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Security Chats – What Developers Say About Us

Avatar photo by Thomas Segura on May 13, 2022

Security Chats - What Developers Say About Us

With more than 170k GitHub users and 4.3M repositories under our shield (and growing fast!), GitGuardian is proud to help the developers’ community code safer. As a company built on the premise of bridging the gap between AppSec and engineering teams, we are glad to hear about your experience with our product. Here is what you’ve been telling us lately:

“GitGuardian integrates in a snap!”

We are using GitGuardian to prevent secrets from leaking into repositories both public and private. So far our experience has been excellent. We actually leaked a private SSH key and got a notification from GitGuardian almost immediately. We were able to revoke the key and remediate the blunder.

Pros: Integration was a snap. We're already using pre-commit for most of our repos so hooking GitGuardian into the process was simple. Since we also already use GitHub, we found integration to be extremely easy.

Cons: We had no issues integrating GitGuardian and have not found any cons, yet.

Torgny B., Lead Software Engineer

“Really a Guardian …”

Pros: The product is easy to use and easily integrable. I love how it alerts me when I have secrets exposed.

Cons: I didn't explore much but I like everything till now … 🙂

Shreyasi M., Student

"Best coverage in industry as compared to other tools"

Pros: Support for kind of secrets being provided and ease of use. Also, it provided information regarding a secret being valid or now, which reduces much workload. Excellent support from product team.

Cons: Nothing as of now. All the current provided features serves the purpose

Akansha A.

"The best ways to maintain security on your repos"

Pros: Extremely easy to set up and use, it's like plug and play and helps you safeguard your repo secrets and immediately triggers a notification if it finds any juicy stuff.

Cons: The dashboard could be a little more better with less of cluttered information, other than that no cons as of yet.

Eti B., COO

"Prevent developers from committing secrets"

Pros: Ease of use and integration with Github. Instant alert whenever you mistakenly check a secret into your commits. You can easily manage (resolve, ignore, etc) all incidents from the GitGuardian dashboard.

Cons: Since the time I've started using GitGuardian, I can't think of anything feature I dislike. But I hope GitGuardian adds more features like local integration with IDE/code editors.

Akeem A., Software Engineer

"Junior Dev discovers incident exposure"

Pros:  The augmented pull requests for GitHub save loads of time and energy. The addition of Personal Access Tokens for ggshield cli use is also extremely exciting!

Cons: In my view, there's nothing to complain about given that access is free.

Trevor F., Sales & Operations

"GitGuardian: Code Scanner for CICD microservices"

Pros: GitGuardian is an excellent tool to scan the code after every commit. It makes sure that developers didn't commit any secret value in the code by mistake. We have integrated it with the CI pipelines, and I must say that interaction is very easy. We can monitor all the repo and reports from a single dashboard. One of the thing which I like is, GitGuardian provides integration with almost all the CI tools and microservices tools.

Cons: Currently, the features are limited to secrets scan, It's not something to dislike, but I would like to see the features like Docker image scan and IaC scans in the future.

Sagar S., InfoSec Engineer

"We are using GitGuardian to scan Django our repos for credentials that might have been committed"

Pros: You get a worry-free commit. Integrated into the SDLC pipeline, it is helpful for internal security, mainly if the credentials are not not to be shared with the public. Better, since we produce open-source software, GitGuardian helps ensure we do not publish sensitive info that somebody can use to target us. The fact that you can restrict the scan of particular folders is very appreciated.

Cons:  It scans even sub repositories that are not ours. If some packages that we use but do not maintain are included in the scan, we get false positives that we wouldn't like to have. Fortunately, that can be easily corrected on the GUI.

Allan Stockman, Software Developer

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from GitGuardian Blog - Automated Secrets Detection authored by Thomas Segura. Read the original post at: https://blog.gitguardian.com/security-chats-what-developers-say-about-us/

Thomas Segura
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Thomas Segura

What You Need to Scale AppSec Thomas Segura - Content Writer @ GitGuardian Author Bio Thomas has worked both as an analyst and as a software engineer consultant for various big French companies. His passion for tech and open source led him to join GitGuardian as technical content writer. He focuses now on clarifying the transformative changes that cybersecurity and software are going through. Website:https://www.gitguardian.com/ Twitter handle: https://twitter.com/GitGuardian Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gitguardian Introduction Security is a dilemma for many leaders. On the one hand, it is largely recognized as an essential feature. On the other hand, it does not drive business. Of course, as we mature, security can become a business enabler. But the roadmap is unclear. With the rise of agile practices, DevOps and the cloud, development timeframes have been considerably compressed, but application security remains essentially the same. DevSecOps emerged as an answer to this dilemma. Its promise consists literally in inserting security principles, practices, and tools into the DevOps activity stream, reducing risk without compromising deliverability. Therefore there is a question that many are asking: why isn't DevSecOps already the norm? As we analyzed in our latest report DevSecOps: Protecting the Modern Software Factory, the answer can be summarized as follows: only by enabling new capacities across Dev, Sec and Ops teams can the culture be changed. This post will help provide a high-level overview of the prerequisite steps needed to scale up application security across departments and enable such capabilities. From requirements to expectations Scaling application security is a company-wide project that requires thorough thinking before an y decision is made. A first-hand requirement is to talk to product and engineering teams to understand the current global AppSec maturity. The objective at this point is to be sure to have a comprehensive understanding of how your products are made (the processes, tools, components, and stacks involved). Mapping development tools and practices will require time to have the best visibility possible. They should include product development practices and the perceived risk awareness/appetite from managers. One of your objectives would be to nudge them so they take into account security in every decision they make for their products, and maybe end up thinking like adversaries. You should be able to derive security requirements from the different perceptual risks you are going to encounter. Your job is to consolidate these into a common set for all applications, setting goals to align the different teams collaborating to build your product(s). Communicating transparently with all relevant stakeholders (CISO, technical security, product owner, and development leads) about goals and expectations is essential to create a common ground for improvement. It will be absolutely necessary to ensure alignment throughout the implementation too. Open and accessible guardrails Guardrails are the cornerstone of security requirements. Their nature and implementation are completely up to the needs of your organization and can be potentially very different from one company to the other (if starting from scratch, look no further than the OWASP Top10). What is most important, however, is that these guardrails are open to the ones that need them. A good example of this would be to centralize a common, security-approved library of open-source components that can be pulled from by any team. Keep users' accessibility and useability as a priority. Designing an AppSec program at scale requires asking “how can we build confidence and visibility with trusted tools in our ecosystem?”. For instance, control gates should never be implemented without considering a break-glass option (“what happens if the control is blocking in an emergency situation?”). State-of-the-art security is to have off-the-shelf secure solutions chosen by the developers, approved by security, and maintained by ops. This will be a big leap forward in preventing vulnerabilities from creeping into source code. It will bring security to the masses at a very low cost (low friction). But to truly scale application security, it would be silly not to use the software engineer's best ally: the continuous integration pipeline. Embed controls in the CI/CD AppSec testing across all development pipelines is the implementation step. If your organization has multiple development teams, it is very likely that different CI/CD pipelines configurations exist in parallel. They may use different tools, or simply define different steps in the build process. This is not a problem per se, but to scale application security, centralization and harmonization are needed. As illustrated in the following example CI/CD pipeline, you can have a lot of security control steps: secrets detection, SAST, artifact signing, access controls, but also container or Infrastructure as Code scanning (not shown in the example) (taken from the DevSecOps whitepaper) The idea is that you can progressively activate more and more control steps, fine-tune the existing ones and scale both horizontally and vertically your “AppSec infrastructure”, at one condition: you need to centralize metrics and controls in a stand-alone platform able to handle the load corresponding to your organization’s size. Security processes can only be automated when you have metrics and proper visibility across your development targets, otherwise, it is just more burden on the AppSec team's shoulders. In turn, metrics and visibility help drive change and provide the spark to ignite a cultural change within your organization. Security ownership shifts to every engineer involved in the delivery process, and each one is able to leverage its own deep (yet partial) knowledge of the system to support the effort. This unlocks a world of possibilities: most security flaws can be treated like regular tickets, rule sets can be optimized for each pipeline based on criticality, capabilities or regulatory compliance, and progress can be tracked (saved time, avoided vulnerabilities etc.). In simpler terms, security can finally move at the DevOps speed. Conclusion Security can’t scale if it’s siloed, and slowing down the development process is no longer an option in a world led by DevOps innovation. The design and implementation of security controls are bound to evolve. In this article, we’ve depicted a high-level overview of the steps to be considered to scale AppSec. This starts with establishing a set of security requirements that involve all the departments, in particular product-related ones. From there it becomes possible to design guardrails to make security truly accessible with a mix of hard and soft gates. By carefully selecting automated detection and remediation that provide visibility and control, you will be laying a solid foundation for a real model of shared responsibility for security. Finally, embedding checks in the CI/CD system can be rolled out in multiple phases to progressively scale your security operations. With automated feedback in place, you can start incrementally adjusting your policies. A centralized platform creates a common interface to facilitate the exchange between application security and developer teams while enforcing processes. It is a huge opportunity to automate and propagate best practices across teams. Developers are empowered to develop faster with more ownership. When security is rethought as a partnership between software-building stakeholders, a flywheel effect can take place: reduced friction leads to better communication and visibility, automating of more best practices, easing the work of each other while improving security with fewer defects. This is how application security will finally be able to scale through continuous improvement.

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