Getting DevOps to mesh with security is a bit like a jigsaw - the right tools can make everything click. Ready to gear up? We've got a lineup of essential DevSecOps tools that the Intruder team swears by. Let’s look at which tools you can trust to automate and streamline your DevOps security.
What are DevSecOps tools?
DevSecOps tools, or DevOps security tools, are used to integrate security practices into the DevOps process and throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC). There are different types of DevOps security tools that serve different functions, including:
Vulnerability scanners: automated tools that proactively scan for weaknesses and new or emerging threats in your digital infrastructure before they can be exploited
SAST tools: static application security testing, also known as white-box testing, is a method by which you can test code without running it
Penetration testing tools: these help you discover assets in complex, hybrid environments, and can help evaluate systems against security benchmarks and compliance requirements
Visualization tools: these monitoring tools automate, define, and measure development processes throughout your development pipeline
Alerting tools: these provide real-time visibility into the performance and behavior of systems, applications, and services so you can identify and fix issues faster
Secrets management tools: these manage digital authentication credentials, including passwords, keys, APIs and tokens for applications, services and privileged accounts
Threat detection: these continuously monitor your cloud accounts and workloads for malicious activity, providing detailed findings for visibility and quick remediation
Trivy: known for its ability to perform comprehensive vulnerability scanning across container images and file systems, Trivy can detect OS vulnerabilities and application dependencies. It also provides detailed reports to facilitate remediation.
GitLab SAST template: GitLab offers a SAST template that integrates seamlessly into your CI/CD pipeline. It scans source code for vulnerabilities, provides actionable insights, and enables you to rectify issues at the coding stage to promote secure coding practices.
Penetration testing
Intruder: Intruder's penetration testing capabilities simulate real-world cyberattacks to detect and exploit vulnerabilities. It offers automated and manual testing services, with detailed reports and remediation advice.
Dashboard and visualization tools
Datadog: Datadog’s advanced monitoring and analytics capabilities provide real-time insights into system performance, application health, and security events. It supports customizable dashboards, anomaly detection, and integrations with various DevOps tools.
Sentry: Sentry specializes in error tracking and monitoring, offering real-time error reporting, performance monitoring, and release-health tracking to optimize application performance.
Alerting tools
Datadog: In addition to monitoring, Datadog provides sophisticated alerting capabilities, customizable alert conditions, incident management, and integrations with communication platforms for timely notifications.
Graylog: The tool offers centralized log management with real-time log processing, data enrichment, and correlation. It supports customizable dashboards, alerting, and reporting to enhance situational awareness.
Sentry: Sentry's alerting features include metric alerts, issue alerts, and incident management—enabling teams to respond promptly to application errors and performance degradation.
Secrets management and detection
1Password: This password manager stores and manages sensitive information, including passwords, API keys, and certificates. 1Password supports multi-factor authentication, secure sharing, and audit logs for enhanced security.
GitLab Secret Detection: The tool scans repositories for accidentally committed secrets—such as API keys and passwords—providing alerts and recommendations for remediation.
Threat detection
Amazon GuardDuty: This managed threat detection service monitors AWS accounts and workloads for malicious or unauthorized behavior. Amazon GuardDuty relies on machine learning, anomaly detection, and threat intelligence to find and prioritize potential threats.
Trust Intruder to protect your pipeline
While our team trusts these tools to safeguard our own development process, taking the first steps into DevSecOps doesn’t need to be difficult. It can be as simple as implementing a vulnerability scanner like Intruder to find vulnerabilities throughout the development and deployment of your app.
Think of it as your DevOps health and safety guide, securing your journey with resilience baked in. It's about delivering web applications and software that is not only effective and efficient, but locked down and robust.
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Getting DevOps to mesh with security is a bit like a jigsaw - the right tools can make everything click. Ready to gear up? We've got a lineup of essential DevSecOps tools that the Intruder team swears by. Let’s look at which tools you can trust to automate and streamline your DevOps security.
What are DevSecOps tools?
DevSecOps tools, or DevOps security tools, are used to integrate security practices into the DevOps process and throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC). There are different types of DevOps security tools that serve different functions, including:
Vulnerability scanners: automated tools that proactively scan for weaknesses and new or emerging threats in your digital infrastructure before they can be exploited
SAST tools: static application security testing, also known as white-box testing, is a method by which you can test code without running it
Penetration testing tools: these help you discover assets in complex, hybrid environments, and can help evaluate systems against security benchmarks and compliance requirements
Visualization tools: these monitoring tools automate, define, and measure development processes throughout your development pipeline
Alerting tools: these provide real-time visibility into the performance and behavior of systems, applications, and services so you can identify and fix issues faster
Secrets management tools: these manage digital authentication credentials, including passwords, keys, APIs and tokens for applications, services and privileged accounts
Threat detection: these continuously monitor your cloud accounts and workloads for malicious activity, providing detailed findings for visibility and quick remediation
Trivy: known for its ability to perform comprehensive vulnerability scanning across container images and file systems, Trivy can detect OS vulnerabilities and application dependencies. It also provides detailed reports to facilitate remediation.
GitLab SAST template: GitLab offers a SAST template that integrates seamlessly into your CI/CD pipeline. It scans source code for vulnerabilities, provides actionable insights, and enables you to rectify issues at the coding stage to promote secure coding practices.
Penetration testing
Intruder: Intruder's penetration testing capabilities simulate real-world cyberattacks to detect and exploit vulnerabilities. It offers automated and manual testing services, with detailed reports and remediation advice.
Dashboard and visualization tools
Datadog: Datadog’s advanced monitoring and analytics capabilities provide real-time insights into system performance, application health, and security events. It supports customizable dashboards, anomaly detection, and integrations with various DevOps tools.
Sentry: Sentry specializes in error tracking and monitoring, offering real-time error reporting, performance monitoring, and release-health tracking to optimize application performance.
Alerting tools
Datadog: In addition to monitoring, Datadog provides sophisticated alerting capabilities, customizable alert conditions, incident management, and integrations with communication platforms for timely notifications.
Graylog: The tool offers centralized log management with real-time log processing, data enrichment, and correlation. It supports customizable dashboards, alerting, and reporting to enhance situational awareness.
Sentry: Sentry's alerting features include metric alerts, issue alerts, and incident management—enabling teams to respond promptly to application errors and performance degradation.
Secrets management and detection
1Password: This password manager stores and manages sensitive information, including passwords, API keys, and certificates. 1Password supports multi-factor authentication, secure sharing, and audit logs for enhanced security.
GitLab Secret Detection: The tool scans repositories for accidentally committed secrets—such as API keys and passwords—providing alerts and recommendations for remediation.
Threat detection
Amazon GuardDuty: This managed threat detection service monitors AWS accounts and workloads for malicious or unauthorized behavior. Amazon GuardDuty relies on machine learning, anomaly detection, and threat intelligence to find and prioritize potential threats.
Trust Intruder to protect your pipeline
While our team trusts these tools to safeguard our own development process, taking the first steps into DevSecOps doesn’t need to be difficult. It can be as simple as implementing a vulnerability scanner like Intruder to find vulnerabilities throughout the development and deployment of your app.
Think of it as your DevOps health and safety guide, securing your journey with resilience baked in. It's about delivering web applications and software that is not only effective and efficient, but locked down and robust.
Limited public information is available about the vulnerability.
Red teamers, security researchers, detection engineers, threat actors have to actively research type of vulnerability, location in vulnerable software and build an associated exploit.
Tenable release checks for 47.43% of the CVEs they cover in this window, and Greenbone release 32.96%.
Day of CVE publish
😊
Vulnerability information is publicly accessible.
Red teamers, security researchers, detection engineers and threat actors now have access to some of the information they were previously having to hunt themselves, speeding up potential exploit creation.
Tenable release checks for 17.12% of the CVEs they cover in this window, and Greenbone release 17.69%.
First week since CVE publish
😐
Vulnerability information has been publicly available for up to 1 week.
The likelihood that exploitation in the wild is going to be happening is steadily increasing.
Tenable release checks for 10.9% of the CVEs they cover in this window, and Greenbone release 20.69%.
Between 1 week and 1 month since CVE publish
🥺
Vulnerability information has been publicly available for up to 1 month, and some very clever people have had time to craft an exploit.
We’re starting to lose some of the benefit of rapid, automated vulnerability detection.
Tenable release checks for 9.58% of the CVEs they cover in this window, and Greenbone release 12.43%.
After 1 month since CVE publish
😨
Information has been publicly available for more than 31 days.
Any detection released a month after the details are publicly available is decreasing in value for me.
Tenable release checks for 14.97% of the CVEs they cover over a month after the CVE details have been published, and Greenbone release 16.23%.
With this information in mind, I wanted to check what is the delay for both Tenable and Greenbone to release a detection for their scanners. The following section will focus on vulnerabilities which:
Have CVSSv2 rating of 10
Are exploitable over the network
Require no user interaction
These are the ones where an attacker can point their exploit code at your vulnerable system and gain unauthorised access.
We’ve seen previously that Tenable have remote checks for 643 critical vulnerabilities, and OpenVAS have remote checks for 450 critical vulnerabilities. Tenable release remote checks for critical vulnerabilities within 1 month of the details being made public 58.4% of the time, but Greenbone release their checks within 1 month 76.8% of the time. So, even though OpenVAS has fewer checks for those critical vulnerabilities, you are more likely to get them within 1 month of the details being made public. Let’s break that down further.
In Figure 10 we can see the absolute number of remote checks released on a given day after a CVE for a critical vulnerability has been published. What you can immediately see is that both Tenable and OpenVAS release the majority of their checks on or before the CVE details are made public; Tenable have released checks for 247 CVEs, and OpenVAS have released checks for 144 CVEs. Then since 2010 Tenable have remote released checks for 147 critical CVEs and OpenVAS 79 critical CVEs on the same day as the vulnerability details were published. The number of vulnerabilities then drops off across the first week and drops further after 1 week, as we would hope for in an efficient time-to-release scenario.
Figure 10: Absolute numbers of critical CVEs with a remote check release date from the date a CVE is published
While raw numbers are good, Tenable have a larger number of checks available so it could be unfair to go on raw numbers alone. It’s potentially more important to understand the likelihood that OpenVAS or Tenable will release a check of a vulnerability on any given day after a CVE for a critical vulnerability is released. In Figure 11 we can see that Tenable release 61% their checks on or before the date that a CVE is published, and OpenVAS release a shade under 50% of their checks on or before the day that a CVE is published.
Figure 11: Percentage chance of delay for critical vulnerabilities
So, since 2010 Tenable has more frequently released their checks before or on the same day as the CVE details have been published for critical vulnerabilities. While Tenable is leading at this point, Greenbone’s community feed still gets a considerable percentage of their checks out on or before day 0.
I thought I’d go another step further and try and see if I could identify any trend in each organisations release delay, are they getting better year-on-year or are their releases getting later? In Figure 12 I’ve taken the mean delay for critical vulnerabilities per year and plotted them. The mean as a metric is particularly influenced by outliers in a data set, so I expected some wackiness and limited the mean to only checks released 180 days prior to a CVE being published and 31 days after a CVE being published. These seem to me like reasonable limits, as anything greater than 6 months prior to CVE details being released is potentially a quirk of the check details and anything after a 1-month delay is less important for us.
What can we take away from Figure 12?
We can see that between 2011 and 2014 Greenbone’s release delay was better than that of Tenable, by between 5 and 10 days.
In 2015 things reverse and for 3 years Tenable is considerably ahead of Greenbone by a matter of weeks.
But, then in 2019 things get much closer and Greenbone seem to be releasing on average about a day earlier than Tenable.
For both the trendline over an 11-year period is very close, with Tenable marginally beating Greenbone.
We have yet to have any data for 2021 for OpenVAS checks for critical show-stopper CVEs.
Figure 12: Release delay year-on-year (lower is better)
With the larger number of checks, and still being able to release a greater percentage of their remote checks for critical vulnerabilities Tenable could win this category. However, the delay time from 2019 and 2020 going to OpenVAS, and the trend lines being so close, I am going to declare this one a tie. It’s a tie.
The takeaway from this is that both vendors are getting their checks out the majority of the time either before the CVE details are published or on the day the details are published. This is overwhelmingly positive for both scanning solutions. Over time both also appear to be releasing remote checks for critical vulnerabilities more quickly.
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