This is my 200th blog post. Also I reached 1M page-views recently. In those 200 blog posts, I used approximately 325K words. An average non-fiction book is somewhere between 70K to 80K words. So that would amount to somewhere around 4 books. Why did I write so many blog posts, what did I write about, which are my favorites, what do readers think? In this rather personal blog post I'm going to look back on the past 10 years of blogging.
Jenkins is a solid CI/CD platform which has proven itself over the years. Many organizations use it to build, test and deploy their applications. In Jenkins it is possible to define credentials or to use an external credential store. You can then use these inside your pipelines and jobs. Direct access to credentials can be limited. Even with limited access, there are still various ways in which you can extract credentials.
This blog post illustrates how you can display credentials in log files as base64 encoded strings so they are not masked and you can easily copy / paste / base64 decode them to obtain and (ab)use them. The method described is not specific to Jenkins but can also be used in various other CI/CD platforms on-premises and in the cloud (such as GitHub Actions and Bamboo).
Note: this is not meant as an encouragement to break rules or laws. Often legislation does not allow you to try and access systems you are not officially authorized to. It is meant to create awareness and to allow you to think about if and how you might want to prevent this in your own CI/CD platform.
SonarCloud is a hosted SonarQube SaaS solution which does not allow 3rd party plugins to be installed. This puts some limitations on the kind of data you can put in SonarCloud. For Java this is limited to Checkstyle, PMD and SpotBugs results. OWASP provides a Dependency-Check plugin to identify vulnerable dependencies in for example your pom.xml file. In this blog post I'll show how to get OWASP Depedency-Check data in SonarCloud without using a 3rd party plugin! Disclaimer: this solution has been created in very little time (~2 hours) and has not been seriously tested, optimized or used in production environments. Use at your own risk!
GitHub Actions allow you to do most CI/CD tasks for free, directly from your GitHub repository. One of the challenges however is that there is no build-in facility like for example SonarQube to manage code quality. Luckily, SonarSource provides SonarCloud; a SonarQube SaaS offering which is free for public projects! It is also easy to feed SonarCloud from GitHub Actions. In this blog post I'll describe how you can do this.
I'm a regular user of GitHub. Recently I discovered GitHub also has a build-in CI/CD workflow solution called GitHub Actions. Curious about how this would work I decided to try it out. I had previously build a Jenkins Pipeline to perform several static and dynamic application security tests on a Java project and decided to try and rebuild this pipeline using GitHub Actions. This blog described my first experiences and impressions.
OWASP ZAP or Zed Attack Proxy is an open source dynamic application security testing (DAST) tool. It is available here and has a website with documentation here. I recently encountered it when looking for open source security test tools to embed in a CI/CD pipeline (here). I was surprised by how versatile this tool is. In this blog post I'll summarize several ways how you can use it.
It is often expected of a DevOps team to also take security into consideration when delivering software. Often however, this does not get the attention it deserves. In this blog post I'll describe some easy to use, CI/CD pipeline friendly, open source tools you can use to perform several checks during your Java software delivery process which will help you identify and fix issues with minimal effort.
You can view my sample project here which implements all these tools. There is also a docker-compose.yml file supplied. SonarQube en Jenkins however do not come preconfigured in this setup. You can look at the Jenkinsfile (pipeline definition) to see what Jenkins configuration is required (installing plugins and creating credentials).
This is provided as an overview and small example only. It is not meant as a walkthrough to setup a CI/CD environment or a manual how to use the different tools. Also the mentioned tools are not all the tools which are available but a set of tools which are freely available, popular and which I managed to get working without too much effort. Using them together allows you to improve the security of your Java applications during your software delivery process and provide quick feedback to developers. This can also help increase security awareness. When you have some experience with these tools you can implement more strict policies (which can let a build fail) and quality gates.
