While the new year is almost here, so are the surprises. Well, for some people, the surprise may become a shock if it is a cyber threat or if their software is insecure.
Your business is more at risk if you use insecure software. Cool new features won’t protect you or your consumers if hackers may easily exploit your product. By creating safe software processes that facilitate rather than prohibit the delivery of high-quality, highly secure products to your market, your team has to integrate security.
Therefore, your dedicated software development team must secure your software development cycle when you have a chance.
What do you need here?
A secure software development life cycle.
Table of Contents
What is SDLC?
The process of conceptualizing, creating, and finally developing an application is known as the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). The Waterfall methodology, Agile methodology, and Iterative approach are a few SDLC frameworks.
Every framework has a unique structure and methodology, and firms often choose the one that is most advantageous to their sector.
However, the general stages of all SDLCs are the same:
- Planning and requirement gathering.
- The stage of design.
- The stage of test planning.
- Stage of coding.
- The stage of testing and results.
- The stage of completion, release, and maintenance.
Why Is Secure SDLC Important?
Since application security is crucial, a secure SDLC is essential. The days of making a product available to the public and then patching it to fix flaws are long gone. Now, developers must be aware of potential security issues at every stage of the development process. This necessitates finding new ways to include security in your SDLC.
You must ensure that you are writing your source code with potential vulnerabilities in mind because anyone could potentially access it. As a result, it’s essential to have a solid and secure SDLC process to guarantee that hackers and other malicious users won’t be able to attack your application.
Ways to Incorporate Security into the SDLC
Software engineers can use specific standards in the software development life cycle to guarantee a secure SDLC. The phases of the SDLC are listed below, with some of them highlighted.
Automation is a better method for integrating security into SDLC than manual processes are for security. Automation ensures that the integration of security into the SDLC is smooth. It aids in introducing security governance processes that might compel software developers to incorporate security as a part of their work. Limiting software vulnerability should be the aim of secure SDLC.
Let’s see the possible ways to integrate security into the SDLC.
Requirements Gathering Phase
How quickly can the software recover from a security attack? It is one of the crucial security queries that should be raised during the requirement-gathering phase. What security measures can defend the software against security assaults?
The developers will understand the software’s security requirements when you respond to these questions.
Design Phase
In-scope criteria are translated into a design for how they should appear in the real application during this step. Functional requirements define what should occur in this situation, whereas security requirements frequently concentrate on what shouldn’t.
Keep in mind that the page needs to display the user’s name, email, phone number, and address after retrieving them from the database’s CUSTOMER INFO table. Furthermore, before getting data from the database, we have to ensure the user has a working session token. The user should be sent to the login page if they are not present.
Development Phase
During this stage, program development designs should be accurately evaluated with the aid of internal and external software teams and software development tools. Several concerns should be discussed and documented at this point, including initial testing, user training, deployment, acceptability testing, and management approval.
Implementation Phase
Technology-specific security rules and security code reviews ought to be the main priorities during the implementation phase. Security code analysis tools, commonly known as Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tools, are devices that automate code security scanning. SAST tools automate security code review. Without actually executing code, inspects and analyses an application’s code to find security flaws.
Testing Phase
To properly incorporate security at this stage, developers should embrace specific security testing approaches. Useful security testing methods include the following:
- Penetration Testing: Testers search for vulnerabilities in networks, applications, and computer systems that an attacker could exploit using a range of manual and/or automated testing methods via DAST tools.
- Fuzz Testing: Fuzz testing allows for sending erroneous inputs to the software to identify potential flaws.
- Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST): IAST ensures that potential flaws are found during runtime by combining DAST and SAST testing methods.
Deployment Phase
The software’s security posture can be strengthened throughout the deployment phase. Security-wise, cloud deployment settings present extra difficulties. Database parameters, private certificates, and other sensitive application configuration settings must always be kept in secret management tools like key vaults that are accessible to applications while running.
Post-deployment and Maintenance
This is the point at which the software development process switches to maintenance mode. At this stage, keep an eye on the new program’s effectiveness frequently. Making a timetable for patching and system shutdowns for maintenance, hardware updates, and disaster recovery chores will help you make the necessary changes without significantly delaying production.
Bottom line – Security as a Developer
As a developer or tester of a dedicated software development team, you need to advance toward a secure SDLC and enhance your company’s security.
So, inform yourself and your coworkers about the most secure coding methods and security frameworks available. You can start by performing a risk analysis of the architecture.
When creating test cases and planning your project, keep security in mind. Finally, use code scanning tools for interactive application security assessment, static analysis, and dynamic analysis.