Strengthen your CI/CD pipeline with new Secure Source Manager capabilities

A resilient software supply chain is the foundation of modern delivery, and securing your continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline is what keeps innovation moving safely.

Notable supply chain attacks more than doubled in the first half of 2026 compared to the second half of 2025, according to Wiz’s recent Cloud Threat Highlights report. 

It’s crucial that your source code not be the weakest link in your private cloud. To help you better address software supply chain threats, Google Cloud Secure Source Manager (SSM) lets you manage your source and CI/CD systems with unified authentication and authorization mechanisms. 

We now offer two new capabilities, both generally available, that can simplify and secure your development and CI/CD workflows:  

1. Unauthorized access to CI/CD systems: Attackers only need to alter a single deployment script to turn your CI/CD pipeline into a vehicle for malware. To help mitigate this risk, from the version control system to the build and artifact systems, to deployment tools, SSM can now block unauthorized access to your CI/CD systems even if your corporate network has been compromised.

2. Unauthorized changes to code by authorized users: The new Code Owners system manages pull request approver sets at a per-file and per-branch level to help provide more granular identity and access management (IAM). Code Owners helps engineers who need to write, edit, and review code. It adds additional guards to files and directories in your repository at a per-file or per-branch level.

Key capabilities

Beginning with source code changes to your CI/CD pipeline, the new code owners feature gives you granular merge guards: Check in CODEOWNERS files to your repository to specify required approvers highly granularly:

• Per-path approver sets: Using flexible glob-style path specifiers, you can require that changes to matching files be approved by one or more of given sets of users.

• Branch-specific governance: Manage security and deployment rules across branches without friction. You can define different owners for main or dev in the same file, eliminating the merge conflicts that occur with existing CODEOWNERS solutions. See our documentation for more details. 

• Nestable multi-file ownership: You aren’t limited to one giant, 5,000-line root file. You can nest CODEOWNERS files in sub-directories. SSM uses a “more local wins” logic, allowing sub-teams to own their folders while the root admin maintains veto power over the entire repo.

• Independent approval sections: Using the [SectionName][count] syntax (e.g., [Security Team][2]), a single pull request (PR) can require independent sign-offs from multiple departments. A PR might be reviewed by a peer, but it won’t merge until two members of the security team also approve.

With your source code ready, SSM’s new Developer Connect integration makes it easy to connect your CI/CD system and runtimes securely, even when they are in different private networks.

The private CI/CD blueprint architecture follows a secure path: Secure Source Manager connects to Private Service Connect, which connects to Cloud Build. The repository, the build pools, and the artifact storage all reside in a private network, with VPC Service Controls (VPC-SC) providing defense-in-depth to limit access to proxy endpoints.

Next steps

To secure your network, follow our new Private Network Integrations guide to connect SSM to Cloud Build with Developer Connect. 

To secure your pull request approvals, create a root CODEOWNERS file to replace blunt IAM “Approver” roles with file-specific ownership.