Historically, security has been difficult to prioritize in DevOps, however protecting assets and ensuring the security of containers and their environments is crucial. This is especially paramount as the evolving sophistication of cyberthreat tactics and emerging technologies such as AI and Post-Quantum Computing develop further each year, and developers and IT leaders are increasingly strained protecting their environments while still working to keep their pipeline moving.
The emergence of the shift-left approach to DevOps, was developed in part to address these growing threats. The shift-left approach is a philosophy around DevOps which intends to place more focus on the ‘left’ of the DevOps pipeline, and goes hand in hand with growing DevSecOps practices which aim to integrate security throughout the pipeline, rather than just tagging it on the end of the operations stage.
Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is a key component of shift-left security and DevSecOps practices and allows developers to use automation tools and protocols to fully integrate security into their pipeline. Effective PKI implementation is a key tool of defense against growing cybersecurity threats.
PKI for DevOps
Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is an asymmetric cryptographic system and the foundation of digital certificates which provide secure digital communications using a combination of public and private keys. PKI creates a secure environment for the transfer of data and ensuring trust between the sender and the recipient and has a broad variety of use cases.
In the case of DevSecOps, PKI security allows developers to integrate and automate security throughout their pipelines, securing assets, containers, perform effective key management, authenticate users and digital identities, as well as implement effective security measures during testing and release stages by monitoring and securing toolchain vulnerabilities.
Primarily though, software developers use and manage TLS certificates to maintain container security. Developers are frequently working with cloud containers and open-source software, which while convenient, creates numerous vulnerabilities which threat actors are continuously seeking to exploit. This is what makes effective PKI solutions and management an essential element of DevSecOps practices. The use of trusted TLS certificates deployed by a Certificate Authority, strong Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) and automation tools ensure the security of containers and prevent a data breach, and allows for vitally quick responses, especially in the case of zero-day vulnerabilities.
PKI also helps to maintain secure access to source code where access to repositories and files is limited to specific identities as well as managing source code encryption and decryption and their software using code-signing.
However, it can be challenging for developers to implement effective PKI and integrate security throughout their pipeline, due to the need for fast deployment. This is further complicated by a pervasive skill-gap in the software and development industry as most developers are not PKI or security experts.
This is why partnering with a trusted security provider for PKI solutions is so imperative for software developers. The right provider can not only offer effective automated solutions to manage certificates throughout their lifecycles to ensure container and key security, but also offer comprehensive support and expertise for proper deployment and configuration of these solutions.
Secure Pipeline Automation
When managing complex environments and pipelines, developers will need to deploy certificates at scale. At this volume certificate lifecycle management and key management can be burdensome for developers, more so when we consider the market gap in security expertise in the industry. This is why developers need to rely on automated solutions as well as a trusted provider to reduce the burden and close the gap between developers and security experts to ensure the successful integration of security throughout the pipeline.
These are some tools used by developers to automate security and close the gap:
- cert-manager for Kubernetes: A cloud native certificate controller for Kubernetes clusters. GlobalSign’s Atlas Issuer for cert-manager helps to secure Kubernetes Ingress containers with trusted TLS certification and enables secure pod-to-pod communication.
- ACME Service: GlobalSign’s ACME protocol service automatically manages domain validations and Certificate Signing Requests (CSRs), to enable issuance of trusted DV and OV TLS as well as non-public IntranetSSL certificates without the need for domain validation. ACME is fully compatible with the Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline automating project builds, tests and deployments.
- Hashicorp Vault: Enables fast trusted TLS certificate provisioning while complying with policy, providing crypto agility, simplified Certificate Lifecycle Management and secure key generation and management, as well as secrets management through GloablSign’s digital identity platform, Atlas.
- Venafi: GlobalSign’s integration with Venafi automates Certificate Lifecycle Management through integrations with containerization, orchestration, configuration management and secrets management tools used within DevSecOps CI/CD pipelines and workflows.
Software developers can leverage automated deployment and container orchestration services such as these to deliver seamless certificate issuance for software packages, microservices, and containers as well as ensure that certificates are issued and deployed to the right containers, machines, and entities.
Partnering with a Trusted Certificate Authority (CA)
Partnering with a trusted Certificate Authority is the most important step when leveraging PKI and automation for the DevSecOps Pipeline. A trusted CA such as GlobalSign can not only offer the comprehensive solutions needed to keep the pipeline secure, but also offer the support and expertise needed in order to implement them.
GlobalSign is a publicly trusted CA with over 25 years of experience in managing and implementing PKI-based solutions over a variety of industries and use cases. GlobalSign has a broad offering of automated PKI solutions such as Certificate Automation Manager which provides a automated certificate provisioning and management with API integration, reducing much of the burden associated with TLS certificate provisioning and comprehensive support for it’s integration.
Solutions such as these are pivotal to providing security to DevOps environments, their pipelines and container orchestration, management and security. GlobalSign’s support and expertise are also a key offering in implementing and integrating them efficiently and closing the security gap in DevOps environments while creating a strong framework for security planning.
Effective PKI Solutions are a Requirement for a Secure DevOps Pipeline
Implementing a shift-left approach to DevOps security takes significant planning and resource utilization, but automated solutions offer to reduce the burden this can place on security experts working in DevOps environments and reduce potential drains on resources. Not only this, but effective security planning, factoring in automated solutions bolsters security of DevOps pipelines and prevents the exploitation of vulnerabilities by threat actors thereby preventing a breach and protecting digital assets and business continuity for software rollouts.
The software development industry must utilize the tools at their disposal to continue to bridge the current skill and security gap pervasive within the industry, starting with automation and shift-left DevSecOps practices. The DevOps philosophy was developed as a means to streamline the development pipeline and bolster efficiency in order to expedite product delivery at high velocity with fewer errors and vulnerabilities. Embracing DevSecOps and shift-left practices is the next step in embracing efficient CI/CD pipelines and requires effective PKI solutions from a trusted Certificate Authority in order to be secure, protected and successful.
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