Red Hat and Oracle announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Compute Virtual Machines (VMs).
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
The Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University announced the release of a tool to give a comprehensive visualization of the complete DevSecOps pipeline.
Synopsys has entered into a definitive agreement with Clearlake Capital Group, L.P. and Francisco Partners.
Postman released v11, a significant update that speeds up development by reducing collaboration friction on APIs.
Sysdig announced the launch of the company’s Runtime Insights Partner Ecosystem, recognizing the leading security solutions that combine with Sysdig to help customers prioritize and respond to critical security risks.
Nokod Security announced the general availability of the Nokod Security Platform.
Drata has acquired oak9, a cloud native security platform, and released a new capability in beta to seamlessly bring continuous compliance into the software development lifecycle.
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.
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.