GitLab’s DevSecOps Report from 2023 highlighted the increasing threats on the software supply chain. It reported that 1 in 2 organizations report vulnerabilities in their CI/CD pipelines, while 69% struggle to integrate security into DevOps. Without proper security controls, your deployment process could become the weakest link in your software supply chain.
Why a DevSecOps Checklist is Essential?
A well-structured DevSecOps checklist ensures security is embedded throughout the SDLC. This DevSecOps Checklist covers activities ranging from tool integration, risk prioritization, automation, and reporting – ensuring teams can detect and mitigate threats effectively.
Generate a table of contents for this right after the introduction with the updated list of checklists below:
- Tool Coverage – Comprehensive Security Across the Pipeline
- Depth – Beyond Vulnerability Detection – Prioritization & Risk Insights
- Automation: Enforcing Security at Every Stage
- Reports & Scorecards: Continuous Security Visibility
DevSecOps Checklist: Practices to Secure the Software Supply Chain
Constant focus on the speed of software delivery, along with (traditional) slow and manual security checks, has caused teams to overlook security during software development. Since software delivery processes today include CI/CD tools, open-source dependencies, distributed teams, the underlying infrastructure and different cloud platforms, DevSecOps teams must ensure security and reliability across all facets of software development.
Below is a checklist of practices that teams must perform across the software development lifecycle (also called the Software Supply Chain).
1. Tool Coverage –
- SCA/License scans
- SAST
- OSS risk scans
- Secret Detection & Compliance Checks
2. Depth – Beyond Vulnerability Detection – Prioritization & Risk Insights
- SBOM & CBOM
- Policy Violations & Compliance Alignment
- Vulnerability Management & Risk Prioritization
- Risk-Based Scoring & Prioritization
- Network Reachability Checks – Exploitability, Reachability, Severity
- Remediation Insights
3. Automation: Enforcing Security at Every Stage
- Scans – Adhoc or automated?
- Trigger-Based Security Checks in different stages: IDE, Build, Artifact, Deployment
- Deployment Firewall to enforce final round of security checks pre-deployment
4. Reports & Scorecards: Continuous Visibility
- Risk Scoring & Prioritization Reports
- Policy & Compliance Reports
- Audit & Governance Reports
1. Tool Coverage: Comprehensive Security Across the Pipeline
Security attacks come from various sources and in various forms. Having a complete stack of security tools with different capabilities is necessary to provide full-spectrum coverage across the application lifecycle.
Ensuring checks for SAST, SCA, OSS Risk analysis, Secrets detection, etc. are the first entry in the checklist because these are the minimum AppSec capabilities that should be in place before releasing software outside of the organization.
- Software Composition Analysis (SCA) – Ensure you have SCA tools to detect vulnerabilities in open source code, third-party libraries/dependencies, and license compliance issues.
- Static Application Security Testing (SAST) – Ensure you have SAST tools to analyze application source code to detect vulnerabilities and security flaws early—during code development.
- OSS Risk Scanning – Ensure you are analyzing all the Open Source Software (OSS) or Open Source Components used in application code for outdated libraries or known exploits.
- Secret Detection & Compliance Checks – Ensure you are running comprehensive scans to detect hard-coded secrets and other sensitive information in your application code.
Completeness in tool coverage can offer comprehensive security scans across your application lifecycle, ensuring proactive risk detection while minimizing manual intervention
2. Depth: Beyond Vulnerability Detection – Prioritization & Risk Insights
Security is not just about identifying vulnerabilities, it is about addressing those vulnerabilities that actually pose a threat. So it’s necessary to go a level deeper and ensure you have a SBOM and CBOM in place, that no policies will get violated as part of the release process, and that you follow a scientific-approach to address threats (in the form of risk scoring and prioritization) as part of the mitigation process. Ensure the following checks are in place:
- SBoM and CBoM – Insert checks to ensure you maintain an updated list of software inventory in the form of a Software Bill of Materials (SBoM) and then you go a step further by extending the scope to Cryptographic Bill of Materials (CBoM)–an object model to describe cryptographic assets and their dependencies.
- Policy Violations & Compliance Alignment – Perform checks to ensure no policies are violated during a release and that security compliance frameworks such as NIST, FedRAMP, CIS Benchmarks, etc. are adhered to with automated checks for violations.
- Vulnerability Management & Risk Prioritization
- Risk-Based Scoring: Have checks in place to ensure prioritization of critical vulnerabilities based on risk scores assigned to each threat—CVSS scores, EPSS ratings calculated based on exploitability, severity, and real-world attack likelihood.
- Network Reachability Checks: Arguably the most important check is to assess whether an exposed vulnerability can be accessed from external or internal networks. Because even if it’s a risk with a low severity/criticality score, but if it’s easily reachable and exploitable, then you cannot let the release pass.
- Remediation Insights: Perform checks that ensure actionable steps have been provided to mitigate risks at various pipeline stages (e.g., patching, dependency updates, configuration hardening).
3. Automation: Enforcing Security at Every Stage
Automation is the backbone of an effective DevSecOps strategy. You need to have checks that can determine all your automated scans are done, and that no ad-hoc scans are missed. This also includes having checks for automated triggers (eg: blocked deployments) in case of a policy violation and other control actions as a compensating measure.
Automated trigger-based security checks include policy-driven security triggers that enforce controls at different stages:
- IDE Stage: To block insecure code before it gets committed.
- Build Stage: To automatically scan third-party packages and dependencies post-commit.
- Artifact Stage: To ensure configurations, container images, and final builds are free of vulnerabilities.
- Deployment & Runtime: To validate security posture before release, ensuring no misconfigurations or exposed secrets.
4. Reports & Scorecards: Continuous Security Visibility
Security is only as effective as the insights a team can act on. Risk scoring and prioritization reports, Policy reports and Audit reports play a crucial role here in providing the much needed visibility and confidence into the application security posture.
- Risk Scoring & Prioritization Reports: Perform checks to ensure risks with the highest scores (calculated based on severity, exploitability, criticality) are addressed before any deployment goes live.
- Policy & Compliance Reports: Check if all policies are in adherence to defined security frameworks and that there are no compliance violations. (Eg.: NIST, CIS Benchmarks, OWASP, etc.)
- Audit & Governance Reports: Maintain detailed security audit trails for governance, incident response, and to demonstrate compliance.
Ensuring these reports are generated in a timely manner and that the right feedback is passed on to the relevant stakeholders is key to effective DevSecOps.
Frequently Asked Questions around DevSecOps / DevOps Security :
What is the main goal of DevSecOps?
Enterprises formed DevSecOps – a new team to tackle security threats while releasing software at speed and scale. DevSecOps is an approach to ensuring DevOps Security, which brings a security-approach to application delivery or CI/CD process.
In this blog, we will address the top DevSecOps checklists (or DevOps Security checklists) that a DevSecOps team needs for safe and efficient software delivery.
What’s the role of “shift-left” in DevSecOps?
Shift Left Security emphasizes on introducing security best practices earlier in the SDLC. In sharing this fundamental philosophy of DevSecOps, Shift Left acts as one of its pillars.
Conclusion: Strengthening DevSecOps with a Structured Approach :
DevSecOps is not just about adding security tools – it’s about creating a security-first culture that integrates seamlessly into your SDLC. And organizations that embrace comprehensive security coverage, intelligent risk prioritization, automation-driven enforcement, and real-time reporting are the ones best equipped to streamline DevSecOps and secure their software supply chain. The checklists and practices described in this blog can act as a valuable structure to achieve DevSecOps success.
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About OpsMx
OpsMx is a leading innovator and thought leader in the Secure Continuous Delivery space. Leading technology companies such as Google, Cisco, Western Union, among others rely on OpsMx to ship better software faster.
If you are undergoing a transformation of integrating security into your DevOps process, then talk to our Top Secure CD Experts. Our team includes experts in security, CI/CD, DevOps, DevSecOps and cloud.
If you are looking to implement a DevSecOps platform to secure your software supply chain and deployments into Kubernetes or public cloud, then you should consider OpsMx Secure CD platform.
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