AutoGuard: A Self-Healing Proactive Security Layer for DevSecOps Pipelines Using Reinforcement Learning

Contemporary DevSecOps pipelines have to deal with the evolution of security in an ever-continuously integrated and deployed environment. Existing methods, such as rule-based intrusion detection and static vulnerability scanning, are inadequate and unreceptive to changes in the system, causing longer response times and organization needs exposure to emerging attack vectors. In light of the previous constraints, we introduce AutoGuard to the DevSecOps ecosystem, a reinforcement learning (RL)-powered self-healing security framework built to pre-emptively protect DevSecOps environments. AutoGuard is a self-securing security environment that continuously observes pipeline activities for potential anomalies while pre-emptively remediating the environment. The model observes and reacts based on a policy that is continually learned dynamically over time. The RL agent improves each action over time through reward-based learning aimed at improving the agent's ability to prevent, detect and respond to a security incident in real-time. Testing using simulated Continuous Integration <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$I$</tex> Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) environments showed AutoGuard to successfully improve threat detection accuracy by 22 %, reduce mean time to recovery (MTTR) for incidents by 38% and increase overall resilience to incidents as compared to traditional methods.