Best DevSecOps Tools for 2022 | Open Source Enterprise
What is DevSecOps?
DevSecOps is all about introducing security in the earlier phase of the application or software development cycle and continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment pipelines (CI/CD), which helps to minimize vulnerabilities and meet IT and business objectives related to security and compliance. It mainly focuses on securing applications and automating security in the DevOps process. Good DevOps Security Tools and strategies are required to determine risk tolerance and conduct a risk/benefit analysis.
DevSecOps is a practice of implementing security at every step in the DevOps Lifecycle with DevSecOps Tools. According to the traditional method where penetration tests and vulnerability assessments were done after the build, DevSecOps is based on the concept of integrating security assessments and vulnerability tests at each point of the CI/CD pipeline. DevSecOps tools help in implementing security within the DevOps workflow.
This tool kit embeds security best practices into the processes without slowing down the delivery of the product. You can group DevSecOps tools into several categories:
- Code scanning, alerts, and notification of security anomalies
- Automation (scanning, discovery, and remediation of security defects)
- Visibility dashboards
- Threat intelligence
- Testing
Code Scanning, Alerts, and Notification of Security Anomalies
The first set of tools includes code scanners, which break down every line of code to ensure that there are no security anomalies or vulnerabilities. If they find any, you receive alerts and notifications.
Gitlab
With a single platform for the entire SDLC, GitLab enables simplicity of embedded security scanning along with end-to-end visibility and control not possible with point solutions. Vulnerabilities can become issues for follow-up with one click. Remediation status is always evident. Changes to the code and to the cloud-native environment upon which it depends are tracked. When using GitLab, no additional integration is needed between app sec and ticketing, CI/CD, etc.
Alerta
Alerta delivers a scalable way to scan and check code. It offers a flexible alert format so that you can customize it to fit your needs.
Alerta integrates with a variety of monitoring and management systems, including Amazon CloudWatch and Prometheus. You can query alerts from the command line or view them on a web console. Alerta offers standard deployment on Amazon Web Services (AWS), EC2, Kubernetes, Docker, and more.
It’s a great tool that reduces alert fatigue because you can customize notifications via partition. It also offers deduplication of alerts so that you see only the most recent one, bringing the organization to an often-chaotic environment.
ShiftLeft
ShiftLeft is a collection of open-source scanning tools. It boasts that it has the “fastest code analysis,” scanning 40 times faster than others. It also claims to have greater accuracy than the industry average, at 75 percent compared to 26 percent.
ShiftLeft’s design is developer-centric, speeding up the mean time to remediation (MTTR) fivefold. It looks for logic flaws in every imaginable channel: hardcoded, data leakage, authorization bypass, backdoors, logic bombs, and more.
SRE teams will find ShiftLeft to be a comprehensive scanning solution. You can use it for free on up to 200,000 lines of code and 300 scans per year. For SREs who care deeply about speed and latency, ShiftLeft is an ideal match. It’s not something that slows systems down, but it also doesn’t make you choose between security and performance.
Trivy — Container Vulnerability Scanning
When working with cloud computing, you’re bound to use containers, application images, and Kubernetes. Trivy is an open-source project that aims to simplify scanning application images, using trusted databases to verify any known vulnerabilities.
As a DevSecOps tool, Trivy is fast, flexible, and will cross-reference with vulnerability databases in seconds (quick scans). Furthermore, It supports many OS packages, can scan repositories, filesystems, and is easy to implement in CI such as;
- GitLabCI
- Jenkins
- GitHub Actions
- CircleCI
Snyk
Snyk helps SRE teams find and fix vulnerabilities. It differentiates itself by being a “developer-first solution.” Its automated remediation enables speed and scale, and its vulnerabilities database claims to be 370 percent bigger than commercial databases.
Snyk easily integrates into your native environment, from coding to reporting. The open-source version is free of charge, but there are also paid options that offer more features. In the field of open-source risk mitigation, it’s top of the line.
Gerrit — Code Review
Gerrit is another DevSecOps tool that works directly in the team’s workflow, allowing every merge and commit to be reviewed or tested for vulnerabilities. Gerrit helps teams communicate better by highlighting issues and allowing notes and comments to specific code sections.
You can also build your own plugin or enjoy the many plugins the community has made to enhance the Gerrit code auditioning. Some of the plugins being constantly updated and created by the community daily include;
- Plugins to manage notes in code.
- Webhooks.
- Gerrit analytics data.
- Auto-submission of changes after approval.
SonarSource
Five million developers and 300,000 organizations use SonarSource’s tools for development pipelines, and over 18,000 contribute to its open-source IDE. The Geneva-based vendor offers a free IDE extension, SonarLint, for coding guidance and analysis. The company’s specialty is its continuous codebase coverage and static analysis tool for CI/CD workflows. Sonar’s technology is available as a self-managed (SonarQube) or SaaS-based (SonarCloud) solution, and clients can choose between Developer, Enterprise, and Data Center plans.
Sonar Features
- Access to 5,000+ coding rules and taint analysis of Java, Python, JS, C#, and more
- Automated code review, including pull request decorations and branch analysis
- 60+ integrations including GitHub, Azure DevOps, Bitbucket, GitLab, and Docker
- Support for 29 programming languages and Infrastructure-as-Code
- Enterprise-level aggregation and reporting for oversight, security, and compliance
Automation: Scanning, Discovery, and Remediation of Security Defects
Automation is one of the biggest aspects of an SRE team. DevSecOps is about embracing automation in security so that the process is seamless, not daunting.
StackStorm
StackStorm is an event-driven platform for runbook automation, supporting infrastructure as code. It uses if-then rules to simplify workflows. It’s event-based, so once there is a trigger event, it checks rules, runs instructions, executes commands, and provides the results.
What makes this tool stand out is its approach to automation. You can compartmentalize small tasks and then orchestrate them into larger ones. It has numerous use cases for SRE teams, including automated remediation and security responses.
OWASP Glue
OWASP Glue acts as a framework for the automation of a security analysis pipeline. It takes different types of tools and aggregates the outputs of each. These “unified” issues deliver exceptional context to SREs. OWASP Glue also works incredibly fast, so developers can make changes quickly to avoid delivery delays or downtime on a live product.
OWASP ZAP
The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is one of the best-known names in cybersecurity, thanks to its threat research and contributions to the open-source community.
- Automated active and passive scanning of web applications for vulnerabilities
- Scanning of open and active ports and database risk posture to SQL injections
- Easy DevOps integrations and a REST API for manipulating the proxy application
OWASP Dependency-Check — Build Composition Analysis
OWASP comes in the build phase of DevSecOps, automatically checking against the build output artifact. OWASP will scan the databases for all known vulnerabilities in the dependencies used during the project’s build process.
Developers will often use established dependencies released by others to build their applications. Sometimes they may contain faulty code from dangerous sources. Often the developers of said dependencies aren’t aware of these issues, which opens your application for potential attacks when using them. OWASP scans all reports on such dependencies, pointing out flaws and vulnerabilities, and recommending possible fixes for them.
Lynis
For an extensive health scan of Linux, macOS, or Unix-based operating systems, Lynis is an excellent option. It supports system hardening and compliance testing. SREs can use it to discover security weaknesses daily so that they don’t become security incidents.
Dashboards for Visibility: Customize Your View and Integrate Sources
DevSecOps/SREs leverage dashboards to visually understand the performance of systems and to track security issues. The ability to customize views and integrate sources makes them essential to any SRE’s day-to-day.
Grafana
Grafana is an open observability platform. From one central hub, you can query, visualize, and analyze metrics.
Grafana also allows you to construct dashboards to match your requirements, which are all shareable with teams. Its visualization tools include histograms, graphs, and geo maps. It supports numerous databases, allowing you to aggregate and get more insights.
This tool is possibly one of the most vital for SREs, simply due to its observability functionality. SREs continue to focus more and more on observability to measure internal states through external outputs.
Kibana
Kibana’s focus is on visualization dashboards. It works specifically with Elasticsearch data. Kibana enables query load tracking, request workflows, and more. SREs will have the freedom to set up visualizations based on their requirements. Kibana also has an added intelligence function that suggests visualizations that will communicate data most effectively.
Threat Intelligence: Identity, Predict, and Define Threats
Threat intelligence is another integral piece of the DevSecOps tool kit. The ability to identify, predict, and define threats supports security-by-design concepts.
OWASP Threat Dragon
OWASP Threat Dragon creates threat model diagrams to record probable threats and determine how to mitigate them. It works for web and desktop applications and offers system diagramming and a rule engine to auto-generate threats and subsequent mitigation efforts. SREs will find it valuable because it’s a proactive approach to threat management from the start.
Testing: Find Security Issues Before Going Live
Continuous testing of applications is necessary to deploy error-free solutions.
Arachni — Testing
DevSecOps Tools at the testing phase of the development process aim to put the application in a live workflow, testing auth, API endpoints, SQL injection, and user-related application flow. Arachni is a powerful open-source project that can multi-scan web test’s scripted audits (with Ruby), all while being simple to integrate into CI/CD.
Arachni supports Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, and Linux, allowing it to be used on cloud servers with ease. Deploying with Arachni is easy due to its Ruby library, which allows complex scripted scans to be executed. It is also able to perform quick scans using the command-line interface. Installing it is as simple as downloading and extracting a package, at which point it’s ready to run tests.
BDD-Security
BDD-Security is a security testing framework that leverages behavior-driven development (BDD) concepts. With these concepts, it can then create self-verifying security specs. It can test both web apps and APIs from an external point of view, requiring no access to the target source code. It’s an excellent resource for automating testing.
Chef InSpec
Chef InSpec helps standardize security auditing for continuous compliance. It’s a leading tool for discovering noncompliance early, leading to quick remediation. Further, it delivers automated security compliance for your infrastructure to reduce risk. SREs benefit from such a tool because of its seamless delivery of compliance and security audits.
Gauntlt
Gauntlt is a command-line testing framework that combines several security tools. SREs can create tests and suites that they can admit into the deployment and testing cycles.
Gauntlt is flexible in that creation and execution can come from different tools to penetrate the application. It uses BDD syntax for readable and structured tests. It’s a great collaborative tool that can boost SRE performance.
Falco — Deployment runtime verification
After an application goes through the entirety of the development and security verification process, it must pass one last series of tests before production. These tests aim to check stability, vulnerability, and errors that can only happen in the live production environment. Essentially, some of the points Falco tests for inconsistencies include:
- Issues with live cloud applications.
- Differences in configurations between live production and testing environments.
- Hardware interactions.
Since this DevSecOps tool comes at the last step of development, it comes with instant alerts to policy violations, and highly configurable rules engines that will accommodate the needs of any team or application. As such, the creators pride themselves on shipping a ready-to-run product. It has strong default configurations that will give you a solid starting point even with little interaction.
Benefits of DevSecOps
With DevSecOps, the aim is to maintain the speed of development provided by the DevOps model while improving security. A team of DevSecOps Engineers will deliver higher quality code faster, catch flaws earlier, avoid higher costs, fix issues where they’re simple to deal with, and are cheaper to implement.
Fast, safe, and reliable software delivery
Before creating and implementing DevSecOps, code was written, iterated, changed, and only after a build was ready. The problem is that this approach leads to extensive delays in production as the auditioning process could take from a few days to upwards of two weeks for each set of changes in a build. This would slow even the fastest DevSecOps Engineers to a crawl.
This process is not only time-intensive but also incredibly expensive. The market accelerated IT companies needed a way to streamline this process and cut the huge cost of security in final builds.
This need led to the emergence of the DevSecOps concept. By introducing security at every step of development and making everyone responsible for the security and compliance of an application, companies could produce a secure environment where DevOps’ rapid delivery was possible while upholding security standards and best practices.
Improved Security
DevSecOps also referred to as “Shift Left DevOps” takes security to the next level by introducing security at the beginning of the development cycle, adding automated checks, finding vulnerable dependencies, and pointing out faulty code. The security team that previously was a bottleneck now educates developers enabling every developer to review their own code before pushing it.
Once this check is done, the code still gets reviewed by a smaller security team, scanned for vulnerabilities, and tested using the latest Security as Code definitions configured by the security team. This means that issues are found much earlier in development, before several layers of code and dependencies have been introduced into the code. As a result, it is effectively faster to fix errors, which also translates to an incredibly cheaper process.
Teams that have adopted DevSecOps can recover from catastrophic failures quicker. This is especially important for businesses that work with high-value, high-risk data, such as banks and e-commerce stores, where catching and patching a vulnerability will not only save a lot of money but also protect customer data.
Conclusion
Attacks, ransomware, malware, and other threats are more prominent than ever. With the growth in attacks, security in applications has never been so important. This issue will only become worse with time, and this is why adopting DevSecOps is so essential. By implementing automated security measures and configurations during the development process, safer, better, and more reliable applications are produced.
As technology evolves, development becomes faster, and methodologies help teams attain goals faster, but speed must come paired with security for the best results. DevSecOps transforms the way teams work, educating every person involved in the process, training them to be ready to deal with continuous iteration, react promptly to issues, and fix them.
Many thanks,
