Application Security Development Best Practices

Application security development best practices help ensure that your organization follows a systematic, consistent approach to delivering robust, cyber-resilient applications free from security vulnerabilities. Best practices are integrated into a secure SDLC process. A well-crafted, secure development process embeds proficiency, reduces errors, improves overall throughput and lowers risk.

The following steps are integral to many lists of application security development best practices.

Define security requirements: When defining application functional requirements, teams should also outline critical security controls needed and potential vulnerabilities to be avoided. With clear security requirements, teams can create test cases to validate that requirements are implemented correctly.

Perform threat modeling in the design stage: Threat modeling helps identify and prioritize potential threats, which leads to determining the appropriate security controls for reducing or stopping them. OWASP offers many valuable resources for performing threat modeling, including the Threat Modeling toolkit. The OWASP  Threat Modeling Cheat Sheet and OWASP Attack Surface Analysis Cheat Sheet provide practical suggestions and explanations of threat modeling concepts and terminology to streamline the process and maximize cyber resiliency.

Test application security: Implement rigorous, automated code reviews to ensure that identified vulnerabilities have been remediated and to uncover new or unknown vulnerabilities. Static application security testing (SAST) and dynamic application security testing (DAST) tools are essential to testing application code and security in a runtime environment.

Automate: Security automation ensures that tests are run with minimal impact to developers and release timelines. Automate processes wherever possible—for security testing, software updates and configuration management as well as routine and repetitive development tasks. Automated testing isn’t a substitute for application security. Application security best practices combine developer education, automated testing and a human review process.

Prioritize remediation: Automated testing not only identifies and tracks security vulnerabilities, it provides vital insight into the severity and exploitability of certain vulnerabilities. It’s impossible to fix everything—prioritize and remediate those that pose significant risk to application security.

Provide documentation and implement controls: Make sure that development teams have good documentation for security techniques, frameworks, tools and threats. Documentation increases security awareness for teams, provides guidance and helps ensure a consistent approach across development processes. The OWASP Top 10 Proactive Controls is a list of the most critical security risks to web applications. An accompanying series of Cheat Sheets provides guidance and best practices for implementing controls that help developers prevent these risks from compromising web applications.

Monitor the software supply chain: The software supply chain has become a primary attack vector for bad actors who modify or inject malicious code into widely used libraries. Use software composition analysis (SCA) solutions to identify libraries and third-party code used within an application and to monitor and patch quickly when needed. CMD+CTRL offers specific training on monitoring and patching third-party code to help organizations prevent attackers from sabotaging their applications.

Train across all SDLC roles and skill levels: All members of the SDLC should receive security training appropriate to their roles and skill levels—not just developers. Certainly coding should adhere to CERT and OWASP standards, but cyber attackers are experts at identifying and exploiting any vulnerability or failed process in the SDLC. CMD+CTRL helps organizations establish application security development processes that follow industry best practices and educate entire teams on integrating security across development lifecycles.

Develop a security culture and maturity process: When security becomes embedded in the culture and everyone is on board, application quality and cyber resiliency improve dramatically. Again, OWASP offers a Security Culture guide designed to help set maturity goals, develop collaboration and identify security champions. Including Security Champions creates a single point of contact for each team to improve security communication and coordination between security and development stakeholders. CMD+CTRL cyber ranges and tournaments can be a great way to identify security champions and help them grow through a belt program.