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Announcing GitGuardian Labs – an interview with Eric, GitGuardian’s CTO

Announcing GitGuardian Labs - an interview with Eric, GitGuardian's CTO

We are proud to announce the launch of the GitGuardian Labs innovation platform, a springboard for GitGuardian’s future projects and a place to share with the open-source community.

On this occasion, we had the pleasure to discuss this initiative with Eric Fourrier, GitGuardian's CTO & co-founder.

Eric, can you explain to our readers why you decided to launch GitGuardian Labs?

Since the beginning of GitGuardian in 2017, our DNA has been to experiment. Although our two solutions, GitGuardian Internal and Public Monitoring, have today reached a level of maturity widely recognized by our partners, it is important to continue exploring new avenues that will improve security and its adoption by the greatest number in the years to come.

The Labs will allow us to offer a common foundation for all our current and future initiatives to improve the global vision of security in the open source community. And we're hardly short of ideas on that front!

What are the objectives?

The objective is for us to keep momentum in bringing security best practices, tactics, and tools to the masses while remaining as relevant and user-friendly as ever. I believe that the threat landscape is witnessing one of its biggest transformations yet, and developers are now stage and center when it comes to protecting organizations.

That's why we committed to replicating the huge success that was GitGuardian's very first global scale operation, the "Good Samaritan", in other areas of the immensely complex digital world of today.

(Good Samaritan project: Since late 2017, GitGuardian has been watching over more than 40 million developers’ shoulders by notifying them every time they leaked a secret on a public GitHub repository, ed.).

Can you briefly present the newest projects?

We have already embarked on three innovative tools in this new venture: ggshield for Docker, HasMyCodeLeaked, and ggcanary.

The first one is an extension of our powerful CLI to run deep scans on any Docker image and easily parse potential secrets forgotten through the image creation process. This is an attack surface that is still too often ignored, even though a major incident last year showed that it could be easily exploited (the supply chain attack against Codecov, ed.).

With HasMyCodeLeaked, the approach was different. We asked ourselves: "OK, right now we are the developers' Cassandra—how could we enable folks to be pro-active, rather than reactive, in securing their source code?". The answer was HasMyCodeLeaked, a unique ability to fingerprint source code and match it against hundreds of millions of others on public GitHub.

Finally, we pushed the idea of proactivity in securing DevOps environments even further with ggcanary. This latter project eases the generation of trap tokens to detect intrusions into environments, repositories, messaging systems, etc.

In my opinion, the true power of this tool lies in its ability to scale with automation. This opens up very interesting perspectives, such as the possibility of shifting left at every step of the SDLC—and every engineer could be responsible for their own link in the chain.

To finish, I know that you have a funny story about the early days of GitGuardian. Are you ok to share it?

Yes, the story goes back to the time when we were just starting to explore GitHub's public repositories with Jeremy (Thomas, GitGuardian's co-founder, ed.). One day, while I was looking at the logs to see which keys had been spotted, I came across credentials associated with a US governmental organization email. I couldn't believe my eyes. We immediately tried to contact the corresponding person to have them revoke the key, but there was no response.

After insisting for several days, the incident finally escalated to the security team, but we could sense that there was a great deal of misunderstanding about the causes and consequences of this leak, although it was simple to remedy. That's when we really grasped the magnitude of the problem we were trying to solve.

Thank you for your time!

You're welcome.

*** 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/announcing-gitguardian-labs/

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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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