Top Application Security Best Practices
An effective application security program addresses the potential risks and threats that applications face throughout their lifecycles.
Some application security best practices include the following:
#1. Start with a Threat Assessment
Applications can be vulnerable to a wide variety of threats. Understanding the potential attacks that an application can be exposed to is essential to properly prioritize remediation actions.
A threat assessment is a great way to identify the most likely threats to an organization, their potential impacts, and what security solutions the organization already has in place. With this information, an organization can develop a strategy for addressing these potential risks and threats.
#2. 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.
#3. Manage Privileges
Privileged access management (PAM) is essential during the development process. An attacker with access to an organization’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 organization’s data and application security. 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.
#4. Monitor the Software Supply Chain
Most, if not all, applications rely on external libraries and components to implement certain functionality. Writing code from scratch takes longer and can result in less performant and secure code, so secure code reuse is a common development best practice. However, the software supply chain is increasingly a target of attack. Cyber threat actors may target vulnerabilities in widely-used libraries or inject vulnerabilities or malicious code into these libraries themselves.
Software supply chain management is essential to strong application security. Software composition analysis (SCA) solutions can help with managing supply chain risks by identifying the libraries and third-party code used within an application. Using this list, development teams can identify and fix any known vulnerabilities and apply updates to outdated components.
#5. Leverage Automation and AI
Development and security teams commonly have wide-reaching responsibilities and tight schedules. Often, security is undervalued during the development process due to the fact that it takes time and resources that may be needed to meet release deadlines.
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.
#6. Prioritize Remediation
The number of vulnerabilities in production applications is large and can be overwhelming. In most cases, organizations lack the resources to fix every vulnerability within their deployed software. As a result, companies are falling behind in vulnerability management if they are still trying to keep up at all.
Proper prioritization is essential to effective vulnerability management. Only a small fraction of vulnerabilities are exploitable. An even smaller number will be actively exploited by cyber threat actors. These vulnerabilities with active exploits can pose very different levels of risk to the organization.
During the security testing process, automated tools should be used to not only identify vulnerabilities but track their severity and exploitability. These automated metrics — backed up by automated analysis when needed — can be used to determine which vulnerabilities pose a real threat to the organization. Based on this, teams can develop remediation strategies that ensure that the time and resources spent on vulnerability management provide real value and a significant return on investment (ROI) to the organization.
#7. Track AppSec 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.
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