Other security considerations

Azure DevOps Services | Azure DevOps Server 2022 | Azure DevOps Server 2020

There are a handful of other things you should consider when securing pipelines.

Relying on PATH

Relying on the agent's PATH setting is dangerous. It may not point where you think it does, since a previous script or tool could have altered it. For security-critical scripts and binaries, always use a fully qualified path to the program.

Logging of secrets

Azure Pipelines attempts to scrub secrets from logs wherever possible. This filtering is on a best-effort basis and can't catch every way that secrets can be leaked. Avoid echoing secrets to the console, using them in command line parameters, or logging them to files.

Lock down containers

Containers have a few system-provided volume mounts mapping in the tasks, the workspace, and external components required to communicate with the host agent. You can mark any or all of these volumes read-only.

resources:
  containers:
  - container: example
    image: ubuntu:22.04
    mountReadOnly:
      externals: true
      tasks: true
      tools: true
      work: false  # the default; shown here for completeness

Most people should mark the first three read-only and leave work as read-write. If you know you won't write to the work directory in a given job or step, go ahead and make work read-only as well. If you have tasks in your pipeline, which self-modify, you may need to leave tasks read-write.

Control available tasks

You can disable the ability to install and run tasks from the Marketplace. This will allow you greater control over the code that executes in a pipeline. You may also disable all the in-the-box tasks (except Checkout, which is a special action on the agent). We recommend that you don't disable in-the-box tasks under most circumstances.

Tasks directly installed with tfx are always available. With both of these features enabled, only those tasks are available.

Use the Auditing service

Many pipeline events are recorded in the Auditing service. Review the audit log periodically to ensure no malicious changes have slipped past. Visit https://dev.azure.com/ORG-NAME/_settings/audit to get started.

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