Securing software development using developer access control

Abstract

This research is aimed at software development companies and highlights the unique information security concerns in the context of a non-malicious software developer's work environment; and furthermore explores an application driven solution which focuses specifically on providing developer environments with access control for source code repositories. In order to achieve that, five goals were defined as discussed in section 1.3. The application designed to provide the developer environment with access control to source code repositories was modelled on lessons taken from the principles of Network Access Control (NAC), Data Loss Prevention (DLP), and Google's BeyondCorp (GBC) for zero-trust end-user computing. The intention of this research is to provide software developers with maximum access to source code without compromising Confidentiality, as per the Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability (CIA) triad. Employing data gleaned from examining the characteristics of DLP, NAC, and Beyond- Corp"”proof-of-concept code was developed to regulate access to the developer's environment and source code. The system required sufficient flexibility to support the diversity of software development environments. In order to achieve this, a modular design was selected. The system comprised a client side agent and a plug-in-ready server component. The client side agent mounts and dismounts encrypted volumes containing source code. Furthermore, it provides the server with information of the client that is demanded by plug-ins. The server side service provided encryption keys to facilitate the mounting of the volumes and, through plug-ins, asked questions of the client agent to determine whether access should be granted. The solution was then tested with integration and system testing. There were plans to have it used by development teams who were then to be surveyed as to their view on the proof of concept but this proved impossible. The conclusion provides a basis by which organisations that develop software can better balance the two corners of the CIA triad most often in conflict: Confidentiality in terms of their source code against the Availability of the same to developers.