Security Support in Continuous Deployment Pipeline

Faheem Ullah, Adam Johannes Raft, Mojtaba Shahin, Mansooreh Zahedi, Muhammad Ali Babar

Research output: Conference Article in Proceeding or Book/Report chapterArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

Abstract

Continuous Deployment (CD) has emerged as a new practice in the software industry to continuously and automatically deploy software changes into production. Continuous Deployment Pipeline (CDP) supports CD practice by transferring the changes from the repository to production. Since most of the CDP components run in an environment that has several interfaces to the Internet, these components are vulnerable to various kinds of malicious attacks. This paper reports our work aimed at designing secure CDP by utilizing security tactics. We have demonstrated the effectiveness of five security tactics in designing a secure pipeline by conducting an experiment on two CDPs - one incorporates security tactics while the other does not. Both CDPs have been analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. We used assurance cases with goal-structured notations for qualitative analysis. For quantitative analysis, we used penetration tools. Our findings indicate that the applied tactics improve the security of the major components (i.e., repository, continuous integration server, main server) of a CDP by controlling access to the components and establishing secure connections.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 12th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering
Number of pages10
PublisherSCITEPRESS Digital Library
Publication date2017
Pages57-68
ISBN (Print)978-989-758-250-9
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2017

Keywords

  • Continuous Deployment Pipeline
  • Continuous Deployment
  • Security
  • Continuous Integration

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