, when introducing DevSecOps, it is important to incorporate initial investment and training periods into your plan in advance and create a reasonable operational plan.
How to achieve DevSecOps
To successfully implement DevSecOps, it is important to correctly understand concepts such as “shift left” and “shift right” and incorporate them into development and operations processes.
Let’s examine each of these ideas in turn.
Shift Left
“Shift left” is a concept that involves incorporating security measures at an earlier stage in the development lifecycle, i.e., at the planning, design, and coding stages, which correspond to the “left side” of the process diagram.
By checking for vulnerabilities while developers are writing code and identifying threats during the design phase, problems can be found and fixed early.
As a result, it is possible to reduce rework in later processes and significantly cut the time and cost required for corrections.
Shift Light
While shifting left is important, so-called “shifting right,” or security measures in the production environment after an application is released, is equally important.
ShiftRight builds a system that allows us to respond quickly to unknown vulnerabilities and new attack methods that could not have been anticipated during the development stage through continuous monitoring, threat detection, and incident response in the production environment.
Specific steps for implementing DevSecOps
The key to successful DevSecOps implementation is to adopt it in stages.
Here we will explain the specific steps for introducing DevSecOps in five steps.
- Step 1: Cultivating a culture and changing mindsets
- Step 2: Integrating security into your CI/CD pipeline
- Step 3: Selecting and implementing the right tools
- Step 4: Conduct Threat Modeling
- Step (5): Continuous monitoring and improvement
Let’s take a closer look.
Step 1: Cultivating a culture and changing mindsets
The first step to successfully implementing DevSecOps is to ensure that the entire organization, from management to the development team, correctly understands the importance of DevSecOps and builds a culture where there is a shared awareness that “security is everyone’s responsibility.”
To achieve this, it is essential to actively promote communication between teams, such as by conducting security training and providing a forum for cross-departmental information sharing.
Step 2: Integrating security into your CI/CD pipeline
It is also essential to review your existing CI/CD pipeline and plan what security checks you will perform automatically at what stages.
A CI/CD pipeline is a system that automates the entire process from creating a program to releasing it.
When you write and save code, it is automatically checked and tested, and if there are no problems, it moves on to the next step, allowing development to proceed smoothly without repeated human intervention.
DevSecOps recommends incorporating a security check mechanism into this CI/CD pipeline.
For example, decide when to run checks according to the flow of development as follows:
- Check for problems with the program when you write and save the code (SAST)
- Check whether the components and libraries used in your app contain dangerous content (SCA)
- After placing it in a test environment, attack tests are conducted that simulate actual behavior (DAST).
In this way, by seamlessly incorporating security checks into the development process, it becomes possible to build a secure system without slowing down development speed.
Step 3: Selecting and implementing the right tools
We select and implement tools such as SAST, SCA, and DAST according to your company’s development environment, programming language, and budget.
The tool should integrate smoothly into the pipeline and provide clear feedback to the developer.
Step 4: Conduct Threat Modeling
It is also important to conduct threat modeling early in development, especially during the design phase.
Threat modeling is a security technique that identifies the “sources” and “methods” of potential attacks by organizing the application configuration and data flow.
By systematically organizing potential threats, you can quickly identify areas where problems are likely to occur.
This makes it possible to clarify potential security risks in applications at the design stage, preventing major rework in later processes and enabling appropriate countermeasures to be taken at the design level.
Step (5): Continuous monitoring and improvement
Even after an application is released into production, it is important to continue to monitor its behavior using security monitoring tools.
DevSecOps is not an endeavor that ends when an application is released.
It is necessary to have a system in place that can respond quickly in the unlikely event of a security incident, and to feed back the knowledge gained from that incident into the next development cycle.
In this way, continuously reflecting what is learned during the operational phase in the process and making improvements is a key point for the success of DevSecOps.
Tools used in DevSecOps
Utilizing tools that can automate various security checks is essential for practicing DevSecOps.
Here we will introduce the categories of typical security check tools used in DevSecOps.
- SAST (Static Application Security Testing)
- DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing)
- IAST (Interactive Application Security Testing)
- SCA (Software Composition Analysis)
- Container Security Scan
Let’s take a look at what kind of security checks each tool performs and at what stage.
SAST (Static Application Security Testing)
SAST (Static Application Security Testing) is a tool that analyzes the source code of an application in a static, non-executed state to detect security issues (vulnerabilities).
Since the checks are performed before the program is run, it is possible to detect early on any violations of coding standards or statements that could cause vulnerabilities such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting.
| SQL injection | ・A cyber attack that attempts to manipulate databases by sending fraudulent SQL statements to input forms on websites or applications. ・There is a risk that information that should not be accessible may be obtained, or that databases may be tampered with or destroyed. |
|---|---|
| Cross-site scripting (XSS) | ・A cyber attack that exploits security flaws on a website to embed malicious scripts and execute them in the browsers of an unspecified number of users who visit the site. ・There is a risk that users’ personal information may be stolen or unauthorized operations may be performed. |
DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing)
DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing) is a tool that detects vulnerabilities by launching simulated attacks from outside the application while it is actually running.
Because the tests are conducted based on the methods that actual attackers would use, they are effective in discovering vulnerabilities that cannot be detected without running the program, such as misconfigurations and inadequate authentication and authorization.
IAST (Interactive Application Security Testing)
IAST (Interactive Application Security Testing) is a tool that combines features of both SAST and DAST.
By embedding an agent inside an application and monitoring the behavior of the program while it is running, vulnerabilities can be detected in real time.
Another major feature is that it can pinpoint the specific part of the code where the problem is occurring, which makes it easier for developers to make corrections.
SCA (Software Composition Analysis)
Modern application development relies on many open source (OSS) libraries.
SCA (Software Composition Analysis) tools are security tools that identify the OSS components used by applications and automatically detect whether they contain known vulnerabilities or license violations.
Container Security Scan
If you are using container technology such as Docker, vulnerabilities may exist not only in your application but also in the container image itself.
A container security scanning tool is a security tool that can scan container images to detect whether there are any known vulnerabilities in the underlying OS packages and included libraries.
