Security Support in Continuous Deployment Pipeline

TL;DR

This paper explores enhancing the security of Continuous Deployment Pipelines (CDPs) by applying security tactics, demonstrating their effectiveness through experiments and analysis to protect critical components from malicious attacks.

Contribution

It introduces and evaluates five security tactics specifically designed to secure CDPs, combining qualitative and quantitative analysis methods.

Findings

Security tactics improve component protection in CDPs

Controlled access and secure connections enhance security

Experimental results show increased resilience against attacks

Abstract

Continuous Deployment (CD) has emerged as a new practice in the software industry to continuously and automatically deploy software changes into production. Continuous Deployment Pipeline (CDP) supports CD practice by transferring the changes from the repository to production. Since most of the CDP components run in an environment that has several interfaces to the Internet, these components are vulnerable to various kinds of malicious attacks. This paper reports our work aimed at designing secure CDP by utilizing security tactics. We have demonstrated the effectiveness of five security tactics in designing a secure pipeline by conducting an experiment on two CDPs - one incorporates security tactics while the other does not. Both CDPs have been analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. We used assurance cases with goal-structured notations for qualitative analysis. For quantitative analysis, we used penetration tools. Our findings indicate that the applied tactics improve the security of the major components (i.e., repository, continuous integration server, main server) of a CDP by controlling access to the components and establishing secure connections.