What is Shift-Left Security?
In traditional software development, security was a final checkpoint before deployment. Security teams would audit the code, run penetration tests, and return a list of vulnerabilities to the developers. This created friction, delayed releases, and forced developers to rewrite major parts of their codebase late in the lifecycle.
“Shift-Left” is the practice of moving security checks earlier in the software development lifecycle—literally shifting it to the left on a timeline, beginning at the planning and coding stages.
The Business Impact
Fixing a security vulnerability in production can cost up to 100 times more than fixing it during the initial design or development phase.
Fixing a security vulnerability in production can cost up to 100 times more than fixing it during the initial design or development phase.
Building Security Into the Pipeline
An automated CI/CD pipeline is the ideal place to enforce security controls. Every commit can be scanned for vulnerabilities before it is ever merged. Key automation steps include:
- SAST (Static Application Security Testing): Analyzes source code for SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and insecure dependencies.
- SCA (Software Composition Analysis): Scans open-source libraries and dependencies for known vulnerabilities (CVEs).
- Secret Scanning: Scans commits for hardcoded passwords, API keys, and private SSH keys.
# Sample GitHub Actions job for dependency scanning
security-scan:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v3
- name: Run SCA Vulnerability Scanner
uses: snyk/actions/node@master
env:
SNYK_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.SNYK_TOKEN }}