CICD security: A new eldorado

The talk argues that CI/CD pipelines are a strong route to privilege escalation inside an organisation, even if they are rarely the easiest way in. The speakers say DevOps teams often operate with looser policies, thinner monitoring and cloud or Kubernetes setups they do not fully understand, which makes them attractive targets for testers.

Drawing on a real-world engagement, the presenters trace an attack from a foothold into source control. They describe finding secrets through automated scanners and manual review, and pulling credentials from leaked commit history, shell history and build artifacts. Compromising the orchestrator, through poisoned pipeline execution or a build agent that leads back to the master, gives access to production. They also cover package repository poisoning and dependency confusion as ways to persist or gain entry. Kubernetes weaknesses follow, including flat cluster networking, cloud metadata access from pods, broad Jenkins permissions and weak container isolation. The final section shows how chained AWS IAM role permissions led from one account to administrator access in the organisation's root account.

The closing recommendations focus on least privilege, removing plaintext secrets, network segmentation, separating environments and accounts, and monitoring the pipeline and its infrastructure. In the Q&A, the presenters note that keeping build configuration on a restricted branch reduces risk, but no control fully prevents poisoned pipeline runs.