Four levels of maturity that bridge the AppSec / engineering divide

Jacob Kaplan-Moss, co-creator of Django, discusses the frequent disconnect between engineering and security teams in software development, emphasizing the importance of integrating security practices into continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. He outlines a maturity model for collaboration between these teams, starting with basic problem identification and moving towards proactive discovery and systemic fixes. By embedding security tests into the CI pipeline, teams can maintain delivery speed while ensuring product security, fostering a collaborative environment rather than one of conflict. Kaplan-Moss illustrates this with a case study on addressing issues related to logging sensitive tokens, advocating for tools like Semgrep to automate the detection of security vulnerabilities across codebases. This approach not only addresses specific vulnerabilities but also helps in developing systemic solutions to prevent future issues, enabling security teams to shift from a reactive to a proactive stance in securing software.