Lab: Exploiting and Defending Against Poisoned Pipeline Execution (PPE)

Lab: Exploiting and Defending Against Poisoned Pipeline Execution (PPE)

Overview Poisoned Pipeline Execution (PPE) ranks as the #2 risk in the OWASP CI/CD Security Top 10. It is a class of attacks where a malicious actor manipulates the build process by injecting code into pipeline definitions or build scripts, typically through a pull request. Once the CI system picks up the change, the attacker’s … Read more

Defensive Patterns and Mitigations for CI/CD Pipeline Attacks

Defensive Patterns and Mitigations for CI/CD Pipeline Attacks

Introduction Understanding how CI/CD pipelines are attacked is only half the picture. Threat modeling and attack taxonomy give us a map of the battlefield, but without concrete defensive patterns and engineering mitigations, that knowledge remains theoretical. This guide bridges the gap between awareness and action. The goal is not to build an impenetrable fortress — … Read more

Dependency Confusion and Artifact Poisoning: Attack Techniques and Defenses

Dependency Confusion and Artifact Poisoning: Attack Techniques and Defenses

Introduction Software supply chain attacks have surged in both frequency and sophistication over the past several years. Rather than attacking applications directly, adversaries increasingly target the dependency resolution and artifact distribution layers that underpin modern software development. Two of the most effective techniques in this category are dependency confusion and artifact poisoning. These attacks exploit … Read more

Policy as Code for CI/CD: Enforcing Security Gates with OPA and Rego

Policy as Code for CI/CD: Enforcing Security Gates with OPA and Rego

Introduction: Why Manual Security Reviews Don’t Scale Every engineering team eventually hits the same wall: security reviews that depend on human eyeballs cannot keep pace with the velocity of modern CI/CD pipelines. When teams deploy dozens or hundreds of times per day, asking a security engineer to manually review every Terraform plan, Kubernetes manifest, or … Read more

Secrets Management in CI/CD Pipelines: Patterns, Anti-Patterns, and Vault Integration

Secrets Management in CI/CD Pipelines: Patterns, Anti-Patterns, and Vault Integration

Introduction: Why Secrets Are the #1 Cause of CI/CD Compromise If you examine the root cause of almost every major CI/CD breach in recent years — from the Codecov supply chain attack to the CircleCI security incident — you will find the same culprit: compromised secrets. API keys, cloud credentials, database passwords, signing certificates — … Read more

Lab: Detecting Malicious GitHub Actions with Static Analysis

Lab: Detecting Malicious GitHub Actions with Static Analysis

Overview Third-party GitHub Actions are one of the most convenient features of the GitHub ecosystem. With a single uses: directive, you can pull in complex build logic, deploy to cloud providers, or run security scanners. But that convenience comes with a critical trade-off: every third-party action executes code in your CI environment with access to … Read more

Signing and Verifying Container Images with Sigstore and Cosign

Signing and Verifying Container Images with Sigstore and Cosign

Introduction: Why Artifact Signing Matters in CI/CD Modern software delivery pipelines are remarkably good at building and shipping code fast. But speed without trust is a liability. Between the moment source code is committed and the moment a container image runs in production, there is a gap — a gap where tampering, substitution, or silent … Read more

Build Integrity and Reproducible Builds: A Practical Guide for CI/CD

Build Integrity and Reproducible Builds: A Practical Guide for CI/CD

Introduction If you can’t reproduce a build, you can’t verify it. This simple truth sits at the heart of software supply chain security. Build integrity ensures that what you deploy is exactly what you intended to build — nothing added, nothing modified, nothing tampered with between source code and production artifact. In recent years, supply … Read more

Secure Deployment Workflows: From CI/CD Pipeline to Production

Secure Deployment Workflows: From CI/CD Pipeline to Production

Your CI/CD pipeline can have airtight security controls—signed commits, pinned dependencies, SAST scans, container image signing—but none of it matters if the deployment process itself is weak. Deployment is the critical junction where pipeline security meets production security. A compromised deployment workflow can bypass every upstream control you have built, pushing malicious code straight into … Read more