Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the general availability of Amazon Q, a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered assistant for accelerating software development and leveraging companies’ internal data.
The previous chapter in this WhiteHat Security series examined the security component of step four of the Twelve-Factor methodology - backing services. Twelve-Factor suggests treating these as attached resources, but from a security standpoint it's important to understand the security posture of the backing service, as well as proactively securing communications and encapsulating security checks within the Resource abstraction.
Start with Security and the Twelve-Factor App - Step 1
Start with Security and the Twelve-Factor App - Step 2
Start with Security and the Twelve-Factor App - Step 3
Start with Security and the Twelve-Factor App - Step 4
This next chapter highlights the build, release and run stages within the app-building process, which step 5 recommends separating.
Defining Build, Release, Run in the Twelve-Factor App
Factor 5 of the Twelve-Factor App relates more to processes and advises strictly separating the build and run stages. The emphasis is on identifying and separating each stage of app development, and encouraging automation between each so as to accelerate the process.
To explain in more detail, a codebase is transformed into a (non-development) deploy through three stages:
■ The build stage is a transform which converts a code repository into an executable bundle known as a build. Using a version of the code at a commit specified by the deployment process, the build stage fetches vendors dependencies and compiles binaries and assets.
■ The release stage takes the build produced by the build stage and combines it with the deploy's current configuration. The resulting release contains both the build and the configuration and is ready for immediate execution in the execution environment.
■ The run stage (also known as “runtime”) runs the app in the execution environment, by launching some set of the app's processes against a selected release.
The twelve-factor app uses strict separation between the build, release, and run stages.
Applying Security to the Build, Release, Run Stages
From a security point of view, keep in mind these key activities during the build, release and run stages:
■ Build - enforce security policy. The Build Stage is responsible for automating enforce of the security policy, and breaking builds that fail the said policy.
■ Release - security go/no-go. The Release Stage should provide a consolidated view of the application's risk, thereby allowing for a "go/no-go" decision with respect to Release.
■ Run - production protection. The Run Stage should provide capabilities to reduce business impact of exploited vulnerability (whether known or unknown).
Read Security and the Twelve-Factor App - Step 6 about processes, which encourages executing the app as one or more stateless processes by using small programs that communicate over the network, and the security implications of this step.
Industry News
Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4, the latest version of the enterprise Linux platform.
ActiveState unveiled Get Current, Stay Current (GCSC) – a continuous code refactoring service that deals with breaking changes so enterprises can stay current with the pace of open source.
Lineaje released Open-Source Manager (OSM), a solution to bring transparency to open-source software components in applications and proactively manage and mitigate associated risks.
Synopsys announced the availability of Polaris Assist, an AI-powered application security assistant on the Synopsys Polaris Software Integrity Platform®.
Backslash Security announced the findings of its GPT-4 developer simulation exercise, designed and conducted by the Backslash Research Team, to identify security issues associated with LLM-generated code. The Backslash platform offers several core capabilities that address growing security concerns around AI-generated code, including open source code reachability analysis and phantom package visibility capabilities.
Azul announced that Azul Intelligence Cloud, Azul’s cloud analytics solution -- which provides actionable intelligence from production Java runtime data to dramatically boost developer productivity -- now supports Oracle JDK and any OpenJDK-based JVM (Java Virtual Machine) from any vendor or distribution.
F5 announced new security offerings: F5 Distributed Cloud Services Web Application Scanning, BIG-IP Next Web Application Firewall (WAF), and NGINX App Protect for open source deployments.
Code Intelligence announced a new feature to CI Sense, a scalable fuzzing platform for continuous testing.
WSO2 is adding new capabilities for WSO2 API Manager, WSO2 API Platform for Kubernetes (WSO2 APK), and WSO2 Micro Integrator.
OpenText™ announced a solution to long-standing open source intake challenges, OpenText Debricked Open Source Select.
ThreatX has extended its Runtime API and Application Protection (RAAP) offering to provide always-active API security from development to runtime, spanning vulnerability detection at Dev phase to protection at SecOps phase of the software lifecycle.
Canonical announced the release of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, codenamed “Noble Numbat.”
JFrog announced a new machine learning (ML) lifecycle integration between JFrog Artifactory and MLflow, an open source software platform originally developed by Databricks.
Copado announced the general availability of Test Copilot, the AI-powered test creation assistant.