Security is a persistent concern today for every organization. Software projects need to be well-protected in a threat landscape where any vulnerability can be attacked and leveraged by cybercriminals. Gilad David Maayan, CEO at Agile SEO, shares five effective ways in which GitOps can help improve security for software projects.

GitOps is a framework that helps apply DevOps practices and tools to software operations. It involves utilizing version control systems, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, and collaboration tools to set up infrastructure automation. GitOps helps address the Ops part of DevOps, helping operations processes shift from manual to automation. 

What Is GitOps?

GitOps is a framework that fully automates infrastructure and application deployment, letting you effectively manage the various resources, including cloud assets, involved in continuous deployment. It helps increase scalability and make the infrastructure provisioning process more transparent and consistent using Infrastructure as Code (IaC). 

IaC enables you to store configuration files as code. These configuration files automatically generate the same infrastructure environment whenever it is deployed. This process works similarly to how application source code generates the same application binaries when it is built. Using IaC, CI/CD, and merge requests help make Ops as efficient as Dev, making your DevOps pipeline as automated as possible.

GitOps is not a single technology – it’s a practice composed of three key components:

• IaC: Using a version control system, such as the Git repository, as a single source of truth for all infrastructure definitions, storing them as code.
• Merge requests (MRs): Implementing MRs as a change mechanism for all infrastructure updates. It enables teams to collaborate using comments and reviews. You also use MRs for formal approvals.
• CI/CD: Using CI/CD to automate infrastructure updates. Once new code is merged, the CI/CD pipeline automatically carries out the change through the environment. Your GitOps automation detects and corrects configuration drift, like manual and accidental changes, to ensure the environment converges according to the desired state defined in Git.

Five Benefits of GitOps in Information Security for Software Projects

Here are the key security benefits of GitOps:

1. Developers take ownership of security: GitOps enables developers to automate and manage the infrastructure as code declaratively. You can keep infrastructure definitions in a Git repository and manage them similarly to how you manage source code. This allows developers to take ownership of security in a classic DevSecOps model.
2. Security as code: GitOps lets you manage everything as code, including security. You can treat all security policies and configurations as code, keeping everything in your version control system. Doing so enables you to input all changes into an automated pipeline that continuously verifies, deploys, and monitors changes.
3. Shift security left: since you treat security as code, you can introduce it earlier into the pipeline and ensure security is a priority from start to finish. It enables you to immediately identify changes to the required state, including bugs, vulnerabilities, and security issues in the entire cycle. Catching these issues early helps ensure you can remediate bugs and instantly redeploy the affected applications or environment.
4. Faster pipeline changes: GitOps can help quickly respond to breaches and critical vulnerabilities discovered in the pipeline, helping you address these security issues. Once your security tools discover an exploitable vulnerability, you can respond by adding a patch, rolling back to a previous secure configuration, or deploying a new version.
5. Rapid recovery: when you store infrastructure as code, you can quickly identify all affected lines of code in a certain repository. It ensures you can quickly assess the size and scale of an attack so you can rapidly recover and minimize the damage caused by the attack.

See More: How to Deploy AKS Applications Using GitOps and Flux

Can GitOps Mitigate Open Source Security Risks?

Most software projects extensively use open source components. These components can create multiple security issues, including low code quality, known vulnerabilities, and unpredictable maintenance and support by the open source contributors. Another issue is that many open source libraries have many dependencies, each of which could have security vulnerabilities.

Open source security has become a critical part of information security. Organizations are using security tools like software composition analysis (SCA) and static application security testing (SAST) to identify open source vulnerabilities. However, remediation can be difficult because it is often unclear where an open source component is used in a software project and how to remediate or replace it.

In a GitOps environment, open source security is much easier, for several reasons:

• GitOps provides a full audit trail of all changes to a software project, so it is immediately clear who added a vulnerable, open source component, when, in which parts of the code, and what version is being used. This can save manual investigation time, which can be critical when a zero-day vulnerability is discovered.
• GitOps lets you easily roll back to a previous version that did not have the vulnerable component. While this may disrupt functionality for users (by reverting to an old version of your project) it can be a quick fix until teams perform full remediation.
• In a GitOps environment, remediating open source components is much easier because developers only need to make the change and update it in a shared repository, and automated systems deploy the new version with no human intervention. Essentially, all that is needed is a code change, and deployment of the fix is taken care of seamlessly.

3 Tips for Security with GitOps

• Integrate Incident Management and Alerting Tools: It is useful to integrate security management tools with alerting tools to ensure teams can access supporting data about incidents. This integration ensures alerts reach the relevant teams and workflows, so responders don’t need to switch between tools. Building an audit trail is important for providing accountability and enabling managers to track team responses to each alert. There must be visibility into all actions across the system’s security tools, so security teams can collaborate and see who addressed individual alerts. 
• Provide Actionable Insights: Taking advantage of GitOps requires equipment and policies to respond to security feedback. If the development team tries to push updates without addressing security guidance or remediating issues, this can create friction for the deployment pipeline. If the feedback is too noisy or not intuitive enough, developers will often ignore it. Developers should be the priority when establishing GitOps security processes to ensure they comply with the guidelines.
• Prevent Cloud Drift: You should store all cloud environment changes in a version-controlled IaC template repository. Enforcing these templates with immutable infrastructure is essential because they are the source of truth for GitOps. You can also use reconciliation loops to continuously check production resources against the desired state specified in the templates. It is possible to roll back most breaking changes with revert commands, although occasional manual changes create cloud drift. You must maintain visibility over your teams to account for drift and ensure immediate rollbacks. All developers viewing the IaC templates should see the same thing, as even a slight discrepancy can cause problems later.

A Shield for Your Software

In this article, we looked at the basics of GitOps and showed five ways it can contribute to the security of your software projects:

1. Developers take ownership of security: developers can ensure code is packaged and delivered securely.
2. Security as code: security configurations can be managed as code with a clear audit trail.
3. Shift security left: it is much easier to introduce security checks earlier in the pipeline and validate security throughout the development process.
4. Faster pipeline changes: GitOps enables rapid rollback or roll forward to remediate critical security issues.
5. Rapid recovery: GitOps shows you precisely what change led to the vulnerability and how to fix it when an attack occurs.

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