  Companies are misled into thinking they solve their security issues by using
a DevSecOps system. This paper aims to answer the question: Could a DevOps
pipeline be misused to transform a securely developed application into an
insecure one? To answer the question, we designed a typical DevOps pipeline
utilizing Kubernetes (K8s} as a case study environment and analyzed the
applicable threats. Then, we developed four attack scenarios against the case
study environment: maliciously abusing the user's privilege of deploying
containers within the K8s cluster, abusing the Jenkins instance to modify files
during the continuous integration, delivery, and deployment systems (CI/CD)
build phase, modifying the K8s DNS layer to expose an internal IP to external
traffic, and elevating privileges from an account with create, read, update,
and delete (CRUD) privileges to root privileges. The attacks answer the
research question positively: companies should design and use a secure DevOps
pipeline and not expect that using a DevSecOps environment alone is sufficient
to deliver secure software.
