Security Support in Continuous Deployment Pipeline
This addresses security risks in software deployment pipelines for developers and organizations, but it is incremental as it applies existing security tactics to a specific domain.
The paper tackled the vulnerability of Continuous Deployment Pipelines (CDPs) to malicious attacks by designing a secure CDP using security tactics, and found that applying these tactics improved security in major components like the repository and servers, with qualitative and quantitative analyses supporting the effectiveness.
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.