A compromised pipeline is every environment it deploys to

Speaker notes

• Reframe the whole course's trust model: every prior chapter treated the pipeline as the trusted mechanism delivering code — this chapter asks what stops the pipeline ITSELF from being the attack. Compromise the pipeline once, and every environment it deploys to is compromised too, often with a legitimate-looking authorized-deployment audit trail.
• Name three concrete attack paths targeting different stages: a compromised dependency injecting malicious code during build, a stolen deploy credential bypassing the pipeline entirely, a tampered image swapping a digest after build but before deploy.
• State why this matters for defense design: each attack targets a DIFFERENT stage, which is exactly why the next three slides' defenses are layered rather than a single control — a defense covering only the build step does nothing against a stolen deploy credential.

Deck map