Securing web applications across the software development life cycle




















Here are some of the primary advantages of a secure SDLC approach:. Generally speaking, a secure SDLC involves integrating security testing and other activities into an existing development process.

Examples include writing security requirements alongside functional requirements and performing an architecture risk analysis during the design phase of the SDLC. Beyond those basics, management must develop a strategic approach for a more significant impact.

Does your organization already follow a secure SDLC? Fantastic, well done! Home What We Do. Mobile Application. Web Application. More secure software as security is a continuous concern. Stakeholders are aware of the security risks in real-time.

Reduced cost, time, and effort to mitigate security risks as they are detected early in the SDLC. An overall reduction in business risks for the enterprise. How Does it Work? That being said, here are the specific phases of integrating security into your software development life cycle SDLC : Planning The first step in the SDLC process is the most critical since proper planning can help create an efficient project delivery by helping each team to be focused.

Requirements and Analysis The second phase of the software development life cycle SDLC process, requirements and analysis, is when the decisions on vital elements like requirements gathering, technology, frameworks, and languages are considered. To ensure that security considerations are also integrated into the overall project plan, enterprises can take the following steps: Access customer needs: Depending on the end product being designed, you need to create a list of security requirements that need to be included as part of the entire project.

One of the primary goals of this is to not only strengthen application security, but to also make it as easy as possible for the development team to code securely. Incorporate industry-standards on security: Once the initial planning is completed, developers need to include and abide by the industry-standard compliance practices and policies. Application security features that are standard to the industry need to be included as an essential requirement, while additional security features can be added during delivery.

There are good strong references for this, use those. Assign responsibility for software security: Before you start development, it is vital to have a team responsible for the application security. Assign the role to the security team responsible for doing quality checks and test each aspect of the solution. Develop security stories as part of the lifecycle and continually do threat modeling to feed these stories.

Choose the right architecture: When planning, developers need to think about which common risks might require attention during development, and prepare for them. Depending on the architecture and design of the application, security requirements need to be included accordingly. Again, the goal is to have the architecture make it easy for the developers to code securely and have secure code if they follow established patterns.

But what about the security of these applications? Back in , most attacks required physical access to a terminal on the machine running the application.

The world was also a lot less interconnected, reducing the risk of external actors impacting application security. As new software development methodologies were put into practice over the years, security was rarely put in the spotlight within the SDLC.

Instead, application security became the responsibility of IT security teams dedicated to application support. At first, applications were tested after their release only. This testing occurred in production environments, often on a yearly basis. As a result, most companies have since chosen to supplement production testing with pre-release security testing as well. This supplemental testing was placed on the critical path of the release, and applications needed to pass the security check prior to deploying the code to production.

This security testing step often takes several weeks to complete, lengthening the release cycle. Fixing the vulnerabilities found could require significant code changes that replace entire underlying components, all of which will then need to be reverified against both the application requirements as well as another security test.

This can—and often does—set application developers back by weeks as they continue to try to meet now-impossible release deadlines. As the speed of innovation and frequency of software releases has accelerated over time, it has only made all of these problems worse.

This has led to the reimagining of the role of application security in the software development process and creation of a secure SDLC. Implementing SDLC security affects every phase of the software development process. It requires a mindset that is focused on secure delivery, raising issues in the requirements and development phases as they are discovered.

This is far more efficient—and much cheaper—than waiting for these security issues to manifest in the deployed application. Secure software development life cycle processes incorporate security as a component of every phase of the SDLC. While building security into every phase of the SDLC is first and foremost a mindset that everyone needs to bring to the table, security considerations and associated tasks will actually vary significantly by SDLC phase.

Each phase of the SDLC must contribute to the security of the overall application. In this early phase, requirements for new features are collected from various stakeholders. This phase translates in-scope requirements into a plan of what this should look like in the actual application. There are usually established secure coding guidelines as well as code reviews that double-check that these guidelines have been followed correctly.

These code reviews can be either manual or automated using technologies such as static application security testing SAST. Instead, developers rely on existing functionality, usually provided by free open source components to deliver new features and therefore value to the organization as quickly as possible. This is also a great place to introduce automated security testing using a variety of technologies. The application is not deployed unless these tests pass.

These vulnerabilities may be in the code developers wrote, but are increasingly found in the underlying open-source components that comprise an application.

These vulnerabilities then need to be patched by the development team, a process that may in some cases require significant rewrites of application functionality. Addressing these types of production issues must be planned for and accommodated in future releases.



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