Integrating Threat Intelligence with DevSecOps: Automating Risk Mitigation before Code Hits Production

Abstract

The combination of Threat Intelligence (TI) and DevSecOps pipelines allows organizations to automate risk reduction measures in the code before production. This paper outlines the complete picture of ingesting, normalizing, and operationalizing TI feeds, including both commercial and open-source options, as well as those based on honeypots within CI/CD pipelines. It has defined standardized data formats (STIX, TAXII) and parsers for extracting indicators of compromise (IOCs), and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). Policy-as-code gates (Open Policy Agent, HashiCorp Sentinel) allow real-time blocking during a build to occur with configurable severity. A representative selection of microservices and open-source applications was evaluated experimentally, showing 45% fewer vulnerable builds and 30% smaller mean time to remediate (MTTR) with only a modest pipeline latency overhead of 5%. Case studies provide descriptions of Kafka-based ingestion topology, enhancement through VirusTotal and AlienVault OTX, and blended dashboards with Grafana and ELK. The areas covered in the discussion are the issues in false positives, feed-quality SLA, and performance optimization via parallel processing and caching. Future research directions will be predictive blocking using AI and deep learning, auto-tuning using closed-loop feedback, multi-cloud and service-mesh integrations, and joint risk scoring with SAST/DAST tools. The results validate that an automated TI integration turns security into a scalability enabler of secure, agile software delivery. It has granular auditing trails that would help comply with GDPR and PCI DSS.