Improving Your DevSecOps Workflow with Jscrambler

Improving your DevSecOps Workflow with Jscrambler is a comprehensive guide to securely managing your DevOps Workflow. In other words, what does digital acceleration mean for application security and development teams?

It is precisely at this interface between development and security teams that DevSecOps becomes a reality. We explore the specifics of DevSecOps and how teams should address this topic.

What is DevSecOps?

While the previous DevOps culture brought a lot of innovation to software development, security was still missing.

DevSecOps is an attempt to shift that and fully integrate security testing into the continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipelines. Not only that, but the DevSecOps approach also aims to build up the knowledge and skills needed in the development teams so that testing and fixing can also be done internally.

One of the critical security steps in a DevSecOps strategy is addressing vulnerabilities in the source code, which attackers could leverage to infiltrate the system.

Program source code can be vulnerable to attack if not adequately protected, and it can provide an attacker with a means to compromise systems in an often covert manner.

ISO 27001 Standard

As such, technologies like SAST and DAST have been widely used to scan and fix these vulnerabilities in the application. However, finding and fixing vulnerabilities only answers some of the security requirements in the early application development stages.

As outlined by OWASP, security and development teams must also consider the threats of tampering and reverse engineering, which are especially important in applications that handle sensitive data and critical operations (banking, e-commerce, healthcare, software, gaming, media, etc.). Here, we find a missing piece of DevSecOps: source code protection.

DevSecOps and Source Code Protection

Hackers can attack the mobile and web app’s source code in several ways, such as by using a debugger or going through the files in the application’s package.

This means that leaving the source code in plain text could potentially result in the two main threats we just saw: reverse engineering and tampering.

Organizations such as OWASP advise adding resilience controls on top of security best practices to tackle these threats.

Mobile Top 10 2016-M9-Reverse Engineering

“To prevent effective reverse engineering, you must use an obfuscation tool.”

Along with OWASP, NIST advises “obfuscation and self-checking to make reverse engineering and modifications more difficult, time-consuming, and expensive for adversaries.”.

Although obfuscation can sometimes be confused with security through obscurity, it plays a role in a DevSecOps strategy, adding a new level of protection to critical applications and increasing the difficulty of reverse engineering attempts.

Because today’s attackers are often highly motivated to infiltrate a system, it’s also crucial to implement techniques that actively mitigate tampering attempts at runtime and ensure the integrity of the source code. The importance of this security control is best presented in the words of the 2021 Executive Order by the White House:

“(...) employing automated tools, or comparable processes, to maintain trusted source code supply chains, thereby ensuring the integrity of the code.”

Looking at the traditional view of the different stages of DevSecOps, it becomes clear that there is a missing piece: source code protection.

Fixing the Missing Piece in DevSecOps

As stated before, ensuring the integrity of the source code requires a robust, multi-layered approach that integrates seamlessly with the existing processes and tools used by development and security teams.

This is precisely what Jscrambler provides: enterprise-grade technology that improves application security throughout the different stages of the development lifecycle.

The client-side security platform protects and monitors every app component, including the first-party code developed internally and all the third-party scripts sourced from external vendors.

Jscrambler client-side security solution

Regarding securing the code developed in-house, Jscrambler automates the protection of the source code at build time using a series of layers, including polymorphic obfuscation, code locks, and runtime protection.

As a result, it makes it extremely difficult for attackers to target the source code, reducing the attack surface to data exfiltration, piracy, cheating, automated abuse, and intellectual property theft. This fits seamlessly with the Code and Build stages of the DevSecOps cycle, allowing teams to automate source code protection.

Jscrambler then extends this protection to the runtime of these applications, using a holistic approach to detect and block, in real-time, malicious behavior on the client side of web applications.

Through a comprehensive webpage inventory, Jscrambler gathers information from every script and network request on each user session and mitigates malicious behavior (including data leakage, customer hijacking, and website tampering).

This information can be fed into the DevSecOps cycle, allowing the development and security teams to promptly address compromised resources such as hijacked code components (libraries, external scripts).

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Conclusion

The whole premise of DevSecOps revolves around ingraining security from end to end into the DevOps workflow and ensuring that these controls happen seamlessly without jeopardizing product delivery.

This approach helps teams address potential code vulnerabilities exploited by attackers in a production environment.

To that extent, tools like SAST and DAST have played a key role in DevSecOps, integrating seamlessly into CI/CD workflows to automate vulnerability management.

However, source code protection impacts DevSecOps and its threats like tampering and reverse engineering. And this is where solutions like Jscrambler come into play.