In the last couple of months we participated in an increasing count of customer projects following current trends of agile software development approaches and corresponding toolstacks. Especially the terms Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery kept (and still keep) popping up on every corner. The frameworks and processes behind those two hypes aid developing software at higher quality in shorter release cycles. This is especially relevant since end consumers nowadays expect fast releases including the newest features. If companies neglect this demand, competitors might take advantage of their better time-to-market which might result in increased market share and -dominance. A lot of changes are happening in the space of CI/CD. Existing tools become more mature, gaining increased attention, and new ones are appearing every month including better ways of integrating them into existing or new processes. Companies benefit from more choices, increased flexibility, and faster integration into existing company policies.
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Modern Application Stacks & Security
I had the pleasure to give a presentation at the Security Interest Group Switzerland Technology Conference about modern application stacks and how they can be used to improve infrastructure and application security posture – the slides can be found here. Besides seeing a lot of old friends, I particularly enjoyed a round table discussion on security integration into CI/CD pipelines. There was a relevant exchange on approaches that actually work and were tested in environments beyond just recommending some container scanner (product). One participant had an interesting case study on how they enabled developers to maintain WAF policies in configuration files in their code repository including automated deployment to the WAF. He also emphasized that the environments with actual security benefits resulted from a close cooperation between development and security team (were domain knowledge was combined 😉 ).
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I’m a big fan of Chris Gates’ publications on DevOops and From Low to Pwned. The content reflects a lot of issues that we also experience in many assessments in general and assessments in agile environments in particular. In addition, we were supporting several projects recently that were organized in an agile way. In this post, I want to summarize some thoughts on how security work can/should be integrated into agile projects. The post was also a result from the preparation of our upcoming Troopers workshop on Docker Security & Devops, which of course also covers organizational aspects, but not to the degree this post describes them.
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