Blockchain for Securing CI/CD Pipeline: A Review on Tools, Frameworks, and Challenges

Cloud security is an essential concern in cloud environments. Several sectors (e.g., business, healthcare, government, etc.) have witnessed recent cyber-attacks (e.g., HEalthEquity Data Breach, Capital One, Midnight Blizzard on Microsoft, etc.) on their computing systems. Our research focuses on security issues and conducts a literature review to address the integration of blockchain technology into Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD) in the cloud environment pipeline to enhance security. The key idea rests on separating entities such as code, data, design, change history, etc., as “blocks” in the blockchain technology through “separation of concern”. Such modularisation should help contain any threats locally in the block concerned without affecting other blocks. Our initial focus is conducting a comprehensive review of existing literature to analyse and synthesise tools and technologies for integrating blockchain into the CI/CD pipeline on cloud services. We also highlight the challenges associated with current solutions. Through this research, we aim to identify and address the existing research gaps in this critical area.