⚙️ CI/CD Attacks

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines streamline the software development process. However, these pipelines can become a target for attackers aiming to compromise the software supply chain. This document explores how Myrror Security safeguards your CI/CD environment from such attacks.

Understanding CI/CD Pipeline Attacks

The Threat Landscape: CI/CD pipelines automate various stages of software development, including building, testing, and deploying code. Attackers targeting these pipelines can inject malicious code into the build process, potentially compromising the final application reaching production. Here's how they might operate:

Exploiting Pipeline Vulnerabilities: Attackers exploit weaknesses in the CI/CD platform itself or its configuration to gain unauthorized access and either inject malicious code or replace an existing package with a malicious one.
Compromised Credentials: Attackers steal developer or build server credentials to gain access to the CI/CD pipeline and manipulate the build process.
Supply Chain Compromise: Attackers target upstream dependencies within the CI/CD pipeline, injecting malicious code into these dependencies that propagate through the build process. This injection of malicious code is called tampering.

Consequences of CI/CD Pipeline Attacks

Supply Chain Compromise: Malicious code introduced into the pipeline can infect the final application, impacting end-users.
Data Exfiltration: Attackers can steal sensitive data exposed during the build process, such as API keys or other secrets.
Denial-of-Service (DoS) Attacks: Malicious code can disrupt the CI/CD pipeline, preventing successful builds and deployments.

Mitigating CI/CD Pipeline Attacks with Myrror Security

Myrror Security, the leading SCA solution with a focus on reachability and exploitability prioritization, offers a robust defense against CI/CD pipeline attacks:

Security Scans Throughout the Pipeline: Myrror Security integrates seamlessly with your CI/CD pipeline, performing security scans at every stage, including code analysis, dependency checks, and secret detection. This continuous monitoring helps identify vulnerabilities and suspicious activity early on in the development process.
Tampering (Malicious Code Injection): Myrror Security is fully capable of detecting tampering since it analyzes the compiled dependencies straight from the repositories and analyzes the ones in the application codebase. This process of analysis goes on with decompiling the dependency’s binary and comparing it with the source code, measuring the similarity score, and providing data on the reports about the application’s code and decompiled code.

Vulnerability Detection in Dependencies: Myrror Security analyzes all dependencies within your CI/CD pipeline, identifying known vulnerabilities and malicious code attempts within these dependencies. This ensures that the injected vulnerabilities are addressed with proper detection and acknowledgment while providing all about the security issue the developer needs to know to mitigate it.
Pipeline Configuration Review: Myrror Security reviews your CI/CD pipeline configuration for potential security misconfigurations that could be exploited by attackers. A secure pipeline can facilitate a positive development environment with minimum loopholes possible for exploitation. Hence, this is continuously reviewed by Myrror at every stage of development.
Reachability and Exploitability Focus: Myrror Security prioritizes vulnerabilities based on their reachability and exploitability within your specific CI/CD pipeline. This ensures development teams focus on the threats with the highest potential for causing damage, optimizing their security efforts.

Configuring Myrror to Scan for CI/CD Attacks

To enable the detection of CI/CD Attacks, you can add it from the settings of Myrror. Myrror supports using scan configuration that developers can configure and use as per their requirements. In these scan configuration options, there is a portion with toggling the Tampering & Risky Code (Trojans) and Supply Chain (Trojan) sections. Enabling this option would enable the detection of CI/CD Attacks in repositories.

Open the Scan Configurations menu and select scan options that need to be updated with Detection of CI/CD Attacks or create a new scan option if required by clicking the + button.

Multiple Scan configurations can be configured and used as per the requirements and frequency of scanning.

Recommendations for Developers

Here are some best practices to secure your CI/CD pipeline:

Enforce Strong Access Controls: Implement robust access control measures for your CI/CD environment, including least privilege principles and multi-factor authentication.
Regularly Update Software: Keep your CI/CD platform and plugins updated with the latest security patches to address known vulnerabilities.
Leverage Secure Storage: Store sensitive secrets like API keys and passwords securely, utilizing dedicated secret management solutions.
Monitor Pipeline Activity: Continuously monitor your CI/CD pipeline for suspicious activity, unauthorized access attempts, or unexpected changes.
Conduct Regular Security Audits: Perform periodic security audits of your CI/CD pipeline to identify and address any potential weaknesses.