SCRIPTED CI: Governing Your Build Pipeline as Critical Infrastructure

CI/CD pipelines are amazing. They build, test, package, sign, and ship our software in minutes. They automate what used to take days. They make modern development possible. They also sit at one of the most dangerous control points in your entire system. If you build regulated, safety-critical, or security-sensitive software, your CI pipeline is not “just automation.” It executes code, holds secrets, produces artifacts, and pushes to production. That makes it part of your product’s trust boundary. So the real question isn’t: Is our application secure? It’s this: Is our build system defensible? That’s where SCRIPTED CI comes in. Why CI Is a Supply Chain Control Point Most teams spend their security energy on: Application security testing API authentication Infrastructure hardening Runtime monitoring All important. But CI pipelines quietly: Execute third-party code (GitHub Actions, plugins, integrations) Access privileged credentials (cloud roles, signing keys, tokens) Produce signed rele