GitLab Security and Governance Solution Helps Secure Organisations’ End-to-End Software Supply Chains - TechInvest Magazine Online

GitLab Inc., provider of The One DevOps Platform, used KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America to announce enhancements to its Security and Governance solution, enabling organisations to integrate security and compliance in every step of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and secure their software supply chain.

GitLab’s 2022 Global DevSecOps Survey found that security was the highest priority investment area for organisations, with 57% of security professionals surveyed stating that their organisations have already shifted security left or plan to this year. To meet growing security needs, GitLab is enhancing its Security and Governance solution to provide visibility and management over security findings and compliance requirements, as well as deliver what we believe is a first-class software supply chain security experience.

With increasing regulatory and compliance requirements for organisations, GitLab has increased its focus on governance to help teams identify risks by providing them with visibility into their projects’ dependencies, security findings, and user activities. This includes capabilities like security policy management, compliance management, audit events, vulnerability management, and an upcoming capability of dependency management, which will help developers track vulnerable dependencies detected in their applications. These governance capabilities, in conjunction with a comprehensive set of security testing capabilities such as static application security testing (SAST), secret detection, dynamic application security testing (DAST), API security, fuzz testing, dependency scanning, license compliance, and container scanning, can help organisations achieve continuous security and compliance of their software supply chain without compromising on speed and agility.

“To stay competitive and propel digital transformation, organisations need to be great at developing, operating, and securing software. Security needs to be embedded in all stages of the software development lifecycle, not treated as an afterthought,” said David DeSanto, VP of Product at GitLab. “Our enhanced security and governance capabilities make GitLab a comprehensive DevSecOps solution to help secure an organisation’s software supply chain.”

Securing Software Supply Chains

The software supply chain is all of the internal and external dependencies used in modern software development. To properly secure the supply chain, companies must put tools in place to not only secure the code created in-house but also need ways to detect vulnerabilities that may be introduced by third-party components. With so many moving pieces, securing an organisation’s software supply chain can be complex. There needs to be an automated system of checks and balances throughout the development lifecycle to make sure code is efficiently and securely deployed.

Implementing a DevSecOps Platform can improve end-to-end security in part by reducing handoffs and improving transparency surrounding ownership and access.

• Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs): Introduced earlier this year, GitLab helps organisations create SBOMs and automatically scan for vulnerabilities within the discovered components, and provide guidance on resolving those vulnerabilities – all within the developer’s natural workflow.
• Ingest SBOM Reports: This upcoming feature is anticipated to help GitLab more efficiently create SBOMs by parsing and ingesting existing SBOM data from third parties to aggregate data for ease of use and help secure developer workflows.
• Build Artifact Signing: To attest to build artifact authenticity, we anticipate that this upcoming feature will enable GitLab to cryptographically sign both the build artifact and attestation file to prove that they have not been altered after generation.
• SLSA-2 Attestation: When unchecked, container-based architectures can introduce a risk of deploying defective, vulnerable, or unauthorised software. SLSA-2 attestations were introduced following the launch of GitLab 15 to protect against software tampering and add build integrity guarantees. GitLab Runner is now capable of generating SLSA-2 compliant attestation metadata for build artifacts.

Proactively Identify Vulnerabilities

GitLab helps ensure that organisations can shift left by proactively scanning for vulnerabilities and implementing controls to secure applications. GitLab’s enhanced features can help organisations automatically scan vulnerabilities in source code, containers, dependencies, and running applications. Additionally, these security features can help automate threat detection before and after applications are deployed to production to minimise security risk.

• DAST API and API Fuzzing: DAST API and API Fuzzing allow developers to find both known and unknown issues in their applications by scanning for them in CI/CD pipelines. With the recent addition of GraphQL schema support in 15.4, these API security scans help secure applications with minimal configuration as compared to prior releases. Additional application security scanners include Static Application Security Testing (SAST), Secret Detection, Container Scanning, Dependency Scanning, IaC Scanning, and coverage-guided fuzz testing.
• Integrated Security Training: The 2022 DevSecOps report found that 56% of respondents found it was difficult to get developers to actually prioritise fixing code vulnerabilities, leaving these threats for security professionals to capture. With Integrated Security Training, developers have access to actionable and relevant secure coding guidance within the GitLab platform, which can reduce context switching and management strain on security professionals.

Fulfill Compliance and Regulatory Standards

Operations professionals identify managing compliance and audit requirements as activities within their scope of responsibility. GitLab believes the new and upcoming features will help teams track changes, implement controls to define what goes into production, and ensure adherence to license compliance and regulatory frameworks.

• Customisable Roles: In an upcoming release, GitLab Admins/Group Owners will be able to create new customised roles with granular permissions. This will help role-based access control to more closely align with an organisation’s security policies and support the principle of least privilege.
• FIPS 140-2 Compliance: GitLab is now FIPS 140-2 compliant, which is required for some GitLab customers under U.S. government regulatory guidelines. This compliance shows that GitLab meets well-defined security standards governing the development and use of cryptographic modules.
• Password Rules: Released earlier this year, password rules establish password complexity requirements and can prevent users from using insecure public keys to access GitLab.
• Streaming Audit Events: Released earlier this year, streaming audit events capture information about event types, timelines, users, and metadata associated with meaningful system events. This allows organisations to consolidate their logs into one toolset and build workflows centrally to take action when a specific event occurs.
• Two-Person Approvals: Released last year, GitLab allows users to specify group-level merge request settings, including the ability to prevent an author from approving their own merge request. This setting, combined with other GitLab features, allows organisations to require two-person approvals before allowing code to be merged in.

“Enterprises have experienced great success in embracing DevOps principles and breaking down the siloes that separate software development and IT operations teams. The next step to strengthen the development process is to replicate this approach for security, moving from DevOps to DevSecOps,” said Daniel Kennedy, Principal Analyst, Information Security at 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence. “In order to shift security left, while continuing deployment at an efficient cadence, organizations require a single platform that integrates security and compliance into their existing development workflows.”1

“HackerOne uses GitLab as a key component to maintain our software security and ensure high confidence with the code we deploy,” said Ben Willis, Principal Software Engineer at HackerOne. “During development, we leverage automated and manual code review checks, use GitLab integrations for continuous monitoring and automated patching, and consistently rely on GitLab for support with any audit requests.”

To learn more about the GitLab Security and Governance solution, please visit the solution page. To read the 2022 DevSecOps survey, please download the report here.