AWS-Vault is an excellent open-source tool by 99Designs that enables developers to store AWS credentials in their machine keystore securely. After using it for a while at Jit, I decided to dig deeper into how it works and learned a lot along the way. In this article, I will summarize and simplify the information I learned to help others with their aws-vault adoption and lower the barrier to usage.

In programming, the term idempotence may sound like a complex and arcane concept reserved for mathematical discussions or computer science lectures. However, its relevance stretches far beyond academia. Idempotence, also called idempotency, is a fundamental principle that is pivotal in ensuring software systems’ predictability, reliability, and consistency.

Let’s be honest: some software development changes are bound to fail. The increasing reliance on software systems means that the frequency and complexity of changes are constantly increasing. While you can’t always have pitch-perfect processes, you can bounce back quickly- and, thankfully, there’s a way to measure that. Change Failure Rate (CFR) is one of the four key metrics of DORA Metrics.

Let’s keep it real: security compliance often makes your DevOps team feel strained. This burden spans multiple security sub-domains, such as information, network, and endpoint security, and specific security configurations, such as Identity and Access Management (IAM). Restraining budgets and ambitious expansion plans make it even more tempting to brush security under the rug until it becomes a challenge too big to ignore.

Logging was once just a best practice to help you understand what's happening inside your applications. Now, any security expert worth their salt will tell you that you can’t build a security plan without it. As a result, organizations have turned to specialized logging tools like Log4J to strengthen their application security. This move has proven highly effective, with cyberattack risks on businesses dropping from 44% in 2022 to 34% in 2023.

Today, I’m delighted to announce the release of Jit’s Context Engine, which uses the runtime context of vulnerabilities to automatically prioritize the top security risks in our customers’ cloud applications. One of the defining challenges of product security is the overwhelming volume of alerts generated by code and cloud security scanners, which is especially painful when the majority of “issues” don’t pose any real security risk.

Imagine this: an attacker sneaks a tiny backdoor into software that hundreds of companies use. It sounds like a plot from a spy movie, but it’s a real threat that recently impacted major Linux distributions through a compromised utility tool, XZ Utils. So far, in 2024, over 35 billion known records have been breached. The Linux attack, potentially in action and undetected since 2021, is just one of the many that highlight the alarming proliferation of supply chain attacks.

The widespread adoption of external libraries and packages in the modern application development process introduces potential security risks that could impact the entire application. To address this, Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tools like npm-audit and OSV Scanner play an important role.

Sisense is a popular monitoring tool that enables users to monitor business metrics from multiple third-party sources in a single dashboard. On April 10, the company informed customers that the sensitive information they entrusted with Sisense may have been compromised and urged them to reset their password and rotate their secrets. According to KrebsOnSecurity, the attackers were allegedly able to access GitLab repositories hosted by Sisense, where hard-coded secrets may have been found.

TruffleHog and Gitleaks are popular secrets scanning tools that can automatically surface hardcoded secrets such as API keys, passwords, and tokens. They can both be integrated into the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) to proactively scan repositories to identify and rectify potential issues before they can be exploited. The need for effective secret detection tools underscores a broader shift toward more secure software development practices.