Academic report · DevSecOps
CI/CD Goat Security Assessment
A structured assessment of the CI/CD Goat environment mapping pipeline weaknesses to exploited trust boundaries, risk, and concrete defensive controls.
Trust chain
Where CI/CD compromise propagates
A weakness near source control can inherit the privileges of every downstream stage.
Assessment objective
The work treated CI/CD as a privileged production system rather than a collection of convenience scripts. Eleven scenarios were analyzed across source control, pipelines, Jenkins, dependencies, infrastructure as code, registries, containers, and secrets.
Representative attack patterns
Different challenges repeatedly exposed the same underlying problem: untrusted input crossed a highly privileged automation boundary.
- Direct poisoned-pipeline execution and attacker-controlled build logic
- Token exposure through pull-request and auto-merge workflows
- Secrets retained in Git history and replayed Jenkins credentials
- Dependency, external-script, package, and container poisoning
- IaC scanner bypass and Jenkins agent-label abuse
Cross-scenario analysis
Findings were grouped by trust-boundary failure, lateral-movement potential, privilege escalation, and secret exposure. CVSS 3.1 scoring provided consistency without replacing contextual risk analysis.
Remediation strategy
The final guidance prioritizes protected pipeline definitions, least-privilege tokens, isolated build agents, trusted dependencies, signed artifacts, secrets management, IaC policy enforcement, and monitoring at the handoff points between systems.