In today’s fast-paced, continuously evolving digital landscape, infrastructure security cannot be an afterthought. Security breaches, often originating from poorly managed infrastructure, have cost companies millions and have led to data leaks, regulatory fines, and damage to brand reputation. With the increasing adoption of cloud technologies and automation, integrating security directly into the development lifecycle is no longer optional but essential. This practice is what we call “Security as Code.” It brings the necessary security posture to Infrastructure as Code (IaC), ensuring systems remain secure and compliant from the start.
Why is Security Important?
Security has become a top priority due to the rapidly growing sophistication of cyberattacks. As businesses become more digitized, they are constantly exposed to new types of threats. Here’s why security is important:
- Increasing Complexity of Cyber Threats: Hackers are no longer targeting individual systems but exploiting vulnerabilities across entire infrastructures. These vulnerabilities can arise from unsecured cloud configurations, weak application code, or misconfigured network policies.
- Financial Impact: A security breach can lead to significant financial loss due to legal fees, regulatory fines, and customer attrition. According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report, the average cost of a breach in 2024 was around $4.45 million.
- Reputation Damage: Public breaches can irreversibly damage your brand’s reputation, leading to loss of trust, customer base, and market value.
- Regulatory Compliance: Many industries now face stringent regulatory requirements, such as GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2, which mandate the implementation of proper security controls. Failure to comply with these can result in hefty fines and legal consequences.
Security breaches are no longer just a theoretical risk—they are an everyday reality that organizations must prepare for.
Why is Security as Code Important?
Security as Code refers to embedding security policies, checks, and controls directly into the development and infrastructure automation processes. Instead of addressing security issues in isolation at the end of the development cycle, it proactively integrates security early into the development pipeline.
Here’s why Security as Code is so important:
- Continuous Security Checks: Automation ensures that security checks are continuously carried out throughout the entire development lifecycle, from code commit to deployment, ensuring security issues are caught early.
- Early Detection of Vulnerabilities: By incorporating automated testing tools for security, you ensure vulnerabilities are detected in real-time before deployment. This reduces the chances of security gaps in production environments.
- Faster Response Times: Security as Code accelerates response time to security incidents. With predefined, automated policies and security practices embedded, incidents can be mitigated faster.
- Enforcing Consistency: Security configurations become consistent and repeatable. You are ensuring that every environment—whether staging, production, or development—has the same security configuration without manual intervention.
- DevSecOps Culture: Security is integrated into the DevOps pipeline, allowing security professionals, developers, and operations teams to work cohesively. This collaborative approach leads to more secure software releases.
Security as Code is an enabler for building more secure, compliant, and resilient infrastructure, especially in cloud-native environments.
Where do Security Leaks Start?
The root cause of many security leaks originates within the code itself. Whether it’s infrastructure misconfiguration, insecure code practices, or overlooked vulnerabilities in dependencies, poor code can open doors to malicious actors.
Some statistics that highlight this trend:
- Despite growing cloud-security awareness and tooling options, an alarming 95% of the 600 organizations polled suffered cloud-related breaches in the previous 18 months. Among those, 92% reported exposure of sensitive data, with a majority acknowledging being harmed by the data exposure..
- 40% of vulnerabilities found in cloud-native applications come from code dependencies and application logic. In Java, 63% of high and critical vulnerabilities derive from indirect dependencies—i.e., third-party libraries that have been indirectly packaged with the application. These vulnerabilities are typically more challenging to identify, as the additional libraries in which they appear are often introduced into an application unknowingly.
- Misconfiguration were the initial access vector for 30% of all cloud environment attacks during the first half of 2024, marking a significant jump from 17% in the second half of 2023 and systems with weak or no credentials were the top initial access vector, accounting for 47% of cloud environment attacks during the first six months of the year.
- A report found that 80% of exposures are caused by identity and credential misconfigurations. Out of these exposures, one-third of them put critical assets at risk of a breach.
This highlights how breaches often stem from poor security practices or vulnerabilities that arise from automated processes or overlooked code configurations.
Types of Code Involved in Security
Securing your infrastructure involves several layers of code that interact with each other, and each layer has its own security concerns:
- Application Code: This is the actual code that runs your application. Vulnerabilities here can include SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and insecure data storage.
- Infrastructure Code (IaC): This includes the scripts that define your infrastructure, such as Terraform or CloudFormation templates, and configuration management tools like Ansible. Misconfiguration here can expose resources to the internet or create unnecessary attack surfaces.
- Configuration Files: These files define how services or applications behave. They may include application settings, API keys, and access control policies. Exposed or improperly configured settings can lead to significant security flaws.
- Image Creation Code: This includes Docker files, Kubernetes helm charts, or scripts used to create container images. These need to follow best practices to avoid vulnerabilities like outdated libraries or insecure configurations.
- Automation Scripts: Automation scripts, including deployment and continuous integration scripts, can also present security risks if they’re not secured properly. Hard-coded credentials or unsafe access controls are common issues.
Each of these code types should be scanned and validated for security vulnerabilities.
Best Practices for Security
Here are some of the most effective best practices to follow in securing your IaC workflows:
- Version Control for Infrastructure Code: Ensure your infrastructure code is stored in version-controlled repositories. This allows for tracking changes and rollbacks if necessary.
- Use Immutable Infrastructure: Adopt immutable infrastructure practices where servers or containers are replaced instead of patched, reducing the chances of leaving vulnerabilities behind.
- Use Static and Dynamic Analysis Tools: Leverage tools like Checkov, TFSec, and Snyk to continuously scan your IaC for vulnerabilities. For runtime analysis, use tools like Falco and Sysdig.
- Implement the Principle of Least Privilege: Grant the least amount of access required for each user or service. This limits potential damage in case of a security breach.
- Security Testing in CI/CD: Incorporate security checks as part of your continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines to identify vulnerabilities early in the development process.
- Secrets Management: Always store sensitive data, such as API keys or passwords, in secure vaults like HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, or Azure Key Vault, and avoid hard coding them in the codebase.
Tools for Securing IaC
There are a variety of tools available to help ensure your IaC workflows are secure:
- Terraform: Use tools like terraform validate, terraform-compliance, tfsec to scan IaC configurations for vulnerabilities.
- Snyk: This tool helps find and fix vulnerabilities in container images and dependencies.
- Trivy: A simple and comprehensive vulnerability scanner for container images and IaC files.
- GitHub Security Features: Leverage built-in tools like code scanning and secret scanning for your repositories.
- Open Policy Agent (OPA): Use OPA to enforce security policies across different stages of your infrastructure and application lifecycle.
- Checkov: It is an open-source tool by Bridgecrew that scans Terraform, CloudFormation, Kubernetes, Helm, and ARM templates for security misconfiguration. It helps enforce policy-as-code best practices.
Conclusion
Securing your infrastructure is no longer a one-time task but an ongoing effort embedded in your IaC practices. By adopting Security as Code, organizations can proactively address security vulnerabilities, ensure compliance, and minimize risks. As cloud environments grow increasingly complex, the automation of security policies and controls is essential to maintain robust, secure infrastructure.
