Presidents are issuing executive orders regarding cybersecurity; cyber attacks often target software that manages today's data. Because security threats exist everywhere, it is imperative to use best practices when developing software securely. Cyberattacks can cause massive disruption across governments, businesses, and individuals alike; hence software development projects must consider security precautions when designing solutions.
Here, we explain what secure software is, how it can be secured, and the best practices to abide by when creating such code. This article presents best practices and frameworks that can be utilized when it comes to creating secure software while outlining techniques for early vulnerability identification and resolution - saving both money and effort in terms of reduced development cost and efficiency. Furthermore, experts from multiple fields will present resources you can utilize when working on security software development projects.
What Is Software Development?
Software Development refers to the creation, design, documentation, testing, and ongoing maintenance of applications, frameworks, and components such as applications. Software development involves writing source code systematically on an extensive scale for maintenance or modification by third-party contributors as part of this process.
Software development activities could include research projects; prototype development; changes; engineering software; maintenance, or any number of activities associated with maintaining products or applications related to software products or applications. Programmers and software engineers primarily drive the software development process. Their roles overlap considerably between departments and can differ drastically according to department dynamics.
Software developers are closely associated with the areas in which code must be written but also act as leaders throughout the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), including working across functional groups, turning features into requirements, overseeing teams and development processes as well as conducting maintenance/testing procedures on software products.
Coders and Programmers use code written by Coders/Programmers to accomplish specific tasks, like merging databases, routing communication channels, or displaying text. Software Developers/Engineers instruct their Programmers using languages like Javascript, Java, and C++ to carry out these directives.
Software engineers employ their engineering knowledge to design software products and solve problems using tools and modeling languages, adhering to scientific principles while making sure their management solutions are practical.
Software development is one of the fastest-growing fields with high levels of demand and an active job market - both attributes making this field highly attractive to workers.
Software developer employment will rise at least 25% between 2021-2031 - an above-average growth rate among occupations; reports even state this figure could reach 30%! Due to high developer demand, there are various kinds of software development. Following are some of the more frequently developed types.
The Importance Of Software Development
Software development is essential to businesses as it allows them to stay ahead of the competition by visiting innovation, improving the customer experience, marketing feature-rich and efficient products more quickly, and making operations safer and more productive.
Software development is essential, given its broad scope in everyday key tasks and applications. Software is used for storage and continuous integration purposes in today's digital environment. At the same time, its development also safeguards against security vulnerabilities for your data. Software development offers us numerous benefits and upgrades; here are 5 reasons why your business requires software development.
1. Promoting Your Business
Software development will enable your business to achieve new heights. Your brand will become even more visible globally thanks to increased promotions.
2. Sales And Service Enhancement
A robust digital presence for your company can skyrocket sales. By expanding globally and listening to customer reviews of products/services offered, sales will soar. An online presence ensures customers can easily connect with you for further inquiries if need be.
3. Communication Direct
Only software development provides direct communications between you and the end customer - this is by far the fastest way to promote your brand!
4. Customer Engagement And Satisfaction Can Be Increased
Online marketing software can significantly boost customer engagement and loyalty; to retain clients while improving service provisioning. Businesses need a thorough marketing plan in place to do this successfully.
5. Marketing Your Business Can Be A challenge
Marketing your business can be challenging. One effective solution to ongoing advertising with minimal extra work and expense is software development - customers are easily reached from all around the globe!
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What Is Secure Software Development?
An efficient software development methodology integrates security at each stage, from planning through development, rather than having it introduced only after testing has discovered critical flaws. Security should become part of the planning stage process before any code has even been written and tested for critical vulnerabilities.
Developers can often perceive security as an impediment to creativity and innovation, which delays product launches. Unfortunately for companies' bottom lines, however, such thinking costs them six times more in implementation and testing issues versus fixing a problem during the design phase.
Customers won't appreciate new, excellent features if they can't access them due to vulnerabilities that hackers exploit. Security must always be prioritized during software development; otherwise, organizations that neglect this aspect risk becoming obsolete quickly.
How can you integrate security into your SDLC right from the outset? Start testing early and often - static and dynamic testing are an integral component of secure software development practices, in addition to functional requirements documentation, security requirements documentation, risk analysis during design processes, and environmental threat identification.
Organizations looking to develop secure software should prepare their employees, processes, and technologies in advance for this undertaking. A carefully considered fast software development strategy offers organizations that aspire to construct secure software an invaluable way of meeting this software development challenge successfully.
Who Can Benefit From Software Development?
Software development belongs to more than just programmers or developers alone - scientists, engineers, fabricators of devices, and testers, among many other professionals, can all code even without being considered software developers themselves.
Recent reports estimate that Information and Communication Technology spending could reach $5.8 trillion US by 2023. Software development has become an essential service to all industries and sizes of businesses alike, regardless of industry sector or size. Software development will benefit your organization somehow.
Software development companies specialize in crafting applications to suit clients' requirements across industries, including retail, manufacturing, healthcare, hospitality, education, finTech catering pharmaceuticals. As such, no sector is immune from taking advantage of software development!
What Is A Secure Software Development Policy?
Secure software development policies provide organizations with guidelines that outline best practices they should implement to limit software vulnerabilities and mitigate their risk management methods. They should provide instructions on how to view, assess and demonstrate security in every stage of SDLC as well as risk reduction management solutions.
An effective software development policy must establish clear customer expectations for employees. All members should be adequately educated about their tasks and undergo extensive training as part of an extensive screening process, to prevent one person from controlling and possessing all knowledge regarding any given project. Testing protocols should also be utilized as quality checks on employee work to evaluate its standardization.
An effective software development policy must also include processes designed to protect software. Divorcing development from test and production environments is one of the critical ways of increasing autonomy while eliminating bias and unauthorized code changes. Access control measures ensure employees only gain access to data relevant to their job functions. In contrast, version internal control can help track all code modifications as they take place and their sources.
As part of an effective policy for secure software development, it's crucial that developers first establish rules governing programming languages and code. Because different programming languages contain many vulnerabilities that must be managed effectively to reduce attacks, secure software development policies must include instructions for setting up secure repositories to collect and store code efficiently.
Use A Secure Software Development Framework To Maintain Consistency And Ensure Best Practices
Many organizations can benefit from aligning their processes to a framework like Secure Software Development Framework. Take a look at the four phases of secure software development recommended by the compliance framework:
- Prepare The Organization: Make sure that the people, processes, and technologies of an organization are ready to develop secure software at both the organizational level, as well as, sometimes, on a project-by-project basis.
- Protect The Software (PS): The software should be protected (PS). This means that all software components must be kept safe from unauthorized access and manipulation.
- Produce Well-Secured Software (PW): Release Software with Minimum Vulnerabilities (PW).
- Response To Vulnerabilities: Determine vulnerabilities in new software releases, and take appropriate action to fix these issues and prevent future exposures.
The following are the elements that define each practice:
- Practice: Briefly describe the course along with its unique identification and a brief explanation as to why the method is valid.
- Task: A task is an individual (or a series of actions) that are required to complete a particular practice.
- Implementation Example: An example of an implementation is a scenario that could be used as a demonstration.
- Referral: A document describing a secure development ongoing process and mappings of the practices to a specific task.
Preparing The Organization: Tasks And Examples
As part of your first step toward software development security in your company, the initial step should be defining its internal (e.g., Policies or Risk Management Strategies) and external requirements (e.g., Laws or Regulations). Teams then receive training tailored specifically for their roles to enhance SDLC speed while complying with organizational standards through security checks installed as an additional measure.
Tasks associated with security requirements implementation include identification, communication, and maintenance. Training sessions, management support systems, and tools must also be selected before finally creating benchmarks that demonstrate compliance programs with security policy standards. Examples include:
- Developers need to know coding and architecture specifics.
- At a minimum, annually and after incidents, review security standards.
- Assign SSDF-related roles accordingly, establish periodic reviews, and plan any required role changes as time progresses.
- We are automating toolchain management by creating categories and tools. Each item must then be specified.
- Develop an internal audit trail of actions related to secure development.
- Determine key performance indicators using automated means to collect feedback, review, document, and organize evidence management of security checks in support of standards.
Applicable Practices And Tasks To Protect Software
Before any software reaches its end user, it is imperative to secure its code and ensure its integrity. The process involves guarding code against unwarranted access while verifying software integrity - as well as guaranteeing its safe delivery after release.
Our primary objective is to employ the principle of least privilege when it comes to code storage to ensure only those authorized can gain access to it. Every customer receives a copy with all components listed and details on integrity checks. Examples include:
- Store code in a secure repository with restricted access.
- Version control allows you to track all changes in code.
- Code signing only with trusted certificate authorities and posting cryptographic hashes of the released software.
Read More: Brief Explanation of Software Development Life Cycle
How To Produce Secure Software: Tasks, Practices, And Examples?
This process involves numerous steps, actors, and techniques. Software must first be designed and tested against security standards before third parties are assessed to meet them. Developers then follow best security practices when writing code that boosts product security while configuring build processes to enhance it further. Finally, software default settings are configured so protection can be provided immediately from production using trusted components as necessary.
Tasks involved with these compliance efforts include developing a list of trusted components, employing threat models to evaluate cyber risk, reviewing external security requirements and communicating them to third parties, verifying compliance with standards, employing best industry practices for secure coding techniques (using top tools in the field for such purposes), as well as inspecting code from all angles - ultimately culminating in designing and performing vulnerability tests, documenting their results and fixing all identified issues.
Setting secure defaults may seem like an unnecessary task. Still, it should align with other security features on the platform before explaining their importance to administrators. Examples include:
- Train a team of developers in the best building practices, cyber risk assessment, and secure construction techniques.
- Reviewing current designs and reviewing vulnerability reports from previous releases to make sure all security risks are taken into consideration.
- Include security requirements when creating third-party contract policies and develop policies for managing third-party risk.
- Only develop in areas that require safe codes and avoid all other unsafe functions.
- Use only the latest, valid versions of compiler tools.
- Combining peer reviews, static/dynamic impactful analysis tests, and penetration testing to identify software vulnerabilities and documenting the results and lessons learned.
- Building a repository for trusted building materials in an organization.
- We are writing the proper use of administrators and verifying that security defaults are set to approved levels.
Top 10 Software Development Best Practices For Security Controls
Software security development in an ever-evolving threat environment is no simple task, yet its importance cannot be overstated. More software attacks than ever are making headlines, and we have put together our top ten list of software development practices that will assist in building more secure software and help prevent your company from becoming one of many cyberattack statistics. Below we outline these best practices for software development security:
1. Design Security From The Beginning
Plan how you will integrate security in every step of SDLC before writing code; automate testing and monitoring vulnerabilities right from the beginning; ensure security is part of the culture within both your code base and company.
2. Craft A Secure Software Development Policy
To ensure secure software development, here is an outline for creating an official policy in which to guide the team, technology, and processes used. This formal policy offers specific guidelines on incorporating security at each step in the SDLC; additionally, it defines roles and rules to reduce vulnerability risks during software development processes.
3. Implement A Secure Software Development Framework
The NIST SSDF framework offers your team a proven approach to following best software practices. New developers, in particular, will find helpful guidance from frameworks that provide answers to "What should we do next?".
4. Improve Software Security Through Best Practices
To increase software security, outline all of your security requirements and train developers on how to code securely according to these parameters using secure coding techniques. Also, be sure that third-party providers understand these needs, as they could become entry points for attackers to exploit them and attack your software system directly.
5. Code Integrity Protection
To avoid any tampering of code, store all copies securely with only authorized personnel having access. To preserve its integrity, limit contact between code users and monitor any modifications in close detail as well as oversee its signing process.
6. Test And Review Code As Early As Possible
Test and review code at an early stage to speed the development of SDLC projects, using both automated and developer testing techniques to inspect code for flaws early and proactively. Early vulnerability discovery saves both time and money while simultaneously alleviating developer frustrations.
7. Be Prepared To Mitigate Vulnerabilities Quickly
Anticipate vulnerabilities In software development, vulnerabilities are an unavoidable fact of life; their appearance depends on when. So be prepared with plans and procedures in place for dealing with incidents in real-time as soon as they arise - the sooner vulnerabilities are recognized and taken care of promptly, the shorter will be their window for exploitation.
8. Configure Secure Default Settings
Customers remain vulnerable because they do not understand how to use their software; customer service professionals provide added assurance during the initial stages of software adoption to protect consumers during these critical initial steps.
9. Utilize Checklists
Securing software development involves many important considerations to keep an eye on and monitor. Utilizing action checklists at regular meetings - like monthly or weekly ones - to assist your team in ensuring all policies and procedures remain relevant and up to date.
10. Be Agile And Proactive
Software developers take an agile and proactive approach when studying vulnerabilities--learning their root causes, identifying patterns that frequently occur, preventing repeat occurrences, and updating SDLC with improved knowledge.
Common Secure Software Issues In Today's Application Security
Today's software developers create apps and systems designed for mobile phones, embedded systems, electric vehicles, and banking custom software development services that may or may not prioritize security measures; unfortunately, it can be easy to overlook that many digital apps may lack adequate safeguards that protect from potential risks posed by misuse or misconfiguration of security functions.
If safety becomes a secondary consideration, this can pose a significant danger. Even businesses that prioritize security can be caught unawares by security threats; current challenges threatening application security include:
- Vulnerabilities In Third-Party Libraries And Frameworks: Third-party frameworks and libraries can have vulnerabilities. If they are not regularly updated, these libraries or frameworks may introduce security flaws into an application.
- Injection Attacks: An attacker will inject malicious code into the input fields of an application, like login forms and search boxes. This allows them to access its database or gain unauthorized access.
- Cross-Site Scripting: An attacker can inject malicious code into a web page or application. This code will then run on the browser of the victim, possibly stealing data or performing unauthorized actions.
- Insecure Authentication And Authorization: Insufficiently designed authentication and authorization mechanisms may allow hackers to gain access to sensitive information or functionality.
- Lack Of Logging Or Monitoring: It can be hard to identify and react to security incidents, as well as to determine the root causes.
- Security Of Mobile Applications: As mobile devices increase, it is more important than ever to ensure the safety of these applications. Mobile apps are vulnerable to many types of attacks. These include those that target the mobile device or its backend servers.
- Cloud Security: As cloud computing grows, it is essential to ensure the security of applications that use cloud technology. Cloud-based apps are vulnerable to many types of attacks. These include those that target the infrastructure in the cloud, the app itself, or the data stored there.
Why Is Security In Software Development Complex?
It's Not A Priority To Have Secure Software
Most developers need to give security in software development more importance. It's a well-known saying:
- Fast market entry is essential.
- Include all the features you plan.
- Keep a high regulatory standard of quality.
You can't have all three. While quality is an important topic, it is only sometimes a priority. Features and deadlines drive checklists. Secure software is not usually a standard or quality. It needs to be addressed.
The Quality Of A Product Does Not Ensure Security
Software quality and integrity are crucial in protecting against defects that lead to security flaws; however, quality assurance often doesn't consider hacking.
Too Many Moving Parts In Embedded Development
Embedded systems may be large and complex in their structure. Find both new code and legacy, along with connectivity components in embedded systems that run across various operating systems.
Software Development Teams Often Span Various Continents
Verifying that software functions appropriately is no easy feat; even more challenging is making sure it remains secure.
There Is Not Enough Training For Security
Many people who are involved with software development need to learn how to identify security issues. It's essential to consider the implications for the security of software requirements or their absence. They need to understand how software security affects the way it is developed:
- Modeled
- The Architected
- Design
- Testing
- Ready for deployment and distribution
So, developers may need to design more secure software. Security requirements may be lacking. Developers may not know how to turn a mistake into a vulnerability.
Nobody Owns Security
Software security is outside of the mind for most embedded teams. To protect their code from attack, many teams rely on different roles - from development and product management to quality assurance - but that approach only sometimes works effectively.
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Conclusion
People often need help to complete the tasks assigned to them, posing a significant threat to security and compliance professionals alike. Human errors often form the root of many security concerns and must be minimized through platforms that help define, document, and monitor whether tasks have been completed on time.
