Biblio

Agile and DevOps are widely adopted by the industry. Hence, integrating security activities with industrial practices, such as continuous integration (CI) pipelines, is necessary to detect security flaws and adhere to regulators’ demands early. In this paper, we analyze automated security activities in CI pipelines of enterprise-driven open source software (OSS). This shall allow us, in the long-run, to better understand the extent to which security activities are (or should be) part of automated pipelines. In particular, we mine publicly available OSS repositories and survey a sample of project maintainers to better understand the role that security activities and their related tools play in their CI pipelines. To increase transparency and allow other researchers to replicate our study (and to take different perspectives), we further disclose our research artefacts.Our results indicate that security activities in enterprise-driven OSS projects are scarce and protection coverage is rather low. Only 6.83% of the analyzed 8,243 projects apply security automation in their CI pipelines, even though maintainers consider security to be rather important. This alerts industry to keep the focus on vulnerabilities of 3rd Party software and it opens space for other improvements of practice which we outline in this manuscript.

Software development is often accompanied by security audits such as penetration tests, usually performed on behalf of the software vendor. In penetration tests security experts identify entry points for attacks in a software product. Many development teams undergo such audits for the first time if their product is attacked or faces new security concerns. The audits often serve as an eye-opener for development teams: they realize that security requires much more attention. However, there is a lack of clarity with regard to what lasting benefits developers can reap from penetration tests. We report from a one-year study of a penetration test run at a major software vendor, and describe how a software development team managed to incorporate the test findings. Results suggest that penetration tests improve developers' security awareness, but that long-lasting enhancements of development practices are hampered by a lack of dedicated security stakeholders and if security is not properly reflected in the communicative and collaborative structures of the organization.