Anchore, the leading providers of continuous security and compliance for containers, has announced an integration with GitLab, the complete DevSecOps platform, delivered as a single application. With this integration, organizations will be able to automate security and compliance checks from the early stages of the development cycle, speeding software development and reducing risks. Anchore also announces it has joined the GitLab partner program.

Anchore now integrates seamlessly with GitLab to simplify security and compliance workflows for developers and to enable DevSecOps practices. Anchore performs deep container image scanning that identifies vulnerabilities and surfaces a wide range of security and policy infractions, including vulnerabilities and other risks during development. Together, the Anchore and GitLab security integrations will:

Display vulnerability results of container scans directly in GitLab security dashboards
Surface these findings in merge requests that identify changes needed to remediate issues
Enable updating of merge requests with a package version to resolve vulnerabilities
Seamlessly manage the risk profile in one place through GitLab’s Risk Management Framework (RMF), reducing the friction of typical software security scanning

Digital transformation has changed software development practices as organizations seek to deliver applications more quickly and update them more frequently. This shift, combined with increasing cybersecurity threats, requires developers to implement security and compliance checks throughout the DevSecOps life cycle. The integration between Anchore and GitLab helps to automate these DevSecOps best practices for enterprises, government agencies, and open source communities,” said Saïd Ziouani, Anchore CEO and Cofounder.

“Strengthening the software development security and compliance postures of enterprises and public sector organizations is paramount to the missions of both GitLab and Anchore. We are pleased to partner through this integration to help our joint customers to increase their speed to mission delivery and to reduce the risks associated with software development,” said GitLab Vice-President of Global Channels, Michelle Hodges.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) uses both Anchore and GitLab as part of their Platform One Initiative to speed the development of secure and compliant software. Anchore is used to develop hardened containers for Iron Bank (DoD’s software repository for containers) based on DoD best practices.

“Today, more than ever before, security is the most essential aspect of software development for government and critical infrastructure—and is the core of the DoD DevSecOps Initiative and Platform One. Now developers have the ability to push validated code into production on an ongoing basis, resulting in shorter development cycles, less debugging, and more rapid feature development,” said Major Robert Slaughter, Director of DoD Platform One.

Cloud security provider Accurics this week announced a new GitHub application designed to further automate the programmatic enforcement of security policies throughout the software development workflow.

The Accurics platform and the Terrascan tool for detecting compliance and security violations across Infrastructure as Code (IaC) have both been accessible through GitHub Actions for a while. Terrascan is accessible through the popular Super-Linter action. The Accurics platform is available through the company’s own action.

The new GitHub App adds an option for the automation of that enforcement, explained Accurics developer advocate Jon Jarboe, in a blog post. It provides a library of more than 500 policies aligned with compliance standards, such as the CIS benchmark. New commits and pull requests are automatically scanned for policy violations, and when security risks are found, they are added to the PR and/or repo as issues.
By adding Accurics to code scanning, any GitHub user can automate the elimination of security risks from their infrastructure as code before and after deployment, Jarboe said.

“Given the success of high-velocity DevOps teams, we believe that self-healing infrastructure is the only way to embed security into DevOps without breaking it,” Jarboe added. “Reactive processes that require manual actions simply cannot keep up. The rapid adoption of infrastructure as code provides an excellent opportunity to implement guardrails throughout the development lifecycle, starting in the earliest stages.

The new GitHub Accurics App was part of the GitHub announcement this week for integration with new third-party code scanning tools for IaC and container scanning.

“By expanding our GitHub security ecosystem, developers can use their tools of choice for any of their projects on GitHub, all within the native GitHub experience they love,” said GitHub senior business development manager Jose Palafox, in a blog post. “Our integrations tightly couple the developer workflow with a security review through GitHub Actions and Apps.”

Along with Accurics, GitHub announced integrations with 42Crunch (API Contract Security Audit), Bridgecrew (developer-first platform for streamlining cloud security), Snyk Infrastructure as Code and Snyk Container security platforms, Aqua Security (pure-play cloud native security company), and Anchore (enterprise container security workflow solution).

The Pleasanton, CA-based Accurics focuses on enabling “immutable security for immutable infrastructure, so that organizations can embrace cloud native technologies with confidence.” The company’s namesake solution seamlessly scans IaC for misconfigurations based on common policy frameworks and detects potential breach paths to eliminate risks before cloud infrastructure is provisioned. It then monitors provisioned cloud infrastructure for configuration changes that introduce posture drift, and enables reverting to a secure posture.

“GitHub is a luminary in the software development world,” Jarboe said, “and we’re excited to work with them to help deliver to their users the ability to programmatically detect and fix security risks through its new code scanning.”