What is DevSecOps?

4 min readSep 22, 2022

DevSecOps stands for development, security, and operations. It’s an approach to culture, automation, and platform design that integrates security as a shared responsibility throughout the entire IT lifecycle.

DevSecOps means thinking about application and infrastructure security from the start. It also means automating some security gates to keep the DevOps flow slowing down. Selecting the right tools to continuously integrate security, like agreeing on an integrated development environment (IDE) with security features, can help meet these goals.

However, effective DevOps security requires more than new tools-it builds on the cultural changes of DevOps to integrate the work of security teams sooner rather than later.

Integrate Security into a DevOps Framework

To integrate DevSecOps into the DevOps workflow, you have to systematically incorporate security design and checks and balances throughout the development process. In this way, DevSecOps also represents a significant cultural shift.

The integration process involves the following:

Automation
Code Analysis
Regular threat assessments
Configuration tracking
Security training

DevSecOps Pipeline

DevSecOps pipeline is a set of security practices incorporated into SDLC to build, test, and deploy secure software faster and easier. A traditional DevOps pipeline has several distinct phases: Plan, Code, Build, Test, Release, Deploy, Operate, and Monitor. In DevSecOps, there are distinct security steps that happen during each of those phases. Those security-focused phases are :-

1. Threat Modeling

Threat modeling provides a summary of possible attack scenarios, outlines the flow of sensitive data, and identifies vulnerabilities and offers potential mitigation options. This phase helps to address security vulnerabilities and improves the security knowledge of everyone on the team.

2. Scan

Scanning is the process of analyzing code to ensure that it is safeguarded from security vulnerabilities. This included both manual and automated code review. AppSec tools — such as SAST and DAST — are used during this phase. This phase enables developers to address security vulnerabilities and bugs earlier in the software development life cycle.

3. Analyze

During the Analyze phase, all of the collected data and metrics from the previous phase is reviewed to identify all of the security risks. Then, those risks are compiled into a list ranging from most to least severe (SAST tools like Klocwork are able to do this process automatically.)

4. Remediate

After identifying and organizing security vulnerabilities in previous phases, they are finally dealt with in the Remediation phase. Some DevSecOps tools like SAST can recommend solutions for these vulnerabilities, errors, and bugs that it has identified. This makes it easier to address security issues as they arise.

5. Monitor

Monitor refers to the process of tracking the identified vulnerabilities, the steps taken to mitigate and/or eliminate those vulnerabilities, and the overall status of the application’s security. In addition, it may be beneficial to also track and manage the differences between the actual and target metric values. This helps to make informed data-driven decisions during the SDLC.

Advantages of DevSecOps Pipeline

Earlier identification of security vulnerabilities.
Improved speed and agility of security teams.
Secure software development.
Faster recovery speed in the event of a security incident.

DevSecOps Security Requirements

There are no formal DevSecOps security requirements, but there are several security recommendations. Those are :-

Follow secure coding guidelines.
Build security into your application.
Scan and secure open source and third-party components.
Validate input data, content types, and responses.
Detect and block unusual behavior.
Automate security testing and protection.
Use SAST tools to ensure that your code is secure, safe, and reliable.

DevSecOps Tools

DevSecOps tools ensure that your code is free from coding errors and safeguarded against software security vulnerabilities at each phase of the SDLC.

There are two commonly used DevSecOps tools :-

1. SAST (Static Application Security Testing)

SAST is a frequently used Application Security (AppSec) tool, which scans an application’s source, binary, or byte code. A white-box testing tool, it identifies the root cause of vulnerabilities and helps remediate the underlying security flaws. SAST solutions analyze an application from the “inside out” and do not need a running system to perform a scan.

Pros of SAST

Scans source code to find weaknesses that lead to vulnerabilities.
Provides real-time reporting.

Cons of SAST

Not capable of identifying vulnerabilities in dynamic environments.
High risk of reporting false positives.
Since the report is static, it becomes outdated quickly.

2. DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing)

DAST is the process of analyzing a web application through the front-end to find vulnerabilities through simulated attacks. This type of approach evaluates the application from the “outside in” by attacking like a malicious user would. After a DAST scanner performs these attacks, it looks for results that are not part of the expected result set and identifies security vulnerabilities.

Pros of DAST

Independent of the application.
Immediately finds vulnerabilities that could be exploited.
Does not require access to the source code.

Cons of DAST

Does not find the exact location of a vulnerability in the code.
Security knowledge is needed to interpret reports.
Tests can be time-consuming.