CI/CD-CSP Federation: Securing Pipelines with Secretless Authentication
In today’s modern tech stacks, CI/CD pipelines are essential for automating testing, deployment, and monitoring of applications. These systems often interact with multiple cloud providers (AWS, GCP, and Azure) to complete tasks, such as pulling resources or deploying new updates.
Traditionally, CI/CD pipelines relied on long-lived API keys or access keys to interact with cloud resources, posing significant security risks. However, the new best practice leverages OIDC (OpenID Connect) combined with cloud providers' STS (Security Token Service) to enable secretless authentication. This drastically reduces the risks of key leaks, ensuring that access is short-lived and task-specific, rather than dependent on static credentials.
To help you implement this solution, our dedicated GitHub repository provides Terraform code examples and setup guides for automating OIDC connections between CI/CD systems and AWS, GCP, and Azure.
How It’s Done Today
API Keys and Secrets in CI/CD
Traditionally, CI/CD pipelines interact with cloud providers using API keys or access keys that are often:
- Hardcoded into CI/CD configuration files, posing risks if the files are exposed.
- Stored in plaintext or accessed via less secure mechanisms.
- Manually rotated and maintained, leading to complex, error-prone management.
Why this is a problem
- Key leaks: Hardcoded or poorly managed secrets can be easily exposed, leading to unauthorized access to your cloud resources.
- Over-permissioning: Access keys are often given more permissions than necessary, creating potential for abuse.
- Static access: Long-lived keys do not automatically expire, making them vulnerable to misuse if compromised.
The Modern Approach: OIDC-Based Authentication
Introducing Clutch Federator
With Federator, teams can leverage OpenID Connect (OIDC) to enable secure, secretless authentication between their CSPs (Cloud Service Providers) and their CI/CD pipelines. By integrating OIDC with cloud providers’ Security Token Service (STS), you can:
- Eliminate static keys: Replace long-lived static keys in CI/CD pipelines with short-lived tokens that automatically expire after use, significantly reducing the window of opportunity for attackers.
- Minimize risks of key leakage: Drastically reduce the attack surface by removing static credentials, mitigating the risk of compromised secrets.
- Automate authentication: Streamline authentication by using Terraform scripts to set up OIDC connections between CI/CD systems, such as GitHub, and cloud providers, ensuring consistent security practices across your infrastructure.
This modern approach ensures that your CI/CD systems can securely authenticate without the hassle of managing or rotating static keys. Our GitHub repository provides Terraform examples and step-by-step guides, enabling you to easily implement secretless authentication and strengthen your security posture.
Get Started: Explore the Federator GitHub Repo
We’ve made it easy for you to adopt secretless authentication in your CI/CD pipelines. In our dedicated GitHub repository, you’ll find:
- Terraform scripts to automate the setup of OIDC-based authentication with AWS, GCP, and Azure.
- Asciinema video tutorials that walk you through the setup process, step by step.