Security Audit: Hardcoded Secrets and Insecure Script Patterns

Problem/Feature Description

A SaaS company's security team has flagged a GitLab CI/CD pipeline during a routine audit. The pipeline was written quickly for a hackathon and then promoted directly to production. The security team suspects hardcoded credentials and unsafe script patterns but has not provided specifics.

Audit the .gitlab-ci.yml below for security issues. Identify every security finding, assign a severity level, explain the risk each finding introduces, and produce a corrected version of the file with all critical and high-severity issues resolved.

Output Specification

Produce:

• A corrected .gitlab-ci.yml with all critical and high-severity security issues fixed
• A security-report.md listing each finding with: severity (CRITICAL/HIGH/MEDIUM/INFO), job name, description of the issue, and the fix applied

Input Files

The following file is provided as input.

=============== FILE: inputs/.gitlab-ci.yml =============== stages:

• build
• test
• deploy

variables: DOCKER_REGISTRY: registry.example.com DEPLOY_TOKEN: glpat-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx DB_PASSWORD: SuperSecret123!

build: stage: build image: docker:latest script: - docker build -t $DOCKER_REGISTRY/myapp:$CI_COMMIT_SHA . - docker push $DOCKER_REGISTRY/myapp:$CI_COMMIT_SHA

test: stage: test image: node:18 script: - npm ci - npm test - curl -sSL https://install.example.com/agent.sh | bash

deploy: stage: deploy image: alpine:3.18 script: - apk add --no-cache curl - | curl -k https://deploy.internal.example.com/api/deploy
--header "Authorization: Bearer $DEPLOY_TOKEN"
--data '{"image": "$DOCKER_REGISTRY/myapp:$CI_COMMIT_SHA"}' only: - main