As organisations increasingly adopt Infrastructure as Code (IaC), ensuring secure deployment practices becomes paramount. Ansible is a well-known open-source and modular tool for automating IT management tasks. However, Ansible is subject to supply-chain attacks that can compromise all managed hosts. This article presents a semi-automated process that improves Ansible-based deployments to have fine-grained control on administrative privileges granted to Ansible tasks. We describe the integration of the RootAsRole framework to Ansible. Finally, we analyse the limit of the current implementation.

The Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol aims to provide confidentiality and integrity of data. It is based on X.509 Certificates. Our previous research showed that popular Web Browsers exhibit non-standardized behaviour with respect to the certificate validation process[1]. This article extends that work by examining their handling of OCSP Stapling. We also examine several popular HTTPS interception products, including proxies and anti-virus tools, regarding their certificate validation processes. We analyse and compare their behaviour to that described in the relative standards.