What is Continuous Integration Continuous Deployment CICD Security?

Understanding Continuous Integration Continuous Deployment CICD Security

CI/CD Security addresses the unique risks introduced when organizations adopt automated build and deployment pipelines to accelerate software delivery. While CI/CD brings tremendous benefits in development speed and consistency, it also creates new attack vectors—compromise of a build system or pipeline could allow attackers to insert malicious code that would be automatically distributed to production environments. Securing these pipelines requires multiple approaches: strong access controls and authentication for pipeline components, integrity verification of all code and dependencies entering the pipeline, automated security testing integrated into build processes, secure handling of deployment credentials, and immutable infrastructure practices. Organizations typically implement signing and verification at each pipeline stage to prevent tampering, while maintaining comprehensive audit logs of all build and deployment activities. A concept called “pipeline as code” treats the CI/CD configuration itself as source code subject to the same security reviews and change controls as application code. Effective implementation requires collaboration between development and security teams—ensuring security checks, code reviews, and threat modeling happen early and consistently. This approach transforms CI/CD from a speed advantage alone into a highly secure software factory that helps prevent supply chain compromises and other advanced threats.