Secure Section

1. You are here:
2. Handbook
3. Engineering
4. Development Department
5. Secure Section

On this page

• Vision
• Mission
• Team Members
  • Composition Analysis
  • Static Analysis
  • Dynamic Analysis
  • Frontend Team
• Stable Counterparts
  • Secure Team
    • Security Products
    • Domains of expertise
      • SAST
      • DAST
      • Dependency Scanning
      • Container Scanning
      • License Compliance
    • Label Usage
    • Release process
    • Skills
    • QA process
    • Engineering Grooming & Planning
    • Brainstorming sessions
    • Product Documentation
    • Async Daily Standups
      • Standup messages format
    • Recorded meetings
  • Technical onboarding
    • Workflow
      • Additional workflow information:
• Common Links
• How to work with us

Vision

For more details about the vision for this area of the product, see the Secure stage page.

Mission

The Secure team works on GitLab's Secure stage.

Team Members

The following people are permanent members of the Secure Section:

Composition Analysis

Static Analysis

Dynamic Analysis

Frontend Team

Stable Counterparts

The following members of other functional teams are our stable counterparts:

Secure Team

The Secure Team (previously known as the Security Products Team) is responsible for the security checks features in the GitLab platform, and maps to the secure transversal stage. You can learn more about our approach on the Secure Vision page.

The features provided by the Secure Team are mostly present at the pipeline level, and mostly available as Docker images. This particularity shapes our processes and QA, which differs a bit from the other backend teams.

Security Products

We still refer to "Security Products" as the tools developed by the Secure Team. Hence the home of our projects in GitLab: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/security-products/

Domains of expertise

SAST

SAST (Static Application Security Testing) refers to static code analysis. GitLab leverages the power of various opensource tools to provide a wide range of checks for many languages and support. These tools are wrapped inside docker images which ensure we get a standard output from there. An orchestrator, developed by GitLab, is in charge of running these images, and gathering all the data needed to generate the final report.

DAST

DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing) is used to hit a live application. Because some vulnerabilities can only be detected once all the code is actually running, this method complements the static code analysis. DAST is relying on OWASP Zed Attach Proxy Project, modified by GitLab to enable authentication.

Dependency Scanning

Dependency Scanning is used to detect vulnerabilities introduced by external dependencies in the application. Because a large portion of the code shipped to production is actually coming from third-party libraries, it's important to monitor them as well. Dependency Scanning is relying mostly on the Gemnasium engine.

Container Scanning

Container Scanning is used when the application is shipped as a Docker image. It's very common to build the final image on top of an existing one, which must be checked like every other portion of the application. For that, Container Scanning is relying on the clair scanner.

License Compliance

License Compliance helps with the licenses introduced by third-party libraries in the application. Licence management relies on the LicenceFinder gem.

Label Usage

If you are submitting an issue about a Secure Stage feature, use ~devops::secure and one of the following group labels to get the issue in front of the most appropriate team members.

Additional labels should be added according to the Workflow Labels Documentation.

Release process

Our release process is specified in this project. The vulnerability database is updated on a regular basis.

Skills

Because we have a wide range of domains to cover, it requires a lot of different expertises and skills:

Our team also must have a good sense of security, with at least basic skills in application security.

We provide tools for many different languages (ex: sast, dependency scanning, license compliance). It means our team is able to understand the basics of each of these languages, including their package managers. We maintain tests projects to ensure our features are working release after release for each of them.

QA process

Our release project also defines our QA process.

Engineering Grooming & Planning

To maximize our velocity and meet our deliverables, we follow a grooming process for all issues.

Meetings schedule:

• Before the 1st of the next month: Planning meeting with our Product Manager, the UX team, and the FrontEnd team. The goal of the meeting is to understand and discuss the scope of the next iteration. Each issue from the product vision is explained and detailed.
• After the Planning meeting, and still before the 1st of the next month: Evaluation meeting with the FrontEnd team.
• Finally, on the 8th of the month: Kickoff meeting where we make the list of Deliverables didn't change, and we assign developers to each one of them

The Product Manager and the Engineering Manager will do the milestone grooming during their 1:1 following the kickoff. Every issue still open will be evaluated for rescheduling (in the following milestone or not).

Brainstorming sessions

Our team occasionally schedules synchronous brainstorming sessions as a method of deep-diving on a specific topic. This approach can be useful in breaking down complexity and deriving actionable steps for problems that lack definition.

We tend to schedule these on a weekly cadence with a rotating timeslot to accomodate team members in different timezones. If a topic is not agreed upon prior to a given week, the slot is canceled to avoid unnecessary meetings. These slots can be viewed on the Secure Stage Team Calendar.

These are purposefully freeform to allow for creativity problem solving. When possible, time should be reserved for a list of actions to be taken from the open discussion.

Brainstorming Sessions Doc (Internal): https://docs.google.com/document/d/179JL5RzbgSIz2XZewbYn79cuX7_vUtte_TcoLwUUC5o/edit#

Examples of previous brainstorming topics:

• Reduce false positives in Security reports
• How to manage occurrence uniqueness identification in the common report format? (CompareKey)
• One file with syntax errors should not stop SAST and similar kind of jobs from running

Product Documentation

As the product evolves, it is important to maintain accurate and up to date documentation for our users. If it is not documented, customers may not know a feature exists.

To update the documentation, the following process should be followed:

1. When an issue has been identified as needing documentation, add the ~Documentation label, outline in the description of the issue what documentation is needed, and assign a Backend Engineer and Technical Writer(TW) to the issue (find the appropriate TW by searching the product categories).
2. If the task is documentation only, apply a ~Px label.
3. For documentation around features or bugs, a backend engineer should write the documentation and work with the technical writer for editing. If the documentation only needs styling cleanup, clarification, or reorganization, this work should be lead by the Technical Writer with support from a BE as necessary. The availability of a technical writer should in no way hold up work on the documentation. Further information on the documentation process.

Async Daily Standups

Since we are a remote company, having daily stand-ups meetings would not make any sense, since we're not all in the same timezone. That's why we have async daily standups, where everyone can give some insights into what they did yesterday, what they plan to do today, etc. For that, we rely on the geekbot slack plugin to automate the process.

Standup messages format

• Use the "description in backquote + [link to issue](#)" format when mentioning issues in your standup report.
• Prepend CI status icons to the answer lines for What did you do since yesterday? to denote the current state:
  • for successfully accomplished tasks (:ci_passing: emoji)
  • for tasks that were due on some period of time but were not accomplished (:ci_failing: emoji)
  • for tasks currently in progress (:ci_running: emoji)
  • for paused or postponed tasks (:ci_pending: emoji)
  • any other :ci_... icon you find applicable

Example:

What did you do since yesterday?

• Accomplished the Spotbugs java analyzer compareKey is not unique https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/10860
• Still working on Allow guests to create an issue from a vulnerability https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/7813
• Catch-up on all emails and threads after the vacation

Recorded meetings

Our important meetings are recorded and published on YouTube, in the GitLab Secure Playlist. They give a good overview of the decision process, which is often a discussion with all the stakeholders. As we are a remote company, these video meetings help to synchronize and take decisions faster than commenting on issues. We prefer asynchronous work, but for large features and when the timing is tight, we can detail a lot of specifications. This will make the asynchronous work easier, since we have evaluated all edge cases.

Technical onboarding

New hires should go through these steps and read the corresponding documentation when onboarding in the Secure Team. Every new hire will have an assigned onboarding issue that will guide them through the whole process.

Workflow

Secure uses a workflow based on the Product Development Flow.

All open issues that are assigned to a milestone and ready for engineering should have one of the above ~workflow:: labels. The process works as follows:

1. Product managers will work on issues and when a PM determines the issue is ready for an engineer to review, the PM will apply the workflow::scheduling label. workflow::scheduling means that the issue is complete from a requirements perspective and needs to be groomed.
2. workflow::ready for development should be assigned after an engineer grooms an issue.
3. workflow::In dev should be assigned when an engineer is working on the issue.
4. workflow::In Review should be assigned by the engineer when they open up a MR request and the MR is not WIP.
5. workflow::Verification should be assigned by the engineer after the code has been merged into the code base.

If an engineer gets blocked the workflow::blocked label should be applied, and the engineer should @mention the PM and EM regarding the issue and anyone else that can help resolve the block.

Additional workflow information:

• Issues board: Add a milestone filter with the current milestone +1 (the current milestone is already released).
• Merge Requests workflow
• Code Review process

Common Links

• Secure team board
• #g_secure in Slack

How to work with us