Application security 3 important pillars of engineering ecosystem security
                     Application 
security: 3 
important pillars of 
engineering 
ecosystem security
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The engineering ecosystem has experienced a huge paradigm shift, with more languages, 
frameworks, and minimum technical or procedural obstacles to adopting new technologies or 
implementing third-party tools and frameworks. This arises as organisations race to deploy new 
features and cloud apps as rapidly as possible in order to remain competitive.
Many organisations have utilised continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) solutions 
for more automated and agile software testing, developing, and deploying procedures to speed up 
development and deployment. With 77% of organisations now sending new or modified code to 
production weekly and 38% committing new code daily, this move has brought unparalleled velocity, 
flexibility, and agility to engineering.
Speed is great, but security must never be compromised. The engineering ecosystem is quickly 
becoming recognised by criminals as a danger vector that is both simple to target and ripe for 
exploitation, with significant and lucrative repercussions. The infamous Solar Winds assault 
happened when a build system was compromised, resulting in malware being sent to 18,000 
customers. Another recent example is the successful infiltration and disruption of CircleCI, a 
leading CI/CD platform that stores highly private client secrets and tokens. These examples 
demonstrate how a single insecure piece in an engineering context can have far-reaching 
implications.
The engineering ecosystem is sometimes overlooked because security teams are more 
concerned with eliminating runtime misconfigurations and vulnerabilities than with 
addressing vulnerabilities throughout the full attack surface. Because of this new reality and 
escalating assaults, we must reconsider application security – the overarching security 
umbrella that covers the engineering ecosystem. The conventional AppSec problem of 
preventing security issues and misconfigurations from reaching production is far more 
complicated. Simultaneously, there is a completely novel category of risks and threats 
focused on exploiting security defects in various systems and procedures throughout the 
software delivery chain, from coding to deployment.
Developing the Groundwork for a Successful 
Application Security Program
A modern engineering ecosystem’s effective application security program can be divided 
into three disciplines:
1. Security in the Pipeline (SIP)
SIP seeks to prevent security issues and misconfigurations from reaching production settings by 
targeting the code and artefacts going through the pipeline. In SIP, we must regularly discover 
all development languages and frameworks in use across an organization’s entire codebase and 
guarantee that scanners and engines specialised to those languages and frameworks are 
seamlessly woven into the development process.
This ensures that no new bugs are introduced into the codebase and that old bugs are steadily 
eliminated
2. Security of the Pipeline (SOP)
SOP focuses on the security posture of each individual system in the software delivery 
chain, from coding to deployment, as well as the interconnection between these systems 
and the third parties they employ (the software supply chain). The SOP is based on the 
realisation that the engineering ecosystem has become a profitable target for adversaries, 
who have discovered that engineering ecosystems provide a highly effective mechanism to 
run malicious code in sensitive environments and acquire access to extremely vital secrets 
and tokens. Unlike SIP, which focuses on the code and artefacts moving through the 
software delivery chain, SOP focuses on the security controls and procedures that surround 
the delivery chain itself.
3. Security Around the Pipeline (SAP)
SAP aims to safeguard the security of the software delivery chain and to apply the 
necessary controls to prevent anyone, including humans and applications, from 
circumventing it. In fact, achieving excellent SIP and SOP is only partially successful if an 
attacker can directly push code to production or deploy a malicious container to K8s. In 
order to accomplish effective SAP, we must be able to answer two key questions:
• Is the software delivery chain responsible for everything that is running in production? 
Was everything subjected to all necessary checks and controls?
• Are all of the necessary visibility and posture controls in place to prevent the software 
delivery chain from being circumvented?
Effective application security must now go well beyond the traditional scope of code 
scanning and must match today’s engineering environment. SIP, SOP, and SAP are all 
about accelerating engineering while maintaining risk and security management. 
Organisations may guide their security and developer teams to construct modern, safe, 
and scalable engineering ecosystems in the cloud by focusing on these three disciplines.
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