Securing Your CI/CD Pipeline: Exploring the Dangers of Self-Hosted Agents

Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines have become crucial to modern software development practices. CI/CD pipelines can significantly improve development efficiency and software quality by automating the process of building, testing, and deploying code. Most modern CI/CD platforms (like GitHub actions, Circle CI, etc.) offer an option to run the pipeline process over a self-hosted runner - an agent hosted by the user instead of the CI/CD platform, to execute jobs on their own infrastructure.

With self-hosted runners, you can create custom hardware configurations that meet your needs with processing power or memory to run larger jobs. Additionally, you can install software available on your local network and choose an operating system not offered by the platform. Self-hosted runners can be physical, virtual, in a container, on-premises, or in a cloud environment. The alternative is to use a build-as-a-service runner offered by SaaS CI/CD platform where the user has no control over the environment.

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