You expect builders to be careful when building a home. They should take all precautions to ensure no split beams, foundational mistakes, or holes in walls once you move in. Software developers are also expected to adhere to secure coding to avoid leaving vulnerabilities for hackers.
What Is Secure Coding?
They govern the techniques, decisions, and coding practices that developers use when building software. The standards are designed to make sure that developers create code that is as secure as possible. There are many ways to solve development tasks, and they can vary in complexity. Secure coding standards encourage software engineers and Web Application Developers to use the most secure solutions, even if they are slower.
Secure coding best practices, for example, often require a "default-deny" approach when it comes to access permissions. Secure coding techniques are used by developers to create code that prevents access to sensitive resources until the user can prove that they have permission to do so. Secure programming is also known as secure coding. It involves writing code using a high-level language and following strict principles with the aim of preventing any potential vulnerabilities.
Secure coding goes beyond writing, compiling and releasing applications. It would be best if you built a secure environment for programming that is built on a reliable IT infrastructure. Several coding standards, such as the OWASP Secure Coding Practices and the SEI CERT Coding Standards, are widely used today.
Why Is Secure Coding Important For Businesses?
Financial transactions are moving more and more online. Security incidents are often rooted in the underlying software of an application and can have severe consequences for both businesses and individuals. Insecure code can lead to financial and property damage, market manipulation, theft and even fatalities in industries such as finance, healthcare, transportation, and energy.
Recent media reports have shown how unsecure a lot of the software that we use can be. Even large organizations, with all their resources and expertise at hand, have suffered serious data breaches. Companies that sell software to enterprises or consumers are very dependent on the trust of their customers. Losing that trust can have a negative impact on their bottom line. These organizations must therefore make ensuring secure coding practices a priority.
Why Should You Use Secure Coding Standards?
During the last year, malicious individuals gained access to personal information due to compromised software that was at the core of their organization. This is not the first or last organization to discover holes in its secure coding practices.
A survey found that one out of four companies had confirmed or suspected an open-source component breach in a web app. This number is shocking when you consider that your organization could be the next to suffer a security breach if it doesn't implement coding best practices.
Eight Secure Coding Best Practices
OWASP offers a checklist of secure coding best practices that cover 14 different areas you should consider during your software development cycle. We'll focus on the eight best secure programming practices out of those secure coding techniques to protect you against vulnerabilities.
- Security by Design
- Password Management
- Access Control
- Logging and Error Handling
- System Configuration
- Threat Modeling
- Cryptographic Practices
- Input Validation & Output Encoding
Security By Design
As you write code, security should be your top priority. It shouldn't be an afterthought. Software engineering and coding may be competing priorities for organizations. Software security can be in conflict with development speed. A "security by default" approach, which puts security before all else, tends to pay off in the long term, as it reduces future costs of technical debt and mitigates risk. Throughout your Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), you should analyze your source code and implement security automation.
Password Management
Multi-factor authentication is so popular because passwords are weak points in many software systems. Passwords remain the most popular security credential. However, following secure coding techniques limits risk. All passwords should be sufficiently long and complex to resist any common or typical attacks. OWASP recommends several coding practices for passwords.
- Never store plain text passwords, but only cryptographic hashes.
- Enforcing the length and complexity of passwords.
- After multiple failed login attempts, disable the password entry.
We've also written about whether password expiration policies are considered a best security practice in modern business environments.
Access Control
Use a "default-deny" approach when dealing with sensitive data. Restrict access to data and privileges to users who are in need. Refuse access to anyone who cannot prove authorization. Verify that users are authorized to access sensitive information before granting them access.
Logging And Error Handling
Many software errors can be attributed to bugs. These bugs often lead to vulnerabilities. Two of the best techniques to minimize their impact are error handling and logging. Error handling tries to detect errors in code before they cause a catastrophic failure. The logging of errors allows developers to diagnose and mitigate the cause. To comply with the secure coding standard, a trusted system should implement documentation and logging for all failures and exceptions.
System Configuration
Make sure you update all software and keep it up to date. You should manage your production and development environments in a secure manner if you use multiple environments. Updated software can be a source of security vulnerabilities. Regular software updates are essential for coding security. They include patches to fix vulnerabilities. Patch management systems can help you keep up with updates.
Threat Modeling
Threat modeling consists of four steps: document, locate, address and validate. You must examine your software to identify areas that are vulnerable to attacks. The threat modeling process is multi-stage and should be incorporated into all phases of the software development life cycle, including testing, production, and development.
Cryptographic Practices
In the event of a security breach, you can increase the safety of your code by using modern cryptographic algorithms.
Input Validation
The secure coding standards themselves are self-explanatory. You need to identify and verify all data sources and inputs. Use a standard procedure for input and output validation.
Secure Coding Techniques
KISS is the best way to keep the process simple when it comes to security and programming. Complex procedures may lead to inconsistent results, or worse still, and they could be completely ignored. Avoid reinventing the wheel, and instead, stick with proven security and secure coding best practices. The OWASP Foundation provides many useful resources. Among them is the OWASP Top 10, which highlights the most common security threats and can be a good place to start.
Access Control: Includes authentication and authorization. It is one of the fundamental building blocks for protecting your system.
Another Important Part Of Keeping Your System Safe Is To Enforce Strong Encryption: Many libraries are available to assist you in implementing encryption. This means that custom code is not required. However, it's important to use only standard libraries and algorithms. When FIPS compliance is needed, you should only use validated libraries.
Secrets Management: This is an important security measure. You should never upload or hardcode secrets like passwords or access codes to code repositories, regardless of whether you use one or more tools that help you manage them.
It's important to secure your code as well.
What Are The Best Strategies For Securing Web Applications?
When we think about IT security, we usually refer to network security and operating system security. With the increasing use of web-based apps for, well, pretty much everything, "cybersecurity" is getting more attention. This term has been around since the early 1990s when the internet was first introduced.
Secure web applications are an important part of everyday business and life. Web applications allow businesses and individuals to simplify their work and achieve more with fewer resources.
- No longer do they need to store a lot of paperwork that is meticulously organized.
- It is no longer necessary to use physical mail for communication.
- The majority of marketing is now web-based.
- Even customer service now directs you to websites rather than 1-800 numbers.
Web applications allow you to reach a large number of clients and customers. Web applications can be used to interact with customers, communicate, provide product support and retain their business.
We use web applications to do so many things, and we pass so much sensitive data around through so many types of online channels. It is only right that we take a strong stance in protecting and securing this information.
No web technology has been proven invulnerable, without a doubt. Every day, new threats appear that demand at least some improvement or change in the implementation of countermeasures as well as general web-focused safety. Developers should follow these rules to improve the quality of web-based applications.
There Are Things That Developers Must Remember To Secure And Protect Information
#1. Web App Security: How To Maintain It During Development
Be sure to keep your web application secure during development.
#2. Be Paranoid: Require Injection & Input Validation (User Input Is Not Your Friend)
As a rule, all input should be considered hostile until proven otherwise. Input validation ensures that only correctly-formed data is passed through the workflow of a web application. This will prevent bad or corrupted data from being processed and causing downstream components to malfunction.
Here are some examples of input validation:
- Validation of data type (ensures parameters are the correct type, such as text, numeric, etc.)
- Validation of data format (validates that the data conforms to schemas like JSON or XML.)
- Validation of data values (ensuring that parameters are within acceptable ranges and lengths.)
Input validation and injection prevention are much more than that. However, you should always remember to use both a syntactical and semantic approach to validating inputs. While semantic validation ensures that the values of these variables are accurate within a given business context, syntax verification should enforce the correct information syntax (SSNs, dates of birth, currencies, or full integers).
Read More: Designing And Developing Web Applications
#3. Encrypt Your Data
Encryption, or the process of encoding data to prevent unauthorized access to it, is the most basic form of encryption. The encryption process does not stop interference during the transmission of data, but it obscures the content for those not authorized to view it.
Encryption is not only used to protect sensitive data in transit but also for information stored on databases and other storage devices. Web development services and APIs should have a plan in place for authentication of the entities that access them. The data between these services should also be encrypted. Hackers love an open, unprotected web service (and there are increasingly sophisticated algorithms that can locate these services).
#4. Use Exception Management
Proper exception management is another security measure that focuses on development. In the event of a failure, you would not want to display more than a generic message. The actual system messages are not helpful to the end user, but they can be valuable clues for potential threats.
Consider that from a security perspective, and there are only three general outcomes:
- Allow the operation.
- Reject the operation.
- Handle an exception.
In the event of an error or exception, you'll usually reject the operation. A secure application will stop operations from being accidentally allowed. If an ATM fails, you'd prefer that it displays a friendly, simple message to the user rather than spilling money on the ground.
#5. Apply Authentication & Role Management
When building a web app, you should implement effective account management techniques such as password enforcers and secure password recovery mechanisms. Multi-factor authentication is also a good idea. You can force users to re-authenticate when they access more sensitive features.
In designing a web-based application, it is important to ensure that each user has the least privileges possible to be able to use the system to its fullest. By using this principle, you can greatly reduce the chances of an intruder crashing the application (or even the platform) or causing other applications to be negatively affected.
Other authentication and access controls include password expiration and account lockouts, where applicable. SSL is also used to protect passwords and account information from being transmitted in plain sight.
#6. Don't Forget Hosting/Service-Focused Measures
To keep your web application safe, it is important to have a configuration management system at the service level that follows the same security principles as those used in development.
#7. Avoid Security Misconfigurations
There are endless possibilities to mess things up with the web server management software of today.
- Files/directories not protected from being served.
- Web Servers do not remove temporary or default accounts.
- Open ports on your web server without need.
- Use of old/defunct libraries.
- Use of outdated security protocols.
- Digital certificates expiration.
Document the process of setting up a new website, as well as the web server and software that will be used to serve the site.
The modularity of web server functions allows more control over security and resources. This can, however, make your applications less safe if you're not careful. When managing high-risk features and security options, be extremely careful.
#8. Implement HTTPS And Redirect All HTTP Traffic To HTTPS
We discussed encryption before with a development-focused approach. It is important to take preventative measures (sometimes necessary), such as encryption at the service level, in order to protect information. HTTPS is usually used (SSL, Secure Sockets Layer) to do this.
SSL is used to create an encrypted connection between a server and a browser. It ensures the privacy of the data passed between a browser and a web server. SSL, the industry standard in protecting online transactions, is used by millions of websites. It is also recommended that you use SSL for all your resources, not just stylesheets and JavaScript because they can cause problems if the files aren't referenced using HTTPS.
#9. Include Auditing & Logging
Auditing and logging are also important at the server level. Many of these features are built-in to content-serving applications like IIS (Internet Information Services), and they're easily accessible if you want to check out various activity-related information.
Logs are often the only evidence that an activity is suspicious. They also allow users to be held accountable by tracking their actions. It is not necessary to do many configurations for Activity Logging. This feature is usually built into the web server. Use it to track user actions and review application errors that are not caught in code. Logs are only required in very rare circumstances. In these situations, the handling of log data is crucial.
#10. Quality Assurance And Testing
It is a good idea to use a third-party service that specializes in penetration testing or scanning for vulnerabilities to complement your own testing. These specialized web application development services can be very affordable. When possible, it is best to be extra cautious and not rely solely on your internal quality assurance process in order to find every single flaw in the web applications you use. It is always a good idea to add another layer of testing in order to find a few gaps that may not have been caught by other testing methods.
A well-defined, easily reproducible process is essential to ensuring that security upgrades and testing are carried out smoothly. It would be best if you also had an inventory of all the web applications you use and their locations. It is frustrating to try to fix security issues with a code library and then not know which web applications use it.
You should ensure that your web applications are free from any vulnerability or breach that would violate PCI or HIPAA standards. You should ensure that you are diligent with your design and approach in order to be sure of this. Consult a company that is experienced in adhering to these guidelines whenever possible. This will ensure that you are able to thwart any attacks and also follow all the rules set forth by governing bodies.
#11. Stay Proactive And On Top Of The Bad Guys
Cybersecurity is a race to the top to me, so we use military terms and analogies when we speak to others about it. The threats are always evolving, and new tactics and attacks are being developed. Online businesses must be vigilant to combat these threats in order to stay ahead of the "bad guys" out there.
Proactivity is the key to a successful cybersecurity strategy. A well-defined security plan should be in place for all of your sensitive web applications. Prioritize your high-risk web applications. If you keep an inventory of the web applications your company uses or offers to its users, it can make it easier to identify them.
What To Do If Your Code Is Not Secure?
Patching your systems regularly will take these guidelines for secure coding to the next step. Patch and vulnerability management focuses on identifying risks and enabling systems to stay current. By using these methods and by performing security testing, your code will be thoroughly checked for errors.
Conclusion
The security and integrity of source code are important, as software has become a part of our everyday lives. The secure coding techniques that are discussed are not all new. They are familiar concepts to experienced developers. But by keeping things simple and adhering to industry-accepted standards and procedures for secure coding, you can reduce the overall number of attack points and deliver more secure software.
Your approach to security threats and your plan for dealing with them should evolve as well. As we increasingly rely on web applications to meet our business needs, the threat of sophisticated adversaries is increasing.
While you can't expect to stop all attacks, it is important to build your own intelligence as a way to increase the force of your defense. Make sure your leadership is fully involved and that you have enough resources to develop an active defense in order to detect and respond to emerging security threats and hazards. Your strategy for navigating the web security landscape must change constantly.
