CI/CD Pipeline Security: Best Practices to Safeguard Your Software Supply Chain

The Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) model is an essential component of agile DevOps. But, poorly implemented, it can also create significant vulnerabilities that threat actors are happy to exploit. 

When compromised, a CI/CD pipeline becomes a direct line into your codebase, infrastructure, and customer environments. It’s why pipeline security has become a top priority, not just for security teams, but for engineering leaders responsible for uptime, integrity, and compliance.

Learn more about the most pressing CI/CD risks and the best practices you can follow to ensure they never reach your production environments.

Why CI/CD Pipeline Security is Essential for DevOps

Compromising a CI/CD pipeline at any stage functionally gives a threat actor the keys to the kingdom, allowing them to inject malicious code, exfiltrate data, steal credentials, or manipulate the build and deployment process. 

Attackers may also use a compromised pipeline to target downstream customers, as happened in the infamous SolarWinds hack. By breaking into SolarWinds’ development environment, hackers were able to inject malicious code directly into its Orion network management software. 

A poisoned update was then delivered to over 30,000 public and private organizations.

Targeting the development pipeline also allows a threat actor to bypass a large number of traditional security controls, like perimeter firewalls, endpoint protection, and even runtime defenses, by embedding malicious code upstream, before it’s ever deployed.

What Are the Most Common CI/CD Security Risks?

Building a more secure pipeline starts with understanding the risks and threats you face. Some of the most common and prevalent include:

Vulnerable Third-Party Dependencies

Most modern pipelines rely on a variety of third-party libraries and tools. Each of these components is a potential point of entry for a threat actor, and a single flaw or backdoor in one of these dependencies may be used to facilitate an attack. 

Supply chain attacks specifically target these dependencies, allowing threat actors to exploit any application or system reliant upon them.

Exposed Secrets

A CI/CD pipeline frequently intersects with services that require certificates, API keys, cryptographic keys, or passwords.

If these secrets are insecurely stored or committed to code without proper obfuscation, an attacker can exploit them to compromise both user accounts and critical assets. 

Misconfigurations

From a configuration standpoint, there are a great many working parts in a CI/CD pipeline, which may include tools, scripts, deployment settings, and infrastructure settings. 

Among other issues, insecure default settings, open ports, and weak permissions all have the potential to compromise a pipeline’s integrity. 

Insufficient Access Controls

Access management is a delicate balancing act. Too strict, and it begins to interfere with development workflows. Too lax, and unauthorized users may be able to access and modify sensitive systems or code.

Poor Code Visibility and Validation

One of the biggest security gaps in many development pipelines is the implicit trust placed in code changes. Pipelines often automatically build and deploy whatever gets merged, without verifying the integrity or intent behind those changes. ode. In addition to consistently failing to identify vulnerabilities prior to production, this leaves software vulnerable to code injection.

Without sufficient input validation, an attacker may be able to insert malicious script directly into an organization’s codebase. Once the injected code is executed, the attacker can do anything from introducing a backdoor into an application to compromising an entire system.

Best Practices for DevOps Pipeline Security

Securing your CI/CD pipeline requires an ongoing effort in several areas, all described below. 

Enforce Strict Access Controls

Apply the principle of least privilege access. Code should only be accessible to those who need it to do their job. Combine Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC) with multi-factor authentication and a strong password policy, and regularly audit user permissions. 

To reduce the risk of insider threats and improve accountability, ensure separation of duties by assigning responsibility for code commits, build approvals, and deployments to different users. 

Integrate Automation Into Your Pipeline

All changes to your code should be automatically scanned for vulnerabilities, accidental secret exposure, and misconfigurations. Ensure you’ve tools and processes in place to streamline remediation. 

These measures will allow you to take a more proactive approach to vulnerability management, stay ahead of potential threats, and eliminate problems before they reach production. 

Securely Manage Your Secrets

Avoid hardcoding your secrets directly into your repositories or CI/CD files. Instead, centralize and encrypt them via a secrets management tool or vault, ensuring they’re only accessible when absolutely necessary. 

Keep Track Of Your Dependencies

Utilize a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) to keep a real-time inventory of all dependencies across your pipeline. Regularly scan these dependencies with Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tools, and validate the integrity of any new dependencies or container images.

Harden Your Environment

Minimize your attack surface by regularly reviewing and updating your configurations, actively scanning for misconfigured tools or settings. Apply security patches immediately when they become available, and leverage sandboxing to limit lateral movement. 

Govern Your Code

Ensure you have real-time visibility across your CI/CD pipeline along with the capacity to identify and respond to anomalous behavior or activity. Automatically record all code changes, authentication attempts, and deployment actions. 

Combine the two functions to both reduce incident response times and speed up root cause analysis. 

Support DevSecOps

Embed security into each phase of your development pipeline by fostering collaboration between your development and security teams and providing them with the necessary tools, training, and standards. How this looks largely depends on your organization, but will typically involve:

• Establishing cross-functional teams of developers, operations personnel, and security engineers
• Removing security gates and replacing them with automated, integrated controls
• Holding regular post-incident reviews
• Empowering developers with the autonomy to identify and address security issues on their own

Safeguard Your Pipeline with Apiiro

Your CI/CD pipeline is foundational to delivering software quickly, but it’s also a high-value target for attackers. Securing it requires more than scanning and policies. It requires visibility into the changes that matter, the architecture they impact, and the ability to prevent risks before they hit production.

That’s exactly what Apiiro delivers.

Apiiro is the only ASPM platform that automatically discovers and maps your software architecture, spanning every repository, pipeline, and change. With complete code-to-runtime context, Apiiro helps you:

• Detect and block risky material changes early in the SDLC
• Automate security reviews, threat models, and approvals
• Prioritize and remediate vulnerabilities based on real business risk, not just CVSS

We’ve built a single, unified platform that integrates directly into your CI/CD pipeline to provide complete, continuous security, including:

Here’s how:

• Native CI/CD and SCM Integration: Monitor all pipelines and repos with real-time, contextual insights across your development ecosystem.
• Deep Code Analysis (DCA): Automatically uncovers vulnerabilities, exposed secrets, and misconfigurations at the most granular level, enabled via one-click SCM integration.
• Risk Graph Engine: Connects risks across code, infra, and runtime to business impact, streamlining prioritization, ownership, and remediation.
• Guardrails in Code: Embed intelligent, risk-based policies directly into PRs and builds to prevent critical issues from moving forward.
• Automated Remediation Workflows: Trigger targeted workflows based on contextual risk signals and material change detection.
• Unified Risk View: Normalize and correlate signals across code, dependencies, pipelines, and runtime for a single source of truth.

Even if you know your threat landscape, securing it at scale is nearly impossible without the right context. Learn how Apiiro prioritizes what matters with proactive application risk prioritization and remediation.

Ready to get started? Book a demo to see Apiiro’s risk-based prioritization firsthand, or learn more about our contextual prioritization funnel. 

Frequently-Asked Questions

Why Should DevOps Teams Prioritize Secrets Management?

Secrets are the keys to your organization’s most sensitive assets. If they’re exposed, it’s akin to handing a robber the keys to a bank vault — threat actors can use them to gain unauthorized access to your systems and data. Ensuring credentials are properly stored and rotated helps to prevent this from happening. 

How Can You Automate Security in Your CI/CD Workflows?

Integrate scanning, policy enforcement, and remediation directly into your development workflows. This allows you to apply consistent security to every code change and request, detecting and addressing security issues before they reach production. 

What Tools Help Enhance CI/CD Pipeline Security?

There’s a broad range of security tools you can deploy and integrate into your CI/CD pipeline, including: 

• Secrets Detection and Management: Identifies and secures exposures in code and configuration
• Static Application Security Testing (SAST): Detects vulnerabilities in source code prior to deployment
• Software Composition Analysis (SCA): Identifies security issues with third-party dependencies
• Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) Security Scanning: Identifies misconfigurations and security flaws in infrastructure templates
• Vulnerability and Misconfiguration Scanning: Detects weaknesses in pipelines, environments, and code
• Access Control: Manages and enforces access permissions
• Guardrails: Automatically flags or blocks anomalous or risky changes based on predefined policies
• Automated Remediation: Streamlines vulnerability management by automatically assigning workflows and providing actionable guidance
• Integrated Source Code Control: Links security checks and controls directly to deployment pipelines and code repositories for enforcement

Real-Time Monitoring, Logging, and Auditing: Provides oversight into all pipeline activities and changes.