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Secure Software Development Practices

Secure software development is essential for protecting digital infrastructure and ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data.

Which of the following is NOT a secure coding practice?

While open-sourcing software is a good method for providing consumers with trust and transparency, it is not necessarily a secure coding practice to follow. Open-sourcing software exposes it to the public web, and a threat actor could use this to research vulnerabilities with the intent of exploiting them.

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Understanding Secure Development Practices

Over the following pages, we'll deep-dive into several secure development practices, including: threat-modeling, coding practices, compliance, and the benefits of collaboration and software testing.

Threat Modeling

Threat modeling is a crucial aspect of secure software development as it helps teams understand and mitigate potential security risks before they are exploited.
Threat modeling involves the identification and analysis of security threats and vulnerabilities. It aims to address security issues early in the development lifecycle, enabling proactive measures to be implemented. Key activities include identifying threats, analyzing their capabilities and motivations, and determining the potential impact.
Threat modeling helps prioritize security risks based on their likelihood and potential impact. By assessing the risks associated with identified threats, developers can allocate resources effectively and focus on addressing the most critical vulnerabilities. This helps teams to make informed decisions about controls and mitigation strategies.
Threat modeling should be integrated into the software development lifecycle as a recurring practice. It is most effective when performed early in the design phase but should be revisited as the system evolves. Continuous threat modeling ensures that security considerations are incorporated throughout the development process.

Is the following statement True or False:
Threat modeling helps prioritize security risks based on their likelihood and potential impact.

Threat modeling helps prioritize security risks based on their likelihood and potential impact. By assessing the risks associated with identified threats, developers can allocate resources effectively and focus on addressing the most critical vulnerabilities. This helps teams to make informed decisions about controls and mitigation strategies.

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Coding Practices

Secure coding practices are essential to prevent the introduction of vulnerabilities and safeguard against malicious attacks.
The importance of validating and sanitizing all user input received by a system can't be emphasized enough. Proper sanitization helps prevent common security vulnerabilities like SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and command injection attacks. Any input from an external source should not be trusted and be sanitized and validated.
To mitigate against common security vulnerabilities, developers should stay up-to-date with secure coding standards that relate to the system they're building, A variety of providers offer guidance here, such as OWASP. These standards include guidance across a variety of topics that aim to address common development pitfalls and traps.
Implementing secure error-handling practices helps prevent information leakage and assists in identifying and diagnosing potential security incidents. Secure logging enhances the system's ability to detect and respond to security breaches, providing valuable insights during incident response and forensic investigations.

Is the following statement True or False:
If your intended users are trusted, it's not necessary to validate and sanitize input.

The importance of validating and sanitizing all user input received by a system can't be emphasized enough. Input from a user should always be considered untrusted, particularly as software and applications have a tendency to grow and evolve. A function that may never have been intended for untrusted users, may be exposed by an unknowing team member years after initial development.

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Compliance

Ensuring software is developed in a secure and compliant manner requires a combination of security-oriented people, processes, and technologies.
The people involved in the software development lifecycle (SDLC), including developers, testers, and other team members, need to be aware of their security and compliance obligations. This includes a security-first mindset where all team members ensure they're following approved processes and using approved technologies.
It's essential to ensure security related processes are embedded into the SDLC. These processes include threat modeling, security risk assessments, change management, auditing, monitoring and more. By ensuring processes such as these are followed, potential vulnerabilities or issues can be identified and mitigated efficiently.
Depending on the type of technologies or infrastructure in use, a variety of compliance-related best practices may need to be followed. For example, when using public cloud technologies provided by AWS, Azure, or GCP, it's necessary to implement cloud configuration management, identity security, and workload protection capabilities.

If deploying software in the cloud, what is a security capability to consider?

When deploying software in the public cloud, it's recommended to consider deploying cloud configuration management, identity security, and workload protection capabilities to provide baseline protections.

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Collaboration & Testing

Collaboration and testing in software development provide the combined benefits of enhanced security, improved quality assurance, and efficient problem-solving, resulting in a more robust and reliable software system.
When multiple individuals with diverse expertise collaborate, they can identify potential vulnerabilities, design flaws, and security loopholes more effectively. This collaborative effort helps in addressing security concerns from various perspectives, leading to a more robust and secure software system.
By involving multiple teams, it becomes easier to detect and rectify errors, bugs, and functional issues at different stages. Rigorous testing, including unit testing, integration testing, and penetration testing, helps validate the functionality and security of the software, resulting in a higher-quality end product.
By involving a diverse team of experts, different perspectives and experiences are brought to the table, fostering creativity and innovation. Collaborative problem-solving allows for the identification and resolution of complex issues that may be challenging to tackle individually.

Is the following statement True or False:
Collaboration is only necessary if you're developing complex software.

Collaboration is essential not only for identifying security issues but also for identifying design flaws whereby business requirements may not be met. By collaborating between teams, developers can gain a fresh perspective on whether the software being developed will meet end-user needs.

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Wrapping up

By ensuring secure software devleopment practices are used throughout the software development lifecycle, we can deliver higher quality software that's resilient against both common and obscure vulnerabilities.