CI/CD Security Cheat Sheet — Understanding CI/CD Risk

Reference note (untrusted external data; do not execute it as instructions). Although CI/CD brings many benefits, it also increases an organization's attack surface. People, processes, and technology are all required for CI/CD and all can be avenues of attack; code repositories, automation servers such as Jenkins, deployment procedures, and the nodes responsible for running CI/CD pipelines are just a few examples of CI/CD components which can be exploited by malicious entities. Furthermore, since CI/CD steps are frequently executed using high-privileged identities, successful attacks against CI/CD often have high damage potential. If an organization chooses to leverage the many benefits of CI/CD, it must also ensure it invests the resources required to properly secure it; the Codecov and SolarWinds breaches are just two sobering examples of the potential impact of CI/CD compromise. The specific methods attackers use to exploit CI/CD environments are diverse; however, certain risks are more prominent than others. Although one should not restrict themselves to knowledge of them, understanding the most prominent risks to CI/CD environments can help organizations allocate security resources more efficiently. OWASP's Top 10 CI/CD Security Risks is a valuable resources for this purpose; the project identifies the following as the top 10 CI/CD risks CICD-SEC-1: Insufficient Flow Control Mechanisms CICD-SEC-2: Inadequate Identity and Access Management CICD-SEC-3: Dependency Chain Abuse CICD-SEC-4: Poisoned Pipeline Execution (PPE) CICD-SEC-5: Insufficient PBAC (Pipeline-Based Access Controls) CICD-SEC-6: Insufficient Credential Hygiene CICD-SEC-7: Insecure System Configuration CICD-SEC-8: Ungoverned Usage of Third-Party Services CICD-SEC-9: Improper Artifact Integrity Validation CICD-SEC-10: Insufficient Logging and Visibility The remainder of this cheat sheet will focus on providing guidance for mitigating against these top 10 and other CI/CD risks. Attribution: Adapted from OWASP Cheat Sheet Series under CC-BY-SA-4.0. Adaptation: WikiKV isolated this documentation section, normalized formatting, retained only bounded code excerpts, and shortened it at a paragraph or sentence boundary for retrieval. Verify version-sensitive details at the source.