GitLab CI Security Cheat Sheet: Variables, Runners, Environments, and OIDC

GitLab CI Security Cheat Sheet: Variables, Runners, Environments, and OIDC

Why GitLab CI Security Matters GitLab CI/CD pipelines are powerful — but with power comes risk. A misconfigured variable can leak secrets. An unscoped runner can execute malicious code. An unprotected environment can let a junior developer push straight to production. This cheat sheet gives you copy-paste YAML for every critical GitLab CI security control, … Read more

Securing GitHub Actions Runners: Architecture, Risks, and Best Practices

Securing GitHub Actions Runners: Architecture, Risks, and Best Practices

GitHub Actions has become one of the most widely adopted CI/CD platforms. Its flexibility, tight integration with GitHub repositories, and rich ecosystem make it attractive for teams of all sizes. At the same time, GitHub Actions runners have emerged as a critical attack surface in modern software supply chain attacks. Runners execute untrusted code, handle … Read more

CI/CD Threat Modeling: Identifying Trust Boundaries and Attack Paths

CI/CD Threat Modeling: Identifying Trust Boundaries and Attack Paths

Threat modeling is a well-established practice in application security. Teams routinely model threats against APIs, backend services, and production environments. However, CI/CD pipelines are often excluded from formal threat modeling exercises, despite being one of the most critical components of modern software systems. This is a dangerous gap. CI/CD pipelines sit at the intersection of … Read more

Why CI/CD Pipelines Are the New Primary Attack Surface

Why CI/CD Pipelines Are the New Primary Attack Surface

For years, application security programs have focused on production environments: hardening servers, patching vulnerabilities, deploying WAFs, and monitoring runtime behavior. That focus made sense when most meaningful compromises happened after deployment, by exploiting weaknesses in running applications. But modern attackers increasingly bypass production defenses. Instead of attacking the application at runtime, they compromise the systems … Read more