Lion Cipher Lab
Add security gates to your CI/CD pipeline (shift-left): secrets + dependencies + IaC in one workflow
- Cloud Security
- Intermediate
- ~60 min
- Free · no account required
Why it matters
Most teams find security problems the expensive way: late, in production, in an incident. A leaked API key, a dependency with a known critical bug, a storage bucket left unencrypted -- each of those is cheap to catch the moment it is written and painful to catch after it ships. "Shift-left" is the whole idea of moving that check as far left in the timeline as it will go: not a manual audit weeks later, but an automated gate that runs the instant you open a pull request, and refuses to let the bad change merge. This lab is where security stops being a person's afterthought and becomes the…
What you'll learn
- shift-left security
- DevSecOps
- CI/CD security gates
- GitHub Actions workflows
- secrets scanning in CI
- software composition analysis (SCA)
- Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) scanning
- branch protection and required status checks
- failing a build on a security finding
Steps in this lab
- The words first: CI/CD, pipeline, gate, and shift-left
- Set up a repo you own, on a branch
- Gate 1 -- secrets: fail the build if a credential is committed
- Gate 2 -- dependencies (SCA): block a known-vulnerable package
- Gate 3 -- IaC: catch a cloud misconfiguration before it deploys
- Make the gate actually block the merge (branch protection)
- Prove it: break it, watch it catch, then fix it
- The instinct you just built