Integrating Chalk with CI/CD Platforms

Why Integrate Chalk into Your CI/CD Pipeline?

Modern software development relies heavily on Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines to automate building, testing, and deploying applications. These pipelines represent a critical juncture in the software lifecycle – the moment where source code transforms into deployable artifacts that will eventually run in production environments.

Integrating Chalk into your CI/CD pipeline creates several powerful advantages:

1. Automatic Traceability Across the Software Lifecycle

When Chalk operates at build time, it creates a permanent connection between your source code and your production artifacts. This connection enables developers, operations teams, and security professionals to trace any production artifact back to its exact source commit, build environment, and pipeline execution. This traceability becomes invaluable when investigating incidents, debugging production issues, or conducting security forensics.

2. Enhanced Software Supply Chain Security

Recent high-profile supply chain attacks like SolarWinds have highlighted the importance of knowing exactly what goes into your software. With Chalk in your pipeline, you can automatically:

• Generate Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs) for every build
• Digitally sign artifacts to verify their provenance
• Collect and store code ownership information
• Document the build environment and dependencies

This information can help satisfy regulatory requirements (like NIST’s SSDF or the US Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity) and provide evidence for security certifications.

3. Improved Developer and Operations Collaboration

When an issue arises in production, operations teams often struggle to identify which team is responsible for a particular service or artifact. By embedding ownership and repository information directly into artifacts, Chalk eliminates the typical back-and-forth of “who owns this?” and allows teams to route incidents to the correct owners immediately.

4. Automated Inventory Management

As organizations grow, keeping track of all deployed software becomes increasingly challenging. Chalk automatically creates data that can be used to maintains a real-time inventory of applications, helping organizations understand what they have running, where it’s running, and who’s responsible for it – without requiring manual tracking or documentation.

5. Build Context Preservation

CI/CD systems contain valuable metadata about the build process that is typically lost once artifacts are deployed. Chalk preserves this ephemeral information by embedding it directly into the artifacts, ensuring it remains available throughout the software’s lifecycle.

Integrating Chalk with Common CI/CD Platforms

Now that we understand why integrating Chalk into CI/CD pipelines is valuable, let’s explore how to implement it on several popular platforms.

GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions is a popular CI/CD platform integrated directly into GitHub repositories. Here’s how to incorporate Chalk into your GitHub Actions workflows:

1. Add setup-chalk-action step:

   - name: Set up Chalk
     uses: crashappsec/setup-chalk-action@main
     with:
       load: |
         https://chalkdust.io/run_sbom.c4m
         https://chalkdust.io/run_sast.c4m
         https://chalkdust.io/run_secret_scanner.c4m
   

2. Use Chalk. Setup action automatically wraps all docker invocations so for example building docker image via action-buils, chalk will wrap that build automatically:

   - name: Build and push
     uses: docker/build-push-action@v6
     with:
       push: true
       tags: user/app:latest
   

3. To insert chalk marks for any other files use chalk insert:

   - name: Build application
     run: |
       # Your normal build commands here
       make myapp
   
   - name: Apply Chalk mark
     run: |
       chalk insert ./myapp
   

4. Optionally you can store chalk log as GitHub artifact:

   - name: Upload Chalk report
     uses: actions/upload-artifact@v3
     with:
       name: chalk-report
       path: ~/.local/chalk/chalk.log
   

GitLab Pipelines

GitLab CI/CD is another popular platform with built-in CI/CD capabilities. Here’s a simple example of one way to integrate Chalk by installing it in before_script with setup.sh:

# .gitlab-ci.yml
build:
  image: docker:cli
  stage: build
  services:
    - docker:dind
  variables:
    CHALK_URL: https://crashoverride.run/setup.sh
  before_script:
    - apk add curl --no-cache
    - >
      sh <(curl -fsSL $CHALK_URL) --load="
        https://chalkdust.io/run_sbom.c4m
        https://chalkdust.io/run_sast.c4m
        https://chalkdust.io/run_secret_scanner.c4m
      "
  script:
    - docker buildx build -t myimage .

Other CI/CD

Similarly Chalk can be installed in any CI/CD system via setup.sh:

sh <(curl -fsSL https://crashoverride.run/setup.sh) --load="
  https://chalkdust.io/run_sbom.c4m
  https://chalkdust.io/run_sast.c4m
  https://chalkdust.io/run_secret_scanner.c4m
"

Advanced CI/CD Integration Patterns

Beyond basic integration, here are some advanced patterns for using Chalk in CI/CD pipelines:

Enabling And Verifying Attestations

See Attestation guide.

Running External Tools

To enhance security by automatically running SBOM, SAST, and secret scanning tools by loading these components: load these components:

• https://chalkdust.io/run_sbom.c4m
• https://chalkdust.io/run_sast.c4m
• https://chalkdust.io/run_secret_scanner.c4m

Best Practices for CI/CD Integration

• Store Chalk binary in your artifact repository: Instead of downloading Chalk in every pipeline run, consider storing the binary in your organization’s artifact repository for faster and more reliable access.

• Version pin your Chalk binary: Explicitly specify which version of Chalk to use to ensure consistent behavior across pipeline runs.

• Use CI/CD secrets for sensitive configuration: Never hardcode API keys, passwords, or other sensitive information in your pipeline configuration.

• Cache the Chalk configuration: For complex configurations, consider creating a custom Docker image with Chalk pre-installed and configured.

• Incorporate Chalk verification in deployment gates: Before promoting artifacts to production, verify their Chalk marks to ensure they haven’t been tampered with.

• Integrate with security scanning: Use the security information collected by Chalk (SBOMs, SAST results) as input for additional security scanning tools.

• Include Chalk reports in compliance documentation: For regulated industries, archive Chalk reports alongside other build artifacts to help meet compliance requirements.

Troubleshooting CI/CD Integration

Common Issues

• Missing Git metadata: Ensure your CI/CD checkout step fetches the full repository history to allow Chalk to capture accurate git information.

• Docker-in-Docker issues: When using Chalk with Docker in CI/CD environments, ensure your container runtime has the necessary permissions.

• File permission problems: CI/CD environments often run with restricted permissions. Ensure Chalk has write access to the artifacts it needs to mark.

Debugging Tips

• Increase Chalk’s log level for more verbose output by loading debug.c4m module from https://chalkdust.io/debug.c4m:

  - name: Set up Chalk
    uses: crashappsec/setup-chalk-action@main
    with:
      load: |
        https://chalkdust.io/debug.c4m
  

• Use the --show-config flag to debug configuration issues:

  chalk --show-config version
  

• Test your Chalk configuration locally before integrating it into your CI/CD pipeline.

Wrapping-up

Integrating Chalk into your CI/CD pipeline allows you to automatically collect valuable metadata about your software, create a permanent link between source code and production artifacts, and enhance your security posture with supply chain verification.

By following the examples and best practices in this guide, you can implement Chalk in a way that adds minimal overhead to your build process while providing substantial benefits throughout your software’s lifecycle.

Remember that the specific integration approach may vary based on your organization’s requirements and existing toolchain. Chalk’s flexibility allows it to fit into virtually any CI/CD process, whether you’re building traditional applications, containers, or cloud native services.