Managing Cybersecurity: DevSecOps

Don’t get overwhelmed with trivial defects.

Contributed By

Taylor Armerding, Software Security Expert, Synopsys Software Integrity Group

“If tools aren’t used correctly, at the right time, and in the right way, they can flag an overwhelming number of potential vulnerabilities, many of them insignificant or irrelevant to a particular project. And that can frustrate development teams to the point that they could start ignoring the warnings or even disabling the tools, undermining the security those tools are meant to enhance.”

That, according to Meera Rao, is one of the biggest challenges of embedding security into DevOps and yielding effective DevSecOps.

Rao, senior director for product management (DevOps solutions) at Synopsys, notes the reality that “at every stage in the pipeline or even in your SDLC, you have many security activities to perform, and each and every one of them gives you vulnerabilities. That can lead to defect overload.”

By now, that list of DevSecOps testing tools and other security tasks is fairly standard. At the start, security teams should conduct threat modeling and risk analysis based on what an application is expected to do and what kind of input, if any, it will handle. Obviously, a page on a website that accepts user input including personal and financial data needs more rigorous security than one that simply provides information, such as the locations of company offices.

During the coding and building phases, automated tools like static, dynamic, and interactive analysis can flag bugs and other defects that could be exploited. Fuzz testing can check how the software responds to random, malformed input. Software composition analysis (SCA) can help find open source components that may have security defects and/or licensing conflicts.