7 Best Application Security Practices

What is Application Security?

Application security?is the process of identifying and mitigating application-level vulnerabilities. This is followed by hardening procedures that aim to increase the overall security posture of the application.

Why AppSec is Important?

AppSec is important because it enables an organization to manage the risks posed by an organization’s applications throughout their lifecycles. AppSec incorporates development best practices and secure application configuration, deployment, and management to reduce the number of vulnerabilities that exist in an organization’s applications and prevent attackers from exploiting these vulnerabilities.

The Most Common Application Threats and Vulnerabilities

An organization’s applications can face a variety of threats throughout their lifecycles. Some examples of common application threats and vulnerabilities include:

• Supply Chain Risks:?Applications commonly import and use third-party libraries and code. Supply chain attacks, which exploit vulnerabilities in these libraries or insert malicious code into them, are a growing threat to application security.
• Account Takeover:?User and administrator accounts in an application commonly have access to sensitive data or privileged functionality. Poor account security — weak passwords, phishing attacks, etc. — allows attackers to access these accounts and misuse their privileges to access data or otherwise harm the organization.
• Injection Vulnerabilities:?Injection vulnerabilities occur when an application fails to properly validate and sanitize user input. This can lead to data loss,?remote code execution?(RCE), and other issues.
• Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks:?The availability of internal and external applications is vital to employee productivity and the customer experience. Denial of Service attacks that exploit vulnerabilities in an application or overwhelm it with traffic can make it unavailable to legitimate users.
• Sensitive Data Leaks:?Applications can leak sensitive corporate and user data via cryptographic errors, excessively verbose logs, and other issues. This data can be used to commit fraud against users or to facilitate later attacks.

7 Best Security Practices in 2023.

1. Track your assets?

You can’t protect what you don’t know you have.

Do you know which servers you use for specific functions or apps? Do you know which open source components are in your various web apps? Do you know what dependencies these components have?

Don’t think tracking your assets is that important? Just ask Equifax, how important it is to remember which software is running in which application.?In one of the most high-profile cases of its kind, the credit rating agency was hit with a?$700 million fine?for its failure to protect the data of over 145 million customers. Equifax suffered the security breach because it failed to patch the vulnerable Apache Struts open source component in one of its customer web portals. The company claimed it wasn’t aware that the vulnerable open source component was being used in the customer portal.

So, keeping track of your assets can prevent serious issues. The process should be automated as much as possible since it can feel like a Sisyphean task as organizations continue to scale their development.

In addition to tracking your assets, take the time to classify them, noting which ones are critical to your business functions and which are of lower importance. This comes in handy later for your threat assessment and remediation strategy.

2.Follow secure software development practices

There are two key aspects to?secure software development:

1. Practices that help you make fewer errors when writing application code
2. Practices that help you detect and eliminate errors earlier

In the first case, software developers must be educated about potential security problems. They must understand?SQL injections,?cross-site scripting (XSS),?cross-site resource forgery?(CSRF), and more vulnerabilities and misconfiguration such as the ones listed in the?OWASP Top 10. They must also know security standards, secure coding techniques, algorithms, mechanisms, and tools required to build secure web applications. For example, they must know?how to prevent SQL injections.

In the second case, what helps most is scanning for security vulnerabilities as early as possible in the development lifecycle. If you integrate security tools into your DevOps pipelines, as soon as the developer commits new or updated functionality, they are informed about any vulnerabilities in it. Because this is done immediately, it also makes such vulnerabilities much easier to fix because the developer still remembers the code that they were working on. It also guarantees that the developer can correct their own code, and not waste time trying to understand code written by someone else a long time ago.

3. Automate and integrate security tools and A.I's

In the past, security teams performed application security testing manually using dedicated security solutions. For example, a security researcher would first use a simple vulnerability scanner and then manually perform additional penetration testing using open-source tools. However, in the current security landscape, such an approach is not optimal. Just like in the whole IT industry, the most efficient IT security processes are based on automation and integration.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and?security automation?can help to reduce the resource requirements of security in the development process. AI can help with parsing alerts and log files to bring issues to the attention of developers and security personnel while minimizing false positives. Security automation ensures that tests are run while minimizing the overhead and impact that they have on developers and release timelines.

Many security tools are now developed with such automation and integration in mind. For example, business-grade?vulnerability scanners?are intended to be integrated with other systems such as?CI/CD platforms?and?issue trackers. There are several advantages to such an approach:

• The less manual work, the less room for error. If security processes are automated and integrated, nobody can, for example, forget about scanning a web application before it is published.
• If security is integrated into the software development lifecycle (SDLC), issues can be found and eliminated much earlier. This saves a lot of time and makes remediation much easier.
• If security tools work together with other solutions used in software development, such as issue trackers, security issues can be treated the same as any other issue. Engineers and managers don’t lose time learning and using separate tools for security purposes.

4. Manage your containers

Containers have grown in popularity over the past few years as more organizations embrace the technology for its flexibility, which makes it easier to build, test, and deploy across various environments throughout the?software development lifecycle?(SDLC).?A significant security advantage of containers is that they have a self-contained OS environment. This means that they are segmented by design, thus lowering the risk to other applications. However, containers still face risks from exploits such as a breakout attack in which they do not remain siloed. Also, the code that’s stored within the container may itself be vulnerable.?

To?secure your container?usage throughout the?CI/CD pipeline, you should run automated scans for proprietary and open source vulnerabilities from start to finish, including in your registries.

Another application security best practice for working with containers is to use signatures. Make sure you sign your own images with tools like Docker Content Trust if you are using Docker Hub, or Shared Access Signature if your team is on Microsoft’s Azure.?

5.Encrypt, encrypt, encrypt?

When it comes to web application security best practices, encryption of both data at rest and in transit is key. Basic encryption should include, among other things, using an SSL with a current certificate. It is unacceptable for sensitive user data such as IDs and passwords to be stored in plain text, which could lead to?man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. Ensure that you are using the strongest encryption algorithms.

6. Implement DevSecOps Best Practices

The DevSecOps or?Shift Security Left?movement is focused on integrating security earlier in the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Instead of relegating security to the Testing phase of the SDLC,?DevSecOps?includes:

• Defining Security Requirements:?During the requirements stage of the SDLC, the development team defines the various functions that an application must include. Along with functionality and performance requirements, this should also include security requirements that outline the security controls that should be in place and the potential vulnerabilities that should be mitigated in the code.
• Creating Test Cases:?Developers commonly create test cases that evaluate an application’s adherence to defined requirements. Once security requirements have been created, the team can create test cases to validate that they are properly implemented.
• Automating Testing:?Automating when possible is one of the core tenets of DevOps and DevSecOps. Automating security testing, including both security test cases and the use of application security tools such as?static application security testing?(SAST),?dynamic application security testing?(DAST), and interactive application security testing (IAST) helps to reduce friction and ensure that security is actually performed during the SDLC.
• Vulnerabilities are common in production code, and one of the main reasons for this is that security is undervalued during the development process. Implementing DevSecOps principles helps to address this and reduce risk to an organization’s applications.

7. Track Application Security Results

Like everything that a business does, application security costs time and resources. However, the benefits and ROI of application security can be difficult to see as an application security success story is closing a vulnerability that would otherwise have resulted in a damaging and expensive cybersecurity incident for the organization.

Since proving a negative is difficult, demonstrating the value of an application security program requires identifying and tracking metrics where the program is making a clear, measurable difference.

Some examples of this include:

• Number of vulnerabilities detected during development.
• Number of vulnerabilities detected in production applications.
• Number of security incidents due to exploited vulnerabilities.
• Number of violations of internal AppSec policies.
• Number of violations of corporate and regulatory compliance requirements.
• Ideally, an AppSec program will result in all of these metrics declining over time as secure development practices and AppSec policies become ingrained in development teams. However, even a shift from vulnerabilities being detected in development vs. production as part of a security incident is a success as it reduces the cost and damage that a vulnerability causes to an organization.

YOUR ORGANIZATION CAN BE THEIR NEXT TARGET.

While there are certainly a wide variety of views and opinions among security experts when it comes to application security best practices, most would agree there are a few key points, as covered herein, that should be included in any application security review checklist.

However, it is always worth being more protected than the rest and doing your utmost to minimize the number of errors in your applications in order to make you a more challenging target to exploit.

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