Skip to content

DevSecOps Architecture & Pipeline Security Gates 🏛️

Detailed breakdown of automated security gates, Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), Policy as Code, and vulnerability remediation pipelines.


1. High-Level DevSecOps Pipeline Architecture

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                             DEVELOPMENT STAGE (IDE / LOCAL)                       |
|  - Pre-commit Hooks (Gitleaks for hardcoded secrets)                              |
|  - IDE Security Linters (Semgrep / Snyk extension)                                |
+----------------------------------------+------------------------------------------+
                                         | Git Push
                                         v
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                             CI/CD SECURITY PIPELINE                               |
|                                                                                   |
|  +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+  |
|  | Gate 1: Secret Scanning (Trufflehog / Gitleaks)                            |  |
|  +-------------------------------------+---------------------------------------+  |
|                                        | Pass
|                                        v
|  +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+  |
|  | Gate 2: SAST & SCA (SonarQube / Snyk / Dependency-Check)                   |  |
|  +-------------------------------------+---------------------------------------+  |
|                                        | Pass
|                                        v
|  +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+  |
|  | Gate 3: Container Image Scanning (Trivy / Grype)                             |  |
|  +-------------------------------------+---------------------------------------+  |
|                                        | Pass
|                                        v
|  +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+  |
|  | Gate 4: DAST & Dynamic Scanning (OWASP ZAP)                                 |  |
|  +-------------------------------------+---------------------------------------+  |
+----------------------------------------|------------------------------------------+
                                         | Deploy
                                         v
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                        RUNTIME SECURITY & COMPLIANCE                              |
|  - Policy as Code (OPA / Kyverno)                                                 |
|  - Runtime Threat Detection (Falco / Tracee)                                      |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

2. Core Architectural Principles

A. Software Bill of Materials (SBOM)

An SBOM is a formal, machine-readable inventory of software components, libraries, and modules required to build a software application (e.g., CycloneDX or SPDX formats).

B. Policy as Code (OPA - Open Policy Agent)

Allows defining security and compliance rules directly as code (.rego files) to block non-compliant Kubernetes manifests or Terraform code during CI/CD execution.

C. Vulnerability Threshold Gates

Configuring automated pipeline break rules based on CVSS Severity Scores (e.g., fail pipeline if CRITICAL or HIGH vulnerabilities are found).