Securing CI/CD Pipelines Against Supply Chain Attacks: Why Artifacts and Dependencies Matter More Than Ever

In highly automated engineering environments, the modern CI/CD pipeline has become a critical trust boundary. Every commit, build, and deployment represents an implicit decision to trust. If that trust is compromised, the pipeline does not just fail; it faithfully delivers compromise at scale. While a significant amount of security effort still centers on production defenses, the most effective attacks are increasingly targeting upstream, where artifacts are created and dependencies are resolved.