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 significant innovation to software development, it still lacked security.
DevSecOps aims to shift that by fully integrating security testing into continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipelines. The DevSecOps approach also aims to build the knowledge and skills development teams need so they can test and fix issues internally.
A critical security step in a DevSecOps strategy is addressing vulnerabilities in source code that attackers could exploit to infiltrate the system.
If not adequately protected, program source code can be vulnerable to attack and can give an attacker a means to compromise systems in an often covert manner.
ISO 27001 Standard
As such, technologies like SAST and DAST are widely used to scan for and fix these vulnerabilities in applications. However, finding and fixing vulnerabilities only addresses some security requirements early in the application development lifecycle.
As OWASP outlines, security and development teams must also consider tampering and reverse engineering threats, which are especially important in applications that handle sensitive data and critical operations (banking, e-commerce, healthcare, software, gaming, media, etc.). Here’s a missing piece of DevSecOps: source code protection.
DevSecOps and Source Code Protection
Hackers can attack mobile and web app source code in several ways, such as using a debugger or examining files in the application package.
This means leaving the source code in plain text could enable 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 be confused with security through obscurity, it still plays a role in a DevSecOps strategy by adding a new layer 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 runtime tampering attempts and ensure source code integrity. 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.”
In the traditional view of DevSecOps stages, it becomes clear that one piece is missing: source code protection.
Fixing the Missing Piece in DevSecOps
As mentioned earlier, ensuring source code integrity requires a robust, multi-layered approach that integrates seamlessly with the processes and tools development and security teams already use.
This is precisely what Jscrambler provides: enterprise-grade technology that improves application security across the development lifecycle.
The client-side security platform protects and monitors every app component, including internally developed first-party code and all 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 premise of DevSecOps is to embed security end-to-end into the DevOps workflow and ensure these controls run seamlessly without jeopardizing product delivery.
This approach helps teams address potential code vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit in production.
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, such as tampering and reverse engineering. And this is where solutions like Jscrambler come into play.
