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Voice of Practitioners: The State of Secrets in AppSec

by Thomas Segura on May 9, 2023

The risks associated with secrets sprawl in application security (AppSec) are immense. Hard-coded secrets, such as API keys and configuration variables, are the gateway to a company's most valuable asset: its data. Despite this, many organizations still rely on manual code reviews to protect themselves from secrets being hard-coded in source code, despite being notoriously inefficient and ineffective.

To shed light on this issue, GitGuardian commissioned Sapio Research to conduct a study on the perceptions and practices of 507 IT and security decision-makers in the US and UK. The study, entitled "Voice of Practitioners: The State of Secrets in AppSec," provides valuable insights into the risks posed by secrets sprawl and the measures taken to mitigate them in large enterprises.

The study reveals that senior management in large organizations is acutely aware of the risks associated with hard-coded secrets. A significant 75% of respondents reported having experienced a past leak, and 94% plan to improve their secrets management practices in the next 12-18 months. Interestingly, more than half of the respondents identified "source code and repositories" as key risk points within their software supply chains, with 47% specifically citing hard-coded secrets.

Despite this increased awareness, the study also highlights significant disparities in risk reduction strategies across the industry. For example, a concerning 27% of respondents revealed that they rely on manual code reviews, which are inefficient, to protect themselves from secret leaks.

Voice of Practitioners: The State of Secrets in AppSec

The study emphasizes the need for organizations to adopt a more proactive approach to security, leveraging automated tools and processes to identify and remediate vulnerabilities quickly and efficiently. By automating the triage and assignment processes, organizations can accelerate their security orchestration, improve their security posture, and free up valuable resources to focus on other critical tasks.

In addition to the poll results, the study delves into the common pain points experienced by large organizations as they grapple with an accumulating backlog of vulnerabilities. In 2022, GitGuardian partnered with a large-scale enterprise to help scale its leak prevention efforts using a multifaceted approach. With 7,500 developers and over 50,000 monitored sources, this enterprise required a solution that was both robust and scalable.

The results of this successful deployment provide valuable insights into the best way to grow an application security strategy in large enterprises.

Overall, the study highlights the importance of a holistic secrets strategy in AppSec and provides valuable insights into the best practices for reducing the risks associated with secrets sprawl. While secrets sprawl is a problem most companies experience, it's not a hard one to solve. There are tools available today that natively integrate into developer workflows for managing, orchestrating, and rotating secrets.

To learn more about the state of secrets in AppSec and how to mitigate risks in your organization, download the Voice of Practitioners study.

In addition, GitGuardian is hosting a webinar on May 25, 2023, at 5 PM CEST, discussing the results of the study with a panel of guest speakers we picked for their expertise in secrets management and developer-led security!

The webinar will provide an opportunity to learn more about the study's findings and ask questions about the best practices for reducing the risk of secrets sprawl in AppSec. Save your seat now!

*** 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/voice-of-practitioners-the-state-of-secrets-in-appsec/

May 9, 2023May 9, 2023 Thomas Segura Company News

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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