In the field of cybersecurity, the phrase and concept of security by design are no longer novel. It is a strategy that guarantees security is given top priority and integrated into technology from the outset in order to make it secure and free of flaws. With this strategy, it is ensured that the development of software includes security safeguards like continuous testing, authentication controls, and adherence to best coding practices that guarantee software products do not put end users' security at risk. Software flaws are coding oversights or mistakes that leave web applications vulnerable and are often utilized by bad actors in their attacks.
How do we, then, guarantee that software applications are created with security by default? We must first comprehend what the fundamentals of security by design are.
Security Architecture
Implementing security architectural design is crucial as it lays the groundwork for understanding an application's information security goals and ensuring that the appropriate measures are in place to accomplish them. When you're thinking about security architecture and requirements, you can consider the CIA triad - Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. When creating application functionalities, developers must have a hacker mentality. This method of thinking can aid in identifying potential attack vectors used by cybercriminals and other bad actors.
Developers may try to respond to these questions:
Are all processes surrounding this feature implemented safely?
Is this feature required to be on by default? If so, how can the risk to the feature be minimized?
If I were the bad actor, how would I go about exploiting this feature?
Security by Design Principles
These principles are meant to ensure that software that supports modern life is designed and built with security in mind. Undoubtedly, there needs to be a fundamental shift in how software is developed in order to achieve this result. The transition to secure-by-design and secure-by-default products will help businesses produce software at a lower cost as this will lead to best programming practices, less time fixing security flaws, more time to focus on innovation and growth, customer satisfaction, and a harder time for cybercriminals.
1. Establish the context of your software application It is important to draw out a good plan that highlights all the elements that compose your application. This will assist in identifying all shortcomings and elements that need more security attention. The following should be considered during the requirement gathering and design stage of the software:
Establish the features of the application and their related risks
Understand the software security requirements; this is the cornerstone of secure development. The requirements include requirements for the software's attributes and behaviors, as well as requirements for the security features (such as cryptographic and user authentication functions).
Establish a list of dependencies for the application, including tech stacks and third-party components
Determine trade-offs in terms of their business impact, rather than relying on technical language
Perform threat modeling of the application to identify further security requirements and relevant remediation controls
2. Make your software application difficult to compromise
The software should be built by following best practices for a secure software development lifecycle. These practices ensure all flaws that can lead to common vulnerabilities are addressed. Additionally, it also goes beyond and addresses flaws that are peculiar to the application's business logic and functionalities.
Minimise attack surface area - Perform Attack Surface Analysis: An application’s attack surface is the measure of its exposure and potential for an application’s entry and exit points to be exploited by a malicious actor. Reduce attack surface by removing all default configurations and features that are not required. Often, attack surface analysis is done as part of a threat modeling exercise during the design phase of the SDLC.
Establishing trust boundaries for the application, meaning, do not trust all inputs/data that come from external sources
Validate external data or files to ensure their structure meet your expectation. This control will protect against injection attacks.
Transformation methodology may be employed in cases where validation is difficult such as PDF file
Output encoding will also protect against some attacks such as XSS. There are several encoding schemes out there such as OWASP Java encoding scheme.
Apply the principle of least privilege and protect privileged access and account
Avoid relying on security by obscurity and prevent circumvention of security controls
Keep your code simple - A complex code or design is difficult to secure
Design for easy maintenance - It is important to address vulnerabilities as soon as possible, whether through software updates or other preventative measures. In order to reduce risk, frequent little updates are recommended over infrequent large ones.
And lastly, fix security issues correctly - In my experience, I have seen situations where identified security flaws were not properly investigated, and this consequently led to the flaw not being thoroughly remediated.
3. Make disruption to your software application difficult High availability of the application should be guaranteed by building software with resiliency in mind.
Determine any bottlenecks in the system - As an illustration, consider limited capacity, outdated technology, or a crucial microservice that uses a third-party service. Make sure you have a strategy in place to deal with these bottlenecks when there is a significant volume of traffic or an outage.
Design for scalability by Considering the potential for future demand for expansion.
Ensure you understand the availability characteristics of the third-party provisions and the impact on the operation of the software should they fail, especially at times of critical demand.
4. Make compromise easier to detect It is impossible to produce an application that is 100 percent secure. The trade-off between security and usability must be balanced. A new or unknown attack may target the application. Hence, the application must be designed in such a way that makes the detection of compromise of the application’s functionality or suspicious activity easier to spot.
Security event logs play an important role in attack detection.
Ensure that enough information is needed to perform identification and root cause analysis of a compromise is logged. However, remember to avoid logging sensitive information.
It is also critical to maintain the integrity of the log and ensure it cannot be modified.
5. Limit the impact of compromise Minimizing the severity of any compromise will make it difficult for an attacker to further exploit your application after an initial successful compromise.
Avoid creating features or deploying applications that allow unrestricted data queries.
Avoid caching unnecessary data - Don’t cache sensitive data but if it is absolutely necessary to cache data, ensure what is stored is protected appropriately.
Encrypt all data at rest and data in transit
Beware of creating a management bypass
Security by design focuses on being proactive rather than being reactive. It prevents a security breach rather than repairing the issue and restoring systems. Remember, what you don’t secure may come back to hurt you
Learn more
The OWASP Top 10 describes the ten top web application security risks
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