Enhancing Secure Deployment with Ansible: A Focus on Least Privilege and Automation for Linux
Abstract
As organisations increasingly adopt Infrastructure as Code (IaC), ensuring secure deployment practices becomes paramount. Ansible is a well-known open-source and modular tool for automating IT management tasks. However, Ansible is subject to supply-chain attacks that can compromise all managed hosts. This article presents a semi-automated process that improves Ansible-based deployments to have fine-grained control on administrative privileges granted to Ansible tasks. We describe the integration of the RootAsRole framework to Ansible. Finally, we analyse the limit of the current implementation.