Securing CI/CD Pipelines

A CI/CD pipeline has privileged access to source code, secrets, and production. Compromising it lets an attacker inject backdoors into every future build while bypassing code review. It is one of the highest-value targets in modern engineering.

Treat the pipeline as production infrastructure: it deserves the same hardening, monitoring, and least-privilege discipline as your live systems.

Pipelines run automatically on events you do not fully control: pull requests, tags, external contributions. A malicious PR can try to alter the build itself.

• A poisoned pipeline definition in a fork can attempt to exfiltrate secrets
• Untrusted code may run with the same permissions as trusted builds

Separate trusted and untrusted workflows: do not expose secrets to jobs triggered by external pull requests.