Laura Bell - Agile Application Security: Enabling Security in a Continuous Delivery Pipeline

by Laura Bell , Michael Brunton-Spall , Rich Smith , and Jim Bird

Copyright 2016 Laura Bell, Rich Smith and Michael Brunton-Spall. All rights reserved.

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Software is eating the world. Developers are the new kingmakers. The internet of things means there will be a computer in every light bulb.

These statements indicate the growing dominance of software development, to the point where most people in the world will never be further than a meter away from a computer, and we will expect much of our life to interact with computer-assisted objects and environments all the time.

But this world comes with some dangers. In the old world of computing, security was often only considered in earnest for banking and government style systems. But the rise of ubiquitous computing means a rise in the value that can be realised from the abuse of systems, this increases incentives for misuse, which in turn increases the risks systems face.

Agile software development techniques are becoming rapidly adopted in most organisations, by being responsive to change and dramatically lowering the cost of development, they provide a standard that we expect will continue to grow until the majority of software is built in an agile manner.

However security and agile have not historically been great bedfellows.

Security professionals have had their hands full with the aforementioned government, e-commerce and banking systems, trying to architect, test and secure those systems all in the face of constantly evolving set of threats. Furthermore, what is often seen as the most fun and exciting work in security, the things that get covered on the tech blogs and the nightly news, is currently done by teams of professional hackers focusing on vulnerability research, exploit development, and stunt hacks.

You can probably name a few recent branded vulnerabilities like Heartbleed, Logjam, Shellshock (or heaven forbid even recognise their logos.), or recognise the teams of researchers who have achieved a jailbreak on the latest iPhones and android devices. But when was the last time a new defensive measure or methodology had a cool media friendly name, or you picked up the name of a defender and builder?

Security professionals are lagging behind in their understanding and experience of agile development, and that creates a gap that is scary for our industry.

Equally, agile teams have rejected and thrown off the shackles of the past. No more requirements documents, no more system modeling, no more traditional waterfall hand offs. The problem with this is that agile teams have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Those practices, while sometimes slow and inflexible, have demonstrated value over the years. They were done for a reason, and agile teams in rejecting them can easily forget and dismiss their value.

This means that agile teams rarely consider security as much as needed. Some of the agile practices make a system more secure, but that is often a beneficial side effect rather than the purpose. Very few agile teams have an understanding of the threats that face their system, they dont understand the risks they are taking, they dont track or do anything to control those risks, and they often have a poor understanding of who it even is that are attacking their creations.