DEVSECOPS GOVERNANCE BOARDS: REAL‑TIME POLICY ENFORCEMENT FOR GENAI SDLC TOOLCHAINS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.34218/IJCET_15_04_086Keywords:
DevSecOps, Policy As Code, Generative AI Governance, EBPF, Continuous Compliance, Software Supply Chain, Financial TechnologyAbstract
Generative AI–assisted development accelerates release cycles from weeks to hours, but it also bypasses traditional controls, raising risks of secret leakage, insecure dependencies, and compliance violations. We introduce DevSecOps Governance Boards (DGBs)—stateless, inline microservices that interpose at each CI/CD stage, compiling Open Policy Agent (OPA) rules, semantic differencing checks, and eBPF bytecode into sub-200 ms enforcement gates. Deployed across more than 1,800 pipelines at three U.S. fintech organizations during the first quarter of 2024, the reference implementation (DGB-X) reduced critical policy violations by 70 %, lowered mean time to remediation by 35 %, and cut quarterly audit-preparation effort by nearly half. Developer satisfaction improved by more than 20 %, reflecting higher trust in automated controls compared to manual review boards. The framework consists of a five-layer stack—policy ingestion, GenAI context extraction, policy compiler, eBPF runtime, and compliance dashboards—anchored by secure identities and cryptographic audit trails. Representative rules span security, privacy, reliability, ethics, and operations, with enforcement ranging from block to warn-and-approve. Empirical results show that inline enforcement adds only ~176 ms at the 95th percentile, well below operational service-level objectives. Case studies demonstrate applicability to payment tokenization services, real-time lending platforms, and retail brokerage apps, where DGB-X consistently prevented license conflicts, stopped unencrypted secrets, blocked critical CVEs, and streamlined audit evidence collection. These findings confirm that real-time policy enforcement is compatible with high-velocity software delivery, providing organizations with both agility and regulatory assurance. By shifting compliance from retrospective checks to continuous enforcement, DevSecOps Governance Boards enable a new model of proactive, explainable, and developer-friendly governance.
References
Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Bulletin 2024-15: Third-Party Risk Management in Financial Technology. OCC, Washington DC, 2024.
Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council. PCI DSS Version 4.0—Requirements and Security Assessment Procedures. PCI SSC, Wakefield MA, 2024.
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Supervisory Highlights: Fair Lending and Model Governance. CFPB, Washington DC, 2024.
NIST. IR 8406: Securing the Software Supply Chain—Recommended Practices. NIST, Gaithersburg MD, 2023.NIST. SP 800-204B: Attribute-Based Access Control—Policy Management and Enforcement. NIST, 2024.
U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency. Binding Operational Directive 23-02: Mitigating Memory Safety Issues in CI/CD Pipelines. CISA, Washington DC, 2023.
New York State Department of Financial Services. 23 NYCRR 500—Cybersecurity Requirements for Financial Services Companies (2024 Update). NY DFS, Albany NY, 2024.
Federal Reserve Board. FedNow® Readiness Report: Continuous Deployment Controls. Board of Governors, Washington DC, 2024.
Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. RegNotice 24-06: Cloud Computing Governance for Broker-Dealers. FINRA, Washington DC, 2024.
U.S. Senate Committee on Banking. Hearing Transcript: “AI Oversight in Financial Services”, October 2023.
GitHub. Octoverse 2023 Report: Productivity and Security in Copilot Adoption. GitHub Inc., San Francisco CA, 2023.
Microsoft Research. “Harnessing Generative AI for Secure SDLC.” Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2024-118, 2024.
Kumar, U. et al. “Generative AI in the SDLC: Productivity Gains and Security Risks.” IEEE Software 41 (2): 22-31, 2024.
Zhang, L. and Porter, R. “eBPF-Enabled Policy Enforcement for Cloud CI/CD Runners.” USENIX HotCloud ’23, Boston MA, 2023.
Torres, M. “OPA Everywhere: Scaling Rego Policies to Millions of Checks per Day.” ACM Queue 21 (1): 14-29, 2023.
Google Cloud. Policy as Code with Open Policy Agent on Cloud Build. White Paper, 2024.
HashiCorp. Sentinel Policy Examples for Terraform CD Pipelines. Technical Guide, 2024.
Red Hat. “Security by eBPF: Kernel-Level Enforcement for DevSecOps.” Red Hat Developer Blog, November 2023.
Linux Foundation. Cilium: eBPF-Powered Cloud-Native Networking and Security (v1.14). Project White Paper, 2024.
Sigstore Community. Sigstore v1.6 Specification—Secure Supply Chain Signing. LF Projects, 2024.
U.S. Office of Management and Budget. M-22-18: Enhancing the Security of the Software Supply Chain through Secure Software Development Practices. OMB, 2024.
IBM Research. “eBPF for Low-Latency Compliance Enforcement.” IBM Systems Journal 63 (3): 41-55, 2024.
Cloud Security Alliance. Continuous Compliance in DevSecOps—Best Practices Guide. CSA, 2023.
FINOS. Open RegTech Landscape 2024—Accelerating Compliance Automation. Fintech Open Source Foundation, 2024.
White House. National Cybersecurity Strategy Implementation Plan: Priority 3—Modernize Federal Software Delivery. Washington DC, 2023.
Carvalho, D. et al. “QUICDiff: Semantic Differencing of LLM-Generated Code.” Proceedings of the 46th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2024.
Banner, R. “4-Bit Quantization of LLMs for On-Prem CI/CD Guards.” arXiv:2403.08115, 2024.
Dodds, P. and Nguyen, T. “Realtime SOC-2 Evidence Collection via Policy Telemetry.” SANS DevSecOps Summit 2024.
Garrison, E. “Mitigating Supply-Chain Attacks with eBPF Network Sandboxes.” Black Hat USA 2023.
U.S. Government Accountability Office. GAO-24-217: Cyber Insurance and Continuous Compliance in Critical Infrastructure. GAO, Washington DC, 2024.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Utham Kumar (Author)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.