Developers are the foundation of an organization’s digital strategy, building the products and services that drive revenue and help their company to operate more efficiently. Unwittingly, they also sit on the frontlines of application security, even though most never intended to be security professionals. Most developers, after all, want to build applications and be innovators.
However, in today’s environment, the applications they build can be the weak point that enables a threat actor’s attack. By practicing secure coding, development teams can create practices that drive better security across the organization.
Secure coding practices include the knowledge, policies, and procedures that developers use to design, write, test and review software to prevent security vulnerabilities that malicious actors can use as attack vectors. As part of secure development practices, developers need to learn how to write code that is devoid of defects, bugs, and logic flaws that may pose a security risk.
The Secure Software Development Lifecycle (S-SDLC) relies on DevOps teams to incorporate software security directly into every stage of the application development lifecycle, making secure coding practices critical.
The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is a non-profit collaboration that works with the developer community to establish best practices around secure coding practices. In 2018, OWASP published its Top Ten Proactive Controls list. The first proactive control is to define security requirements. To provide the necessary guidance, OWASP then released its Application Security Verification Standard (ASVS) that established functional and non-functional security controls to use during the design, development, and testing phases.
Here is a synopsis of the critical things to consider when developing secure applications.
To prevent attackers from moving laterally, developers need to make sure that they build authentication controls into their applications beyond enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA). As part of this, they need to consider:
Beyond authentication, application developers need to make sure that users can limit access to the applications according to the principle of least privilege. Additionally, access within the applications should also consider how to enforce the principle of least privilege access. Some things to consider include:
As the trust boundary changes, developers need to build in trust enforcement at all access points, including APIs, serverless, or microservices. As part of building in this security, they need to make sure that:
Using encryption precisely secures sensitive data without being wasteful. In an attempt to balance these needs, developers should consider:
Logging and auditing are used to prove compliance with regulations, industry standards, and internal policies. Some best practices include:
Increased focus from regulatory agencies and legislatures mean that developers need to make sure that their applications have the right privacy controls built into them. To do this, they should incorporate:
As threat actors look to intercept data as it communicates between components, developers need to build in protections like:
Since malware and ransomware continue to be a primary attack vector, developers need to
To protect the information that the applications stores, processes, and transmits, developers need to make sure that they understand and map how data moves through the application and across systems. As part of this process, they need to:
To protect applications that allow users to upload files, developers need to make sure that they can do this securely to prevent malicious actors from uploading malware or engaging in an injection attack.
Some best practices include:
As part of security-by-design, application configurations should be strong enough that administrators and users have to work to weaken the default security posture. To build security-by-default, developers should consider:
Often, developers want to build security into their applications but lack the background knowledge to do it. For example, research published in February 2021 as part of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering found that for developers using Python and Java, only 40% know the OWASP standard.
To practice secure coding, developers need the right education. Despite not intending to become security practitioners, the move to cloud-based applications means that securing software requires building it directly into the products.
To build a successful secure codings training, organizations need to create a program that meets developers where they are. This means understanding their needs and giving them the resources to be successful.
All training should be rooted in Learning Science principles, or it will become nothing more than a box to check for compliance purposes. As part of locating the right format, organizations should look for a program that provides:
Instead of treating defensive security strategies as separate from offensive, use an educational approach that incorporates both for enhanced understanding of how attacks work and how to mitigate risk.
People learn better when the education builds on and connects to their personal experience. For secure code training, this means growing knowledge in a way that is relevant to the developers’ daily activities.
Some ways to help create a contextual learning experience include choosing the right:
Many people have negative associations with education because it often focuses on taking away points for errors rather than providing positive reinforcement for successes. Secure coding education should be something that developers see as a positive, rather than as a form of punishment
When building out a training program, organizations should consider making it enjoyable to learn by providing positive reinforcement using mechanisms such as:
Ensuring that developers have the right education is the key to securing the software development lifecycle. Organizations need to enable their developers. Instead of hoping that they learn best practices on their own, organizations need to offer solutions that give developers the knowledge they need. More importantly, they need to build a secure coding training program that provides the educational experience that truly helps developers learn the necessary skills.
HackEdu’s secure coding training platform is built on a foundation of Learning Science principles so that developers can internalize knowledge and build on what they already know. As application security becomes mission-critical, developers need the education and the supporting tools that help them practice on real-world vulnerabilities in the languages they use. Without that, applications will continue to be a security weakness and a risk factor, instead of the business enabler they should be.