This chapter contains security considerations in a DevOps context. This is especially important as security practices are considered as not agile and therefore slow down the time between a code commit and acceptance into normal production. By considering this topic in the first place and integrating security aspects into a DevOps organization, the mentioned consideration might become obsolete. The following topics are common candidates for security discussions:

• Security audits
  While security audits are imminent, coordination between Dev and Ops becomes crucial. Especially while considering infrastructure-as-code.
• Securing the deployment pipeline
  The deployment pipeline itself is an attractive target for malicious attackers.
• Microservice architecture
  Adoption of microservice architecture introduce new security challanges.

Security

Security is defined through the acronym CIA:

• Confidentiality
  prevents unauthorized people from accessing information.
• Integrity
  prevents unauthorized people from modifying information.
• Availability
  ensures that authrized people can access information.

In this context authorization addresses two elements: Who is trying to access or modify information and do they have the right to perform the operation they requested?

A common wise saying in security is “Do not roll your own”; thats due to errors that may creep in can be subtle. Own teams won’t find those errors while they provide an avenue for an attacker to compromise systems. Another common wise saying is “defense in depth”, which indicates that any attack must circumvent numerous different defenses to compromise a system. As there is no 100% security, the question about security is always, how much an attacker is willing to spend on compromising the system. Therefore security contains different aspects:

• Ability that individualys cannot deny the operations they performed on the data in a system
• Security Controls such as encryption, security patches within a time frame; those can be preventive, detective or corrective

Security Threats

When taking the point of view of an attacker, a new perspective is taken into consideration when designing a system or subsystem. Microsoft has introduced the acronym STRIDE for such a threat model which impairs the CIA aspects of security:

• Spoofing identify
  Illegally accessing and using another users’s authentication information,such as username and password.
• Tampering with data
  Data tampering involves the malicious modification of data.
• Repudiation
  Those threads are associated with users who deny performing an action without other parties having a way to prove otherwise.
• Information disclosure
  Includes the exposure of information to individuals who are not supposed to have access to it.
• Denial of service
  Compromises availability of a system to valid users.
• Elevation of privilege
  Thread that unpreviliged users gain previledged access and therefore sufficient access to compromise or impair the entire system.