By GitGuardian Technical Content Author Thomas Segura
All in all, software is still in its infancy compared to other large industries. Although its principles have been established for more than half a century, they are still undergoing powerful changes that regularly expand the methods of use. Recently, enterprises have experienced this movement with the advent of cloud computing. Moving a large portion of its IT operations to the cloud was a huge opportunity to deliver new products faster. The cloud provides an unprecedented level of agility in allocating or de-allocating computing resources on the fly.
However, a closer look reveals that much of the cloud’s power is dependent on its infrastructure capabilities. Cloud assets, cloud services and resources, as well as orchestrators such as Kubernetes and even policies, are not managed in real time by human operators. Controlled by software and defined by code. Welcome to the Infrastructure-as-Code era!
Democratize cloud resources
IaC is the server, storage, database, network topology and all basic configuration (DNS entries, firewalls, etc..).
Infrastructure is not about production workloads. This is what you need to support your entire development process. The nice thing about IaC is that everyone can specify the resources they need at any stage of the SDLC. Creating several isolated environments during development and replicating production conditions for testing, etc. IaC is a standard language for describing these resources and how they are configured.
This provides incredible benefits to your go-to-market strategy. The infrastructure is only as flexible as the software it supports, and thanks to reusable modules it runs faster and at the same time is more consistent. The risk of human error when done correctly lowers maintenance costs.
Of course, as the requirements become more complex, the IaC declaration becomes more complex. However, this is where the technology shines. easily) saves engineers a lot of time and headaches.
The name of this paradigm is: GitOps. It uses the same approach to managing infrastructure configuration files as software source code, enabling faster and more reliable cloud-native deployments. Teams collaborate more effectively on infrastructure changes and investigation configuration files with the same rigor as software code. Infrastructure definitions are stored in git repositories, gradually modified, pulled or merge requests are reviewed, and finally tested and applied through CI/CD pipelines.
Because engineers work directly with code, IaC has moved infrastructure workflows to the left.
But like everything, this comes at a price. In this case, cloud security also needs to be switched to the left.
Protect your infrastructure as code
Regarding security, IaC has some interesting features. First, it can be used to automate the provisioning of security controls. This means security policies can be enforced more consistently and efficiently.
Second, IaC can help you better manage your security posture. Automating security control provisioning makes it easier to track and monitor security issues in your infrastructure. It can help you quickly identify and remediate potential security issues.
Finally, IaC can also help improve incident response capabilities. Responses to security incidents can be deployed more quickly and easily. This will minimize the impact of a security incident and get your infrastructure back up and running as quickly as possible.
However, securing the infrastructure is a significant challenge. By blurring the lines between application and infrastructure security, IaC adoption raises big questions. Who should be held accountable?
Infrastructure as code is the new responsibility.
It goes without saying that infrastructure security is paramount. Traditionally, expert operations teams have overseen this attack surface with many proven tools. But when your code manages your infrastructure, uncaught mistakes can lead to insidious security vulnerabilities. A single misconfiguration in the IaC manifest can affect runtime or network security. For example, traffic may remain resource-unlimited, or data may be inadvertently exposed.
In addition, static vulnerabilities must be addressed specifically. Hard-coded credentials are paramount. Regardless of the level of awareness of the importance ~ no Store plaintext credentials in configuration files; mistakes still happen often.
In fact, the misconfiguration is either: Top 10 vulnerabilities identified by OWASP. Therefore, it is logical to anticipate potential vulnerabilities by setting the right guardrails to deliver clean code from the start. To implement a true DevSecOps philosophy, this responsibility, part quality, part security must be shared. Failure to do so could mean a potentially costly security failure is imminent.
Infrastructure-as-code responsibility lies at the crossroads between DevOps, AppSec, and CloudOps engineers. Enabling collaboration from source to deployment is the only way organizations can protect themselves from future threats. Tools are starting to emerge to accommodate this new paradigm.
IaC has reached new heights in the realm of automation, so automation is clearly part of the answer. Getting automatic scans for misconfigured vulnerabilities and hard-coded credentials strengthens your organization’s overall security posture. Beyond that, we will also be involved in raising awareness of IaC security best practices and common mistakes.
conclusion
Infrastructure as code is here. The benefits it brings are completely transforming the software development cycle and opening new doors for automation and innovation. Its advantages have been praised for some time, but the threats associated with it are becoming more evident. Security must fully embrace this new paradigm, which is centered around the dynamism and ephemerality of the underlying resources provided by the cloud. Bridging the gap between security, operations and development activities and leveraging automation to build effective security solutions is essential for organizations to raise the bar for their security posture. The first step in that direction is to secure the cloud infrastructure at the source code level as early as SDLC.
About the author
Thomas has worked as an analyst and software engineer consultant for various large French companies. His passion for technology and open source led him to join GitGuardian as a Technical Content Writer. He is now focused on clarifying the transformative changes cybersecurity and software are undergoing.
Thomas can be reached online at: LinkedIn, Twitterand on our website https://www.gitguardian.com/