DevSecOps best practices help you to accelerate release cycles while also ensuring security. For that reason, we provide DevSecOps best practices to help you efficiently and effectively safeguard your source code.
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Back to topWhat Is DevSecOps?
DevSecOps (Development Security Operations) adds security practices to the DevOps mindset. It's also known as rugged DevOps.
Everyone involved in software development today is responsible for security. Just one security breach can have a huge impact. It can damage your product’s reputation. Or worse, it could put lives at risk.
But you can’t always slow down development to do extra security checks. Instead, you need to accelerate security efforts (and match the pace of development).
That’s why security is important. It’s especially key for safety-critical development teams.
There’s no room for security risks in:
In these industries, you can’t sacrifice security for the sake of speed.
Back to topWhat Are DevSecOps Best Practices?
DevSecOps blends speed, scale, and security to improve your development process.
Here are three DevSecOps best practices that you can apply today to improve security — without sacrificing speed.
1. Educate Your Developers
Everyone makes mistakes — including developers. And training developers on secure coding isn’t always a priority. But it should be.
Human error is one of the biggest contributors to coding errors. And coding errors are responsible for a large number of vulnerabilities in code.
Start With CWE
Many developers are unaware of common software weaknesses. A good place to start learning about security mistakes is the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) list.
Using a coding standard can also educate developers on secure coding best practices. They’ll learn from their mistakes. And by checking their code against a standard, they’ll learn how to avoid key security vulnerabilities in the first place.
2. Use Automation Wisely
Automated tools can help you identify security risks.
For instance, Continuous Integration (CI) tools can help you automate security checks. And when security checks are an automatic part of the development process, you’ll rest assured that they actually happen.
Use SAST Tools
Static application security testing (SAST) is one type of security check. You can use a SAST tool to continuously check your code for security issues. This is typically done with automated static analysis tools, such as Klocwork.
These tools can help you identify potential vulnerabilities in your code earlier in the development process. By checking for security issues frequently, you’ll be able to address them more effectively.
Plus, you can use these tools to check your code against a secure coding standard. As a result, you’ll be able to continuously inspect your code for potential errors — and improve the overall security of your codebase.
But automation should be used wisely.
It’s important to select the right automated tools for security.
You should also consider whether automation accelerates or slows down your development process. After all, if you have an SAST tool that produces too many false positives, you’ll lose time.
3. Keep Your Code Simple
As your code gets more complex, it can contain more security vulnerabilities.
Simple, readable code is easier to collaborate on. One developer should be able to look at another developer’s code — and know exactly what’s going on.
There are coding best practices for C++ you can use to make your code simpler and more readable. These include things like avoiding unnecessary parentheses.
Back to topDevSecOps Best Practices: Apply a Coding Standard
Applying a coding standard can also help to simplify your code. A coding standard is made up of rules — and some of these rules are designed to simplify your code.
For example, the following MISRA rule helps to minimize visual code complexity:
Rule 15.4
There should be no more than one break or goto statement used to terminate any iteration statement
And by keeping your code simple, you’ll minimize the risk of introducing security issues.
Back to topDevSecOps Best Practices Start with High-Quality Code
The only way to be successful at DevSecOps is to incorporate security early on in your development process.
It can’t wait until the end of development — or even until testing. Security needs to start with your code. And it needs to be applied continuously throughout development.
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