Developing highly secure products is not only a technical challenge, but also a strategic one. You need to consider the risks, threats, and vulnerabilities that your product may face, and how to mitigate them with best practices, tools, and processes. In this article, you will learn some of the best strategies for developing highly secure products, from design to deployment.
Before you start coding, you need to define the security requirements for your product. What are the goals, objectives, and expectations for security? Who are the stakeholders, users, and adversaries? What are the legal, regulatory, and ethical implications? How will you measure and monitor security performance? By answering these questions, you can establish a clear and consistent security vision, scope, and criteria for your product.
This is the one thing I harp on obnoxiously. When developing an application software system you must define the system's business requirements, functional requirements and security requirements. This is the fundamental pre-cursor to system design and then threat modeling. Failing to define security requirements in the SDLC ultimately leads to failures within threat modelling exercises. At that point, the application software system and its components will be virtually impossible to secure.
Start by gaining a comprehensive understanding of the data involved in your product, as this will enable you to gauge the necessary level of security implementation. Once this is determined, create a set of expectations outlining the criteria for top-notch security mechanisms in your product.
Security should be embedded in every stage of the product development lifecycle, not just an afterthought. To achieve this, you need to incorporate secure design principles such as minimizing attack surface, implementing defense in depth, applying least privilege, encrypting and hashing data, and validating inputs and outputs. Reducing the number of entry points that can be exploited by attackers, layering multiple security controls and mechanisms to protect your product from different angles and scenarios, limiting access and permissions to the minimum necessary, using strong and standard algorithms to protect data in transit and at rest, and checking and sanitizing the data that your product receives and sends can all help to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of your data.
Secure design is the foundation of building secure products. It starts from the basics : 1. Hygiene - CIA Triad 2. Identity is the new boundary. Ensure right authentication and authorisation 3. Data Security across - At rest, In transit - Appropriate encryption must be used 4. Threat Modelling at the earliest possible stage. Apply risk mitigation techniques to minimise attack surface 5. Change Control procedure to be designed upfront and elevated privileges logs should be auditable any time In summary, applying these protections early in the product will ensure smooth, secure development, deployment, release and maintenance.
The quality of your code has a direct impact on the security of your product, so you should use secure coding practices. This includes adhering to the best practices and conventions of your programming language and framework, carefully choosing and updating third-party components, performing regular code reviews and testing, and leveraging the power of code analysis and scanning tools. These tools can scan and analyze your code for security flaws, such as static and dynamic analysis, vulnerability assessment, and penetration testing. Following these secure coding practices will help you avoid errors, bugs, and vulnerabilities.
DevSecOps is a philosophy and culture that integrates security into the development, operations, and delivery of your product. It endeavors to make security a shared responsibility and an ongoing process across the product lifecycle. To adopt a DevSecOps approach, you should communicate and collaborate with your stakeholders, users, and customers to understand their security needs and expectations and align them with your product vision and strategy. Additionally, you should use tools and scripts to automate security tasks such as code scanning, testing, auditing, and deployment in order to reduce human errors and optimize efficiency and consistency. Lastly, you should collect and analyze security data from your product environment such as logs, metrics, and alerts to identify and respond to security incidents, anomalies, and trends.
Security first approach is the foundation of DevSecOps. Any code scanning that we enable must be closer to the developers and provide feedback in such a way that the vulnerabilities are fixed upfront. Software Supply chain security must be built across the cycle especially for the open source libraries planned to be used is critical to success.
“Shift-left” and build security as early in the development lifecycle as possible. 1. Create a Security epic in the backlog and refine down to stories for different security requirements. These can be compliance or technical requirements. 2. Product owners and managers should define a certain percentage of security tickets they’ll put in every sprint or release train. 3. Have source code or other scanners integrated in the CI/CD pipeline. 4. Make sure developers receive security awareness training. Especially on the OWASP Top 10. Gamify the trainings so it is something people actually want to do.
Security is not only a technical matter, but also a human one. Your team is your first line of defense and your biggest asset when it comes to developing highly secure products. Educating and training your team on security topics, such as security awareness, skills, and culture, is essential. Security awareness should raise the understanding of the importance, benefits, and challenges of security, as well as the roles and responsibilities of each team member. Security skills should provide the knowledge to implement best practices, tools, and processes, while security culture should foster a culture where security is valued and integrated into daily work and decision making. Developing highly secure products can be challenging but rewarding. By following these strategies, you can create products that are not only functional and user-friendly but also secure and trustworthy.
Gamifying training will make it more fun and therefore people are more likely to finish or push themselves to do more. Products like Dune Security do this.
In addition 3rd party Validation and Verification with Continuous development and testing inbuilt framework is vital. The VAPT conducted in the end already have suggested libraries and best practices one can include in the testing framework. OWASP refers to the Top 10 as an 'awareness document' and they recommend that all companies incorporate the report into their processes in order to minimize and/or mitigate security risks. We need to be pro-active in our approach