13 years from Java developer to DevSecOps. Today I am tech lead of the team that runs GitHub and GitHub Actions at a Fortune 10 healthcare company, where we are building a SLSA Build Level 3 pipeline.
Six links between a developer's keyboard and production. Pick a link to see the risk, a real attack on it, and the work I have done to protect it.
Someone pushes code they should not. One stolen token is enough.
Attackers pushed backdoored commits to PHP's git server under the names of real maintainers.
You run code you did not write and did not read.
A trusted maintainer slipped a backdoor into a compression library that SSH depends on.
The build system changes the output and nobody sees it.
Malware planted in the build system was signed and shipped to about 18,000 customers.
The image you deploy is not the image you built.
A mutable tag like :latest gets repointed to a different image after review.
Someone changes what runs in the cluster by hand.
A direct kubectl edit skips review and leaves no trace in git.
One weak service or exposed app reaches everything else.
A container with a shell, root, and host access breaks out to the node.
SLSA is a public scale for build integrity. Each level adds a guarantee and stops a new kind of attack. My team is building toward the top one at work, and this site already ships at it.
Builds run isolated. Signing keys never reach user code, so provenance cannot be forged.
Stops: tampering inside the build itself, by another build or a stolen credential. Example: SolarWinds (2020), where malware in the build system shipped inside signed updates.
A hosted builder signs a record of what it built and from which source.
Stops: an artifact swapped after the build, because the signature no longer matches. Example: Codecov (2021), where attackers changed a published script after it was built.
Each artifact ships with a record of how it was built.
Stops: mistakes, like a release built from the wrong branch or with the wrong steps.
Where most build systems start.
Stops: nothing. You trust the artifact because of where you downloaded it.
Groundwork: from 2022 to 2024 I built a pipeline that attached signed SBOM attestations to every container with cosign. That proved what was inside an image. Provenance adds proof of how it was built.
Every release of this site is one signed bundle. Download the latest release and check it yourself.
$ gh release download --repo JacobFrericks/jacobfrericks.com --pattern 'site.*'
$ slsa-verifier verify-artifact site.tar \
--provenance-path site.intoto.jsonl \
--source-uri github.com/JacobFrericks/jacobfrericks.com
Verified build using builder "https://github.com/slsa-framework/slsa-github-generator/.github/workflows/generator_generic_slsa3.yml@refs/tags/v2.1.0"
Verifying artifact site.tar: PASSED
PASSED: SLSA verification passedEach card is tagged with the chain link it protects. Filter by link.