Ensuring the security and compliance of your DevOps practices is crucial. Azure DevOps offers many great ways to manage your development lifecycle, but without proper configuration, you can still expose your organization to significant risks.
At nvisia, we have developed a set of seven baseline security practices to help you deploy a secure and compliant Azure DevOps organization. Here's an overview of those practices.
Allowing a project team member to be part of the Project Admin permission group is akin to handing over the keys to the kingdom.
By granting such extensive privileges, you essentially relinquish the standard controls and safeguards provided by Azure DevOps, leaving your organization vulnerable to potential risks and security breaches. To maintain a robust security posture and adhere to best practices, it is imperative to assign Project Admin permissions to individuals outside of the project team, mirroring the segregation of duties principle commonly observed in IT environments.
This fundamental principle of segregating duties is not just a recommended practice but a cornerstone of any reputable security and compliance framework. In the realm of cybersecurity, the NIST Cybersecurity Framework emphasizes the importance of Protective Technology (PR.PT), highlighting the necessity of distributing critical system functions among different roles to mitigate the risk of unauthorized changes.
By adopting a structured approach to access control and permissions management, organizations can fortify their defenses and minimize the likelihood of security incidents.
While it is crucial, many agile developers may argue that they cannot function effectively without the Project Admin privileges or a team member with such authority. This is a valid concern, especially considering that the default Contributor group permissions may be overly restrictive for teams focused on cloud-native development.
The key lies in finding a harmonious balance between compliance and developer productivity. To achieve this, creating a bespoke permission group modeled after the Azure DevOps Contributor group is essential. This new group, known as the Contributor-Plus, grants specific powers necessary for software development without the need for excessive service requests. Typically, members of this group are equipped to create pipelines, repositories, and iterations, striking a balance between security and operational efficiency.
To facilitate the first practice (above), it's essential to devise a method for managing permissions across your organization's projects.
It's important to note that manually adding permissions to groups via the Azure DevOps UI can be cumbersome and limited. Moreover, this approach often results in a lack of consistency among project teams, which can lead to a nightmare during attestation.
Therefore, the most effective method for managing customer permissions is to utilize the Azure API, or even better, employ Terraform/OpenTofu providers to encapsulate the API within declarative configuration code. Our approach involves controlling these permissions and monitoring for any deviations using Terraform/OpenTofu, which is automated within a platform engineering project repository and pipeline.
Once the Contributor-Plus group and any other necessary custom groups are established, ensure that users can only be added to these groups through an IAM process, typically involving Azure Entra ID security group assignments.
Bid farewell to manual user additions and sporadic assignments within your Azure DevOps permission groups!
Exclusively allocate members through Azure Entra ID groups to bolster the security of your Azure DevOps environment. Streamline the process by seamlessly mapping security groups to Azure DevOps (AzDO) permission groups with precise role granularity, all managed through Entra ID for a centralized access control solution.
Leverage the power of the Azure API or opt for the more advanced Terraform/OpenTofu IaC methods to seamlessly establish the link between Entra ID and Azure DevOps Project Permission groups. With this automated approach, only the designated agent, secured running the permission update pipeline will possess Project Admin rights, safeguarding against unauthorized user additions and ensuring a consistent, secure, and streamlined access management strategy.
As a bonus with Entra ID integration, your security posture will improve with features including mandatory multifactor authentication and conditional access policies.
Implement a robust logging mechanism to track user actions effectively.
Azure DevOps empowers organization Owners and Project Collection Administrators to activate "Auditing" features, capturing detailed activity logs within your Azure DevOps setup. Enhance this by seamlessly channeling audit events to a Splunk-compatible destination. This allows your security and compliance teams to actively monitor the log stream and trigger alerts aligned with your organization's compliance protocols.
To begin, ensure that you exclude development team members from the Project Admin permission group to prevent any unauthorized modifications or overrides by the team. Instead, utilize the Contributor-Plus role for technical leaders who require additional permissions beyond the standard Contributor group.
Next, align your development workflows with trunk-based development principles and safeguard the main (trunk) branch.
When setting policies for reviewing code merges into the main branch in Azure DevOps, it's important to enforce practices that ensure code quality, security, and maintainability. Here are the recommended approaches:
Setting up your pipelines and service connections in Azure DevOps is a crucial step that is frequently underestimated, leading to missed opportunities in enhancing security and compliance measures. Here are some essential practices for doing this the right way:
Make sure that Azure DevOps access is restricted to corporate private networks and secure your network using TLS 1.3. Additionally, make sure to access your cloud resources through controlled Azure DevOps Service Connections and the pipelines run on private agents, deployed to a private network segment.
In a hub and spoke architecture, this means the build agent can only route traffic within the target spoke, limiting the network blast area. Additionally, the Service Connection's identity must have RBAC access to the resource once the target private network.
To further enhance security and control over sensitive information, it is crucial to implement a robust strategy for managing secrets in your Azure DevOps environment. By utilizing tools like Azure Key Vault, you can ensure that confidential data is securely stored and accessed only by authorized users.
Consider deploying Remote Key Vaults on a private network, within a specific target spoke, to provide an additional layer of isolation and control over your Azure DevOps central secret variables. This setup enhances the security of your secrets and minimizes the risk of unauthorized access.
In Azure Pipelines, leverage secure tasks to access your Key Vault, such as the AzureKeyVault@1 task, which requires an Azure Service Connection. This connection, typically an Azure Service Principle with RBAC access to the target Azure Key Vault resource, acts as a secure gateway for retrieving sensitive information from the Key Vault.
To ensure the utmost security, it is imperative to properly secure the service connection with access controls and checks. By following these best practices for secrets management, you can fortify the protection of your confidential data and maintain a high level of security within your Azure DevOps environment.
By following these practices, you can significantly enhance the security and compliance of your Azure DevOps environment. At nvisia, we are committed to helping you achieve a secure and efficient DevOps workflow. Contact us to learn more about our Digital Foundations service and how we can assist you in your cloud-native journey.