Secure coding, the principle of designing code that adheres to code security best practices, safeguards and protects published code from known, unknown and unexpected vulnerabilities such as security exploits, the loss of cloud secrets, embedded credentials, shared keys,confidential business data and personally identifiable information (PII).
It reflects a wider understanding among developers, security teams and DevOps that code security must be enforced as an integral part of CI/CD, supporting continuous changes both in code and in infrastructure, providing visibility into all seen and hidden components of a given environment.
Secure coding requires willingness, education, tools, and above all cultural change.
Secure coding demonstrates a changing shift in responsibility by literally naming the developer as responsible for code security rather than a security team. This also paves the way for the Shift-left security concept that is already being widely adopted as part of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) best practices.
Secure coding introduces an abstraction layer that scans existing code and any new code as it is committed into a code repository. It helps enforce best practices that, in turn, enforce production-ready code standards as well as prevent human error and developers “cutting corners” to meet strict deadlines.
Creating software, applications or writing infrastructure as code requires cloud secrets to access and control cloud resources, and sensitive parameters saved to enable automation. There are countless scenarios that could introduce vulnerabilities into your code, and below we explore the most critical and frequent issues encountered:
All programming languages require programmatic keys to access and manage cloud resources. Secret keys control access to IAM roles that grant permissions to be executed against cloud resources. Secrets should always be encrypted, but a common mistake made is embedding access keys and secrets into local parameter stores or var files. It’s easy for a developer to inadvertently commit these secrets to a code repository, especially if troubleshooting the code. If your chosen repo is public, any published secrets can be used by anyone in the world.
Each application has an embedded configuration dataset that details the security parameters the application uses against associated apps. This might include database login credentials, database parameters, middleware configuration variables, or access details for front/back end web application services. The parameters and secrets should be encrypted and never written in plain text, but some applications only use file system permissions to protect unauthorized users from reading the configuration. If features like .gitignore is not used in the code committal, the file will be saved in plaintext.
Protecting and securing code to industry standards is extremely challenging to achieve. Here are the top secure code best practices to defend your workload against compromise.
There are countless techniques that can be introduced to protect code and business data. The fundamentals of secure coding must cover mobile devices, servers, and embedded applications.
Here are some of the top secure coding techniques:
CloudGuard Spectral by Check Point is a professional automation tool that validates and enforces secure coding best practices. It prevents developers and DevOps from making costly mistakes by using automated routines to discover, identify and predict the vulnerabilities inyour code, providing powerful shift-left provenance from code to cloud.
Supercharge your IaC and CI/CD with end to end secret and misconfiguration scanning across your SDLC. Eliminate public blindspots by enforcing security policies uniquely matched to your business. Schedule a demo of CloudGuard Spectral to uncover security concerns you most likely not aware of, and learn how to promote a developer first security narrative throughout the business.