Pipeline Security

Skill: Pipeline Security

Expertise: OIDC cloud auth, least-privilege workflow permissions, secret scanning, keyless artifact signing, SLSA provenance, and admission policy checks.

When to load

When designing or hardening CI/CD pipelines for production deployments, especially where compliance or high-risk workloads are involved.

Security Outcomes (definition of done)

• Pipeline uses OIDC federation (no long-lived cloud keys in CI secrets).
• Artifacts are signed keylessly and verified with identity constraints.
• Provenance + SBOM are generated and validated before deploy.
• Workflows use minimal GitHub/GitLab permissions.
• Runtime admission policies block unsigned/unattested artifacts.

OIDC Authentication (no long-lived credentials)

jobs:
  deploy:
    permissions:
      id-token: write
      contents: read
    steps:
      - uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@<pinned-sha>
        with:
          role-to-assume: arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/github-actions-deploy
          aws-region: us-east-1

• Constrain trust policy by repo, ref, and workflow identity.
• Prefer short session duration and environment-scoped roles.

Minimal Permissions Model

permissions:
  contents: read
  id-token: write
  packages: write

• Deny by default; explicitly request only required scopes.
• Split build and deploy into separate jobs with separate permissions.

Keyless Signing + Verification

# Sign immutable artifact digest
cosign sign --yes registry.example.com/team/service@sha256:<digest>

# Verify identity and issuer in deploy gate
cosign verify \
  --certificate-oidc-issuer https://token.actions.githubusercontent.com \
  --certificate-identity-regexp 'https://github.com/myorg/myrepo/\.github/workflows/.+@refs/tags/v.+' \
  registry.example.com/team/service@sha256:<digest>

Provenance + SBOM Requirements

• Generate SLSA provenance attestation for each release artifact.
• Generate CycloneDX/SPDX SBOM for exact artifact digest.
• Store attestation/SBOM references in release metadata.
• Block deploy if attestation/SBOM is missing or invalid.

Secret and Dependency Controls

• Run secret scanning (trufflehog/gitleaks) on PR and main.
• Run dependency review with severity threshold and license policy.
• Fail pipeline on critical policy violations; do not “warn-only” for production paths.

Runner Hardening

• Ephemeral runners preferred (one job per VM/pod).
• No privileged mode unless explicitly justified.
• Restrict network egress to required registries/APIs.
• Never persist cloud credentials or kubeconfig on runner disk.

Policy-as-Code Integration

• Enforce cluster admission checks for:
  • signed image;
  • digest-only reference;
  • valid provenance for production namespaces.
• Keep exception path explicit: owner + expiry + compensating controls.