Will this tank our CI times?

Not if you stage it right. PR-time SAST/secrets should stay under 3 minutes. SBOM + Trivy adds ~60–120s per image with caching. DAST is nightly against staging. Net effect on median CI time is usually +2–4 minutes, which is acceptable if you’re blocking only on Critical/High early on.

Open source or commercial tools?

Start open source: Semgrep, gitleaks, Trivy/Grype, Syft, Checkov, Kyverno. If you need portfolio views, SSO, or developer assignment, layer Snyk/Prisma/FOSSA later. The gate logic lives in your pipeline and cluster, not the vendor UI.

How do we manage false positives?

Keep rulesets tight (`p/ci` in Semgrep, tuned policies in Checkov), suppress noisy checks in-repo, and enforce waiver expirations. Track false positive rate; if it’s over 10%, fix rules before adding new gates.

We’re a monorepo with polyglot services — does this still work?

Yes. Run language-specific SAST jobs by path filters, generate one SBOM per image, and report at the service label. Use a shared pipeline template (GitHub composite actions, GitLab includes, Jenkins shared library) so teams don’t hand-roll configs.

What about AI-generated code and “vibe coding”?

Treat it like any other risky input: SAST on PR, secrets scan, dependency pinning, and mandatory reviews on critical paths. We’ve had to clean up Copilot-spawned Dockerfiles that ran as root and referenced `latest`. The gates above catch that before it hits prod.

Guides · Nov 26, 2025 · 10 minute read

CI/CD Security Gates That Catch Real Bugs (Without Killing Your Velocity)

What we wire into pipelines at companies that can’t afford a breach — and how to deploy it in a week without wrecking dev flow.

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CI/CD Security Gates That Catch Real Bugs (Without Killing Your Velocity)

Key takeaways

Implementation checklist