Eliminating Shared Secrets: Solving a Core CI/CD Security Problem

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The security of Continuous Integration (CI) systems has come under intense scrutiny in recent years. As organizations adopt zero trust for employees and customers alike, trust is no longer an abstract concept—it directly informs enterprise security architecture and infrastructure management strategies. One of the most critical issues? The widespread use of shared secrets across CI systems.

This article explores why shared secrets are a major design flaw, the risks they introduce, and practical strategies to move toward a trusted, zero-trust infrastructure model.

The Rise of Trusted Infrastructure in CI Systems

Modern infrastructure is expected to deliver compute, storage, and network services at the speed of business. This expectation requires a Trusted Computing paradigm, which reduces anonymous access and shifts assurance to the start of any authentication event—whether for humans, workloads, or machines.

Key trust mechanisms now include:

• Software attestation: Ensuring software is loaded from a verified source, in the correct order, at the correct time.
• Cryptographic challenge-response authentication: Using standards like Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) to verify identity.

These mechanisms extend trust beyond data and applications down to the underlying infrastructure, forming the foundation for secure CI/CD pipelines.

The Perfect Storm: Why CI Systems Are Vulnerable

Modern infrastructure presents multiple risk factors:

• Broad infrastructure usage: On-premises, cloud services, containerized workloads, and APIs.
• Need for agility: Continuous deployment and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) require rapid access provisioning.
• Infrastructure as an attack vector: Misconfigured access paths can lead to lateral movement, data exfiltration, and denial-of-service attacks.

CI systems, particularly when relying on shared secrets, amplify these risks. Shared credentials, embedded API keys, and static tokens provide attackers with easy access to multiple components, creating a high blast radius if compromised.

Complications With Traditional PAM and NHI Solutions

Privileged Access Management (PAM) has long managed access to databases, directories, and other core services. Non-Human Identity (NHI) platforms now manage programmatic and machine access. However, these solutions often create silos:

• Legacy PAM is rigid and difficult to scale across dynamic cloud environments.
• NHI tools focus on specific use cases, leaving gaps in infrastructure identity coverage.
• DIY solutions are inconsistent, resource-intensive, and error-prone.

The result? Reduced productivity, higher operational overhead, and increased risk.

Infrastructure Management Challenges

CI/CD and cloud-driven infrastructure introduce multiple personas, each with unique access needs:

• Engineers deploying workloads via IaC
• Cloud operations managing multi-cloud resources
• Security teams monitoring access and compliance

When multiple point solutions are used for PAM, NHI, or DIY management:

• Visibility is fragmented
• Audit efficiency suffers
• Business agility is reduced

Questions like “Who has access to what?” or “Who executed privileged actions?” become difficult to answer, complicating forensics, compliance, and security investigations.

The Solution: Treat Infrastructure Risk as a Spectrum

Effective CI security requires a holistic, risk-driven approach. Core principles include:

What to Implement

• Assurance of all access paths: Understand who or what can access infrastructure and how.
• Identity coverage for people, machines, and workloads: No anonymous access permitted.
• Consistent authentication and policy enforcement: Apply strong cryptographic verification and attestation.

How to Implement

• Discover all identities and access points across infrastructure.
• Enforce consistent strong authentication for all human and non-human entities.
• Policy-driven access management: Centralized control to ensure compliance and least privilege.
• Broad integration coverage: Support proxies, native protocols, and cloud-native APIs.

By combining Zero Trust principles with continuous monitoring, ephemeral access, and cryptographically verified identities, organizations can significantly reduce the blast radius of compromised credentials while maintaining agility.

Benefits of Modern CI Security

Getting Started: Steps to Remove Shared Secrets

1. Understand the current problem statement
   • Assess visibility, tools, processes, and existing identities.
2. Engage stakeholders across teams
   • Include engineering, security, and cloud operations teams in discussions.
3. Start small and scale strategically
   • Implement standards, cryptographic identities, and root-of-trust mechanisms gradually.
   • Build a secure, policy-driven infrastructure model that supports ephemeral and least-privilege access.

By moving toward an infrastructure-identity-centric model, organizations can eliminate shared secrets, secure CI/CD pipelines, and provide flexible, trusted computing environments.