5 Open Source Security Tools All Developers Should Know About

The talk focuses on utilizing open source security tools to reduce threats and risks in cloud systems, environments, and products. The speaker emphasizes the importance of a programmatic approach to security and shifting left.

• Shift left movement empowers developers with security tools and processes
• Open source security tools are important in minimizing risks
• A broader set of risks should be considered when selecting tools
• Utilizing a toolkit and tool belt can help minimize risks
• Programmatic approach to security is crucial

The speaker shares their experience in cyber security consulting and how they saw the challenges of retrofitting security processes after the fact. They emphasize the importance of a programmatic approach to security and shifting left to avoid these challenges.

The minimum viable security (MVS) approach, enables us to easily bake security into our config files, apps, and CI/CD processes with a few simple controls built - and the great part? It’s easily achievable through open source tooling. In this talk we will focus on five critical security controls that will be integrated as part of the CI/CD pipeline by leveraging some excellent open source tools, including: Bandit or SEMGrep for static application security (SAST), Gitleaks to detect hard-coded or insufficiently secured secrets & dependency checks (SCA), KICS for infrastructure as code (IaC) and OWASP’s ZAP for API and dynamic application security (DAST), in addition to custom controls to ensure proper enforcement of MFA via Github Security. These controls will provide a foundational framework for securing your applications from the first line of code, that will make it possible to continuously iterate and evolve your security maturity all the way through advanced layers of security that comes with time, as well as increased experience with your deployments, stacks, and security posture. Code examples & demos will be showcased as part of this session.