Open source is everywhere. Everyone is using it. Open source code is found in almost every proprietary software offering on the market and is estimated to make up on average 60%-80% of all software codebases in 2020. Why the proliferation? Open source libraries help developers write code faster to meet the increasingly shorter release cycles under DevOps pipelines. Instead of writing new code, developers leverage existing open source libraries to quickly gain needed functionality.

This is the second post in a two-part series about enforcing API authorization policies using Apigee, Okta and OPA. While the first post explained how to set up all three to work together, this post dives into detail on the policies that go along with the working code. The application we will be discussing is based on a hypothetical medical insurance provider Acme Health Care.

CVE-2020-14386 is yet another severe vulnerability that was recently discovered in the Linux kernel. It reminds us that the fight against vulnerabilities is not over. This particular one allows a regular application to escalate its privileges and gain root access to the machine. Indeed, it sounds scary.

Organizations are increasingly agile today, producing and deploying software applications faster than ever before. But this requires all the elements in the software development life cycle (SDLC) to work together cohesively. Security practices in the SDLC become especially important, given that more than half of security flaws result from preventable coding mistakes. Ensuring that developers are on board with security practices is even more critical to improve the process efficiency.

Today’s software development life cycle includes a variety of quality and security testing techniques at every stage. Frequent testing throughout the DevOps pipeline is imperative considering the ever-increasing pace of development. One of the most common testing methods that companies use to ensure the products they are pushing out are secure and high-quality is black box testing.

API gateways have become a standard component in modern application architectures. The gateway exposes application APIs to the Internet and serves as a logical place to enforce policy. This is a two-part series about enforcing API authorization policies in Apigee with Okta as the identity provider (IdP).