Secure Coding Practices for Developers

Secure Coding Best Practices

Secure coding is the foundation of an effective application security (AppSec) program. The following best practices enable a development team to avoid common vulnerabilities and promote a culture of strong AppSec:

• Security Training: Developers need to be aware of common vulnerabilities in order to avoid them. Providing regular training on widespread vulnerability classes and secure coding best practices helps to empower developers and create a culture of strong AppSec within the organization.
• Threat Modeling: Threat modeling is a structured exercise to identify potential vulnerabilities and security risks within an application. Performing threat modeling enables an organization to better address likely threats to an application.
• Input Validation and Sanitization: Input validation ensures that user-provided inputs meet expectations for length, content, and formatting. Input sanitization removes potentially dangerous content from user-provided input before processing it.
• Access Control: Applications should implement strong access control, including authentication and authorization. Authentication verifies the user’s identity, while authorization validates that an authenticated user has the privileges required to perform some action.
• Data Security: Data should be secured both at rest and in transit. This includes the use of data encryption with secure management of cryptographic keys.
• Secrets Management: Applications may have access to various secrets, including passwords, cryptographic keys, API keys, and more. These secrets should be securely stored and not hardcoded into application code where they are at risk of potential exposure.
• Least Privilege: The principle of least privilege states that users, applications, etc., should only have the minimum set of permissions needed to do their job, This principle should be designed into an application’s access control and privilege management system.
• Error Handling: An application should be designed to explicitly handle any possible errors that it encounters. Otherwise, unanticipated input or behavior could cause the application to crash.
• Code Reviews: Code reviews are an essential component of an AppSec program. Having someone other than the developer review the code increases the probability that overlooked issues will be detected and remediated.
• Regular, Automated Vulnerability Scanning: Automated scanners can identify software vulnerabilities, hardcoded secrets, and other security risks within an application’s code. These tools should be used throughout the software development process and after deployment to enable potential security risks to be quickly identified and remediated.
• Automate Security Scanning in CI/CD Pipelines: Automated scanning can be built into automated CI/CD pipelines to decrease friction and improve test coverage. Before a commit is accepted to the repo, it can be automatically subjected to static and dynamic code analysis to identify potential vulnerabilities.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): IaC automates the process of configuring software and systems. This streamlines the deployment process and reduces the risk that human error will introduce security vulnerabilities.
• Leverage AI/ML: The evolution of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) has dramatically expanded the capabilities of automated security scanning tools. Taking advantage of these new features enables vulnerabilities to be identified and remediated more quickly and easily.