Everything you need to know
Beyond Security
CI/CD pipelines are essential for modern software development, enabling faster releases with less manual intervention. However, they can also introduce significant risks if not designed securely. This article focuses on securing access and network flows in CI/CD systems, with three core criteria for evaluation:
Public Endpoints: Avoid publicly exposed systems vulnerable to attacks.
Access Permissions: Minimize permissions granted to CI tools to prevent misuse.
Deployment Feedback: Ensure immediate and visible deployment success/failure feedback.
According to Garner, more than 60% of organizations will embrace zero-trust principles as a starting place for security by 2025.
Option 4 is the ideal solution for balancing security and scalability, especially for globally distributed teams under pressure to ship faster:
No Public Endpoints:
Zero Trust principles ensure all resources remain private, significantly reducing the attack surface. Teams can scale securely without worrying about exposing artifact registries or deployment targets, even when adopting SaaS-based CI tools.No Dangerous Permissions:
By decoupling CI and CD and shifting to pull-based deployments, CI tools are no longer a security risk. This enforces least privilege access and minimizes the blast radius if credentials are compromised.Immediate Feedback:
Webhook-based feedback loops deliver real-time success or failure updates, ensuring CI pipelines maintain visibility into deployment outcomes. This eliminates delays caused by polling, enabling faster cycles and minimizing bottlenecks.
The 10x Engineer Approach
1. Separation of CI and CD with Feedback Loop to CI
Artifact Consistency: Build artifacts once during CI and store them in a private registry. These artifacts are pulled consistently across environments (e.g., dev, staging, production), eliminating drift.
Controlled Access: CI tools don’t need direct permissions to deploy. Instead, deployment targets (e.g., Kubernetes clusters) pull artifacts securely.
2. Elimination of Public Endpoints
Private Connectivity: All resources are accessed securely through Zero Trust solutions (e.g., Twingate).
Zero Trust Principles: Fine-grained access controls ensure only authorized components can interact, reducing the attack surface.
3. Removal of Dangerous Permissions
Pull-Based Deployments: Deployment tools (like ArgoCD or FluxCD) pull artifacts instead of CI tools pushing changes. This removes the need for CI to hold dangerous permissions.
Least Privilege: Resources authenticate securely using minimal permissions and headless clients.
4. Immediate Feedback via Webhooks
Scoped Permissions: CI tools retain limited, read-only access to production, scoped specifically to check deployment status.
Clear Feedback: Webhooks provide real-time success or failure updates, ensuring CI pipelines can immediately confirm deployment outcomes.
1
Set Up a Private Artifact Registry
Use solutions like AWS ECR, GCP Artifact Registry, or JFrog Artifactory.
2
Secure Artifact Access:
Use Zero Trust tools that can be automatically deployed with IaC (e.g., Twingate) to enable private, secure access for deployment targets.
3
Adopt Pull-Based Deployments:
Deploy using tools like ArgoCD or FluxCD. Targets authenticate via secure, headless clients.
4
Integrate Immediate Feedback:
Configure webhooks to notify the CI system of deployment outcomes.
Zero Trust Implementation
While its implementation requires careful design and expertise, the result is a secure, scalable, and efficient CI/CD process.
