What Is Infrastructure as Code (IaC)?

Here are some of the security best practices for IaC that can be easily integrated into the development lifecycle:

Gain Visibility into Asset Inventory

During IaC operations, you must identify, tag, monitor, and maintain an inventory of deployed assets. Untagged resources should be carefully monitored as they’re difficult to track and cause drift. Whenever the resources are retired, their associated configuration must be deleted and data should be secured or deleted as well.

Identify and Fix Environmental Drift

Ideally, configurations across developers’ environments are uniform. But application owners sometimes need to make modifications to their applications and the underlying infrastructure. Without proper monitoring or tools, the unchecked accumulation of these leads to configuration drift which can leave the infrastructure exposed and create gaps in security and compliance.

Secure Hard-Coded Assets

Sensitive data such as secret keys, private keys, SSH keys, access/secret keys, and API keys hardcoded in IaC can provide easy access to underlying services or operations and help attackers move laterally. Having exposed credentials spread through IaC code, which is committed to source control (e.g. GitHub), can be of great risk for organizations.

Secure Developer Accounts

Developers' accounts need to be secured from attackers. It is important to harden and monitor developers’ accounts, track changes in IaC configurations, and verify that the changes are sanctioned and intentional. Unauthorized changes can cause IaC template or configuration tampering that may result in a code leak.

Restrict Access to Environments

Security teams need to have a single point of control that enables consistent management of privileged accounts, credentials, and secrets across each of the development and compute environments. It enables them to govern current and future privileged credentials usage, detect access configuration issues with required context, right-sizing of identity access and permissions, and consistent least-privileged policy enforcement.

Enforce Guardrails

Security teams should enforce cloud-native policy guardrails that incorporate checks to secure multi-cloud infrastructures from configuration drifts and alert on violations, enforce consistent security policies during build and runtime, and deliver clear guidance to developers on how to resolve vulnerabilities and risks. For instance, one may want the CI/CD build to fail, in case a certain security threshold was not met.

We’ve made one thing clear: IaC can greatly benefit your organization, but it comes with security risks you can’t ignore. To get the most out of IaC, you need a cybersecurity partner that has built a solution with DevSecOps in mind, mastered cloud data protection, and above all, will help you get the most out of your IaC investment. That partner is Zscaler.