CI/CD
Secure Delivery Pipeline Architecture
CI/CD security ensures the path from source code to deployment remains tamper-resistant, policy-controlled, and observable. It is the control plane for software trust, secret handling, artifact integrity, and safe release governance.
What it is for
- Protecting the build, test, packaging, and deployment workflow from malicious or unintended changes
- Ensuring secrets are not exposed in source, build logs, or artifacts
- Validating that only trusted code and verified artifacts reach production
- Enabling auditable release management with approvals, rollback, and change tracking
Design principles
- Branch protection, signed commits, and approval gates before production deployment
- Immutable builds and artifact provenance from source to runtime
- Secrets in managed secret stores with workload identity and scoped access
- Continuous validation through SAST, SCA, IaC scanning, and container checks
Reference layout
Release control flow
Developer
Repo
Build
Scan / Test
Artifact
Deploy
Control emphasis
Security posture score
95%
Technologies & controls
Industry-standard stack
Source & repo governance
GitHub / GitLab / Azure DevOps, branch protection, code reviews, signed commits, environment protections.
Security validation
SAST, DAST, SCA, IaC scanning, container image scanning, artifact policy enforcement.
Secrets management
HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, workload identity, environment isolation.
Release integrity
Sigstore, cosign, in-toto, artifact signing, provenance, approval gates, rollback automation.