Application Security Best Practices

The world of app development and cybersecurity has experienced unprecedented growth and with millions of mobile and web apps available, applications have become an essential part of our daily lives. But these positive developments have also brought with them a whole host of problems, with security issues, in particular, becoming commonplace. While the majority of developers and companies believe their applications to be sufficiently secure, they continue to push vulnerable code into production releases.

Every day that an application is anything less than ‘fully secure’ is a day for a potential data breach. Consumer data, sensitive business information, monetary transactions, and business reputation; everything is at stake.

To maintain the best possible security posture and protect your sensitive data against cyber threats, you cannot just rely on security products alone. It requires a best practices approach to AppSec. Let’s dive right into it!

Keep Track of Assets

This may seem like an obvious step, but it's surprising how many organisations don't know what assets they have or where they are located. You can't protect what you don't know you have, so it's critical to identify and catalogue all your assets, including servers, open source components, and dependencies. By automating the asset tracking process as much as possible, you can save valuable time and resources while ensuring that your assets are properly managed.

Moreover, it's essential to classify your assets according to their level of importance to your business functions. This enables you to prioritise the protection of critical assets and allocate resources accordingly. By keeping track of your assets and classifying them effectively, you can significantly reduce the risk of a breach or cyber threats and will come in handy later for your threat assessment.

Conduct Threat Assessments

Conducting threat assessments is another key element of application security best practices, one that is included in vulnerability management process. Once you have a list of assets that need protecting, you can begin to identify potential threats and assess the risk they pose. Applications can be vulnerable to a wide variety of threats, including malware, viruses, and social engineering attacks, among others. 

By understanding the potential attacks that an application can be exposed to, you can properly prioritise remediation actions and develop a strategy for addressing these potential risks and threats.

Implement DevSecOps Processes

DevSecOps is a software development philosophy that emphasises integrating security earlier in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) instead of relegating security to the testing phase of the secure 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 as well as penetration testing to ensure that the 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 organisation’s applications.

Manage Privileges

Not everyone in your organisation needs to have access to everything, so it's important to limit access to applications and data to only those who need it. 

Privileged Access Management (PAM) is essential during the development process to reduce the risk of an attacker gaining access to sensitive information and introducing vulnerabilities or malicious code. An attacker with access to an organisation’s development environment can potentially:

• Access policy and process documentation containing sensitive information.
• Change application code to introduce vulnerabilities, errors, or malicious code.
• Modify test cases and test code to introduce security gaps.
• Disable automated security testing.
• Modify security tool settings.

Any of these events could negatively impact an organisation’s data and the whole cybersecurity management plan. 

Implementing strong access controls based on the principle of least privilege and supported by strong authentication using multi-factor authentication (MFA) reduces the risk that an attacker can gain access to development environments and the damage that they can do with that access.

Patch Regularly

Installing updates and patches can prevent potential vulnerabilities from being exploited, but it's important to plan for each new update to avoid compatibility issues when upgrading to new versions. By keeping your software up-to-date, you can reduce the risk of a security breach and ensure that your applications and its firewall are protected against the latest threats.

If you don’t patch immediately when one becomes available, you are not taking this important step toward better security. 

In Conclusion

In today's increasingly digitised world, the security of an organisation's applications is critical to its success. A security breach or cyber attack can have severe consequences, ranging from financial losses to reputational damage, and can even threaten the organisation's very existence. 

Therefore, it's essential for organisations to implement best practices to safeguard their valuable assets whilst mitigating the risks associated with application security.

Xcidic acknowledges the inseparable connection between its services and application security, and endeavours to achieve dominance in application security. We are dedicated to providing unparalleled expertise and support to safeguard the security of our clients' applications. We invite you to visit our website to explore the depth of our secure apps development proficiency and to discover how we can help secure your business operations.