7 CI/CD Security Best Practices for Agile Teams

Continuous integration and continuous deployment, commonly abbreviated as CI/CD, are quickly becoming standard practices in many software development organizations, as underscored by the tech giant Amazon.

A recent State of DevOps Report states that Amazon firmly adopts CI/CD, with a median of 23,000 deploys per day.

It translates to a deployment every three seconds! Secure pipeline execution is critical in this context, ensuring that automated processes reliably and safely move code from development to production while minimizing security risks.

CI/CD is no longer a differentiator but a denominator for agile teams. Security awareness among team members is essential to proactively address vulnerabilities and foster a security-conscious culture. Here are seven CI/CD security best practices to help avoid security incidents in production by catching security vulnerabilities at commit time.

Understanding CI/CD Security Threats

As organizations increasingly rely on CI/CD to accelerate their software development and delivery, the security threats targeting these pipelines have grown more sophisticated. CI/CD security threats are vulnerabilities and risks that can undermine the integrity of the entire software development process, from code commit to deployment.

Attackers often seek to inject malicious code into the CI/CD pipeline, exploiting weak points to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data or disrupt the continuous integration and continuous delivery workflow. These security threats can manifest in various forms, such as compromised credentials, insecure configuration files, or insufficient access controls, all of which can lead to a security breach or data leak.

The impact of these threats extends beyond a single application—successful attacks can compromise the overall security posture of the organization, exposing critical infrastructure and sensitive information. For example, if an attacker manages to inject malicious code during the build process, it can propagate through to production environments, affecting end users and potentially causing widespread damage.

Understanding the nature of CI/CD security threats is the first step in implementing effective security measures. By identifying potential vulnerabilities early in the development process, teams can proactively address security issues, strengthen their CI/CD security, and ensure that only authorized personnel have access to critical components. This awareness is essential for maintaining a robust security posture throughout the entire software development lifecycle, safeguarding both the development process and the sensitive data it handles.

1. Ensure True Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration (CI) is the practice of merging each developer’s work frequently with other team members using a central version control system to ensure that the codebase is as close to a deployable state as possible.

Continuous Integration: The best practice for teams is to integrate new code every few hours or less frequently to keep the continuous integration momentum going with every code commit. This enables teams to detect code and integration defects for remediating them early.

Version Control: A version control system, such as Git, can assist in managing code changes at scale and speed. Version control will act as the single source of truth for the development process, enabling you to trace code, audit it, and collaborate easily.

Automated Build: Using automation tools for build/deploy processes greatly enhances your speed of change, and this consistency helps reduce or eliminate human errors. Automated feedback from the CI process allows the development team to quickly address integration issues and maintain code quality.

Also, invest in agile collaboration tools to ensure efficient team communication in a fast-paced sprint. For example, tools like Nifty can help connect GitHub activity directly to tasks and discussions, providing visibility without disrupting developer workflows.

2. Bake Security In

Security should never be considered an afterthought. Integrating AppSec tools into the CI/CD pipeline to shift left will help spot and mitigate vulnerabilities right at the inception, before they reach the production phase. It minimizes rework and eliminates expensive final-stage fixes.

Before Development: Conduct threat modeling and architecture risk analysis before writing any code. This will reveal weaknesses in design and allow teams to choose the right security tooling and testing that is possible, given engineering priorities.

Implement Security Gates: Have gates or checkpoints in the development lifecycle. For example, you can use SAST (static application security testing) during the development process, switch to SCA (software composition analysis) for checking open-source dependencies while building—scanning dependencies for vulnerabilities and license compliance—and perform an IaC scan before release. Incorporate static code analysis and both static and dynamic analysis tools to identify vulnerabilities and identify security vulnerabilities early in the development process, preventing security issues from reaching production.

Perform a Run Time Check: You can use DAST (dynamic application security testing) to simulate real-world attacks for testing applications during staging or pre-production. Embedding security and conducting security checks throughout the pipeline ensures vulnerabilities are caught before production. This is a never-skip step for microservices and web apps as it helps ensure runtime security.

Additionally, teams must also fortify their API security controls in this phase to mitigate issues such as broken authentication, exposure of sensitive data, and injection attacks.

3. Establish Comprehensive Full-Stack Testing

Automated testing is the denominator of a reliable continuous deployment process. Upon code changes, the pipeline should automatically trigger various tests and offer rapid feedback to ensure the utmost quality.

Ensure Comprehensive Coverage: Make sure that you implement a comprehensive mix of tests. For instance, while individual components may need unit tests, module integrations may require integration tests. Also, it is important to establish some end-to-end tests that simulate real user scenarios across the entire application.

Opt for Parallel Testing: To continue shipping and receive feedback fast, run tests in parallel so that the build speed isn’t lost. Test optimization is vital, and teams need to regularly reflect and remove unnecessary steps to keep the build pipeline fast and efficient.

Continuously Monitor and Optimize: Test suites should be systematically monitored and optimized to keep current with requirements and environments. Continuous monitoring is essential for detecting anomalies and ensuring ongoing security and quality in the CI/CD pipeline. When a test step is added to the automated release process through continuous feedback, it will automate the last step in the release process and complete an improvement feedback loop.

4. Implement Value-Driven Secrets Management

Asking the code to contain sensitive information such as passwords, tokens, API keys, keys, etc., directly is clearly at high risk. It provides a risk across the whole pipeline.

Centralize Everything for Secure Control: Use a dedicated secrets management tool to minimize the risk factors associated with spread out secrets in a multi-tool, fragmented storage. Management tools can automate and secure the handling of secrets, including API keys, ensuring efficient automation, security, and compliance.

Do Not Hardcode: Be sure not to leave any remaining hints in the code for any sensitive information. Inject secrets securely as environment variables or mounted files at run time.

Automate Rotation: Incorporate automated secret rotation processes for periodically changing secrets in order to limit the time risk that even if the credentials are leaked or a user’s credentials have been compromised. Add complete audit logging that tracks who accessed which secrets and when.

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5. Use Infrastructure as Code for Consistency

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) refers to the delivery and management of infrastructure components, including servers, load balancers, and container clusters, defined through code. IaC is an essential part of any modern CI/CD pipeline.

Automate Provisioning: Employ declarative technologies such as Terraform, Pulumi, or AWS CloudFormation to automate the delivery of infrastructure resources. This eliminates the manual approaches and addresses “config drift” during the development and testing of applications in multiple environments.

Version Control the Infra: When you define the infrastructure with code, you can easily integrate it with version and access control systems, resulting in conditions where you can track the changes of configurations in an auditable way.

Mirror Environments: It is crucial to ensure testing environments are exact replicas of the production environment by using the same IaC definitions. Ensuring secure configuration within these IaC definitions helps prevent vulnerabilities from being introduced into production environments. These security measures ensure that if new code works in the cloned environment, you know it will work correctly in a live environment.

6. Build Developer-Centric Workflows 

For steady adoption, AppSec tools need to be embedded into workflows so that security is seen as a helpful guardrail instead of a roadblock. Security training and security awareness are essential for development teams to ensure security is integrated into daily workflows and to foster a security-conscious culture.

Near-Instant Feedback: While it’s often not in the IDE, developers get quick feedback from a code change through either IDE annotations or a Pull Request (PR) comment. This results in instant fixes to the developers and an immediate remediation opportunity since the context is still in the developer’s head.

Intelligent Prioritization: Use automation and AI to eliminate other duplicate and low-risk findings so only the most serious and relevant security problems are surfaced. Fewer, lower, or trivial findings mean less noise, so developers can fix the big security risks first and eliminate alert fatigue.

Actionable Guidance: Your tools should offer clear, actionable remediation guidance, suggest auto-fixes for workflow remediation, and provide adequate support and guidance to developers. Collaboration between the security team and development teams helps address security issues efficiently and ensures best practices are followed throughout the process.

Nifty’s artificial intelligence functions can accelerate your workflows by automatically creating either Tasks or full Docs with little input. The Tasks built-in feature also allows teams to define dependencies and establish a clear line of expectations for “zero-friction” handoffs.

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7. Optimize Processes Continuously

Agile teams have a strong focus on continuous improvement, so it is important to allocate time to reflect and make adjustments to processes as they go.

Make Retrospection Non-Negotiable: Hold an agile retrospective at the end of every sprint. While you’re at it, have an open conversation about what worked and what did not, correlating it with the path ahead. This activity will not only surface inefficiencies but also build trust.

Review Past Actions: When you start every retrospective, review with the team any action items that were discovered in the previous session. Use this opportunity to analyze your development processes, conduct post-mortem analysis, and identify lessons learned—including those related to potential security threats. It keeps your momentum focused on continuous improvements.

Put Data to Use: Use your sprint metrics, such as velocity, cycle time, and more, as a mirror to spark discussions. You can get a full picture of the process by pairing these numbers with the team sentiment captured during these discussions.

If you want to formalize your continuous improvement cycles, check out our resources on Agile vs waterfall project management or the Agile Manifesto.

Wrapping Up

For Agile teams, continuous integration and continuous delivery are the key infrastructures that help turn intentions into real value. These CI/CD best practices are essential to deliver at speed without compromising quality. Adopting these secure coding practices, such as Shift Left Security and using IaC for consistency, can enhance the speed of delivery while paving the way for continuous success.