Mastering Application Security: Your SDLC Roadmap

Businesses are constantly striving to accelerate technological innovations to stay ahead of competitors across every industry. DevOps teams are under pressure to drive faster application release cycles to make those innovations possible.

Secure development lifecycle (SDL) testing of the application must be ensured during the design and development phase of the application to identify and address potential vulnerabilities in the application’s design, architecture, and development processes. Runtime is a critical phase in the software development lifecycle, and developers must ensure that their applications are robust, efficient, and secure during this phase. Additionally, continuous monitoring and maintenance may be required to address issues that may arise during the application’s runtime, such as software updates, security patches, and performance enhancements.

Proactive testing for risk in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) is crucial, but security testing can often be delayed by outdated processes like slow manual penetration testing lifecycles. This creates backlogs, increases security risk, and serves as a bottleneck in the SDLC, hindering innovation.

In this blog, we will address how organizations can address application security challenges proactively throughout each stage of the SDLC.

What are the 5 Stages of the SDLC?

The SDLC consists of five core stages that guide software development from start to finish:

1. Requirements and Design: This is the stage in which a project’s scope and objectives are defined, and security requirements are established. This phase lays the foundation for the entire development process.
2. Development: This phase is where developers bring the design to life by coding and implementing the software.
3. Testing: This phase is dedicated to quality assurance, where various tests are conducted to ensure that the application is secure and functions properly before deployment.
4. Deployment: In the deployment phase, an application is released into production. Developers carefully configure it and ensure that network security is considered.
5. Maintenance: This phase includes ongoing support, patching, and updating to ensure that an application remains secure and functional over time by continuously addressing evolving threats and user requirements.

How to Secure an Application in the Design Phase

Creating an application that is secure by design is fundamental. When security is considered at the very beginning stages of the SDLC rather than being an afterthought, this lessens the work that DevSecOps will need to do to identify and minimize risk down the road, especially after deployment.

During the design phase, security requirements that align with an organization’s policies and industry best practices should be clearly identified. Design decisions should prioritize security by including secure authentication mechanisms and access controls in advance. For example, including multi-factor authentication (MFA) in an application’s design plan will make it more seamless to implement down the road.

Threat modeling is another critical process that should be conducted during the design and planning phase to help identify potential threats and vulnerabilities based on a particular application’s architecture and design. The primary goal of threat modeling is to proactively identify and mitigate security risks by analyzing the system’s architecture, data flow, components, and potential threats. Threat modeling helps organizations make informed decisions about security controls, countermeasures, and design choices to enhance the security of a system before it is built or deployed.

Before the development phase begins, it’s important that DevSecOps teams also assess the design for security flaws and weaknesses by conducting a design review that scrutinizes the system’s architecture, data flow and components for potential vulnerabilities.

Finally, a secure code review must be conducted to review code snippets and design documents for security issues. This is where coding best practices should be double-checked to ensure that an application’s code flaws do not introduce vulnerabilities later in development.

Vulnerabilities Identified During the Design Phase Include:

• Inadequate authentication mechanisms
• Improper access controls
• Data leakage risks

How to Secure an Application in the Development Phase

The Development Phase is where the actual coding and implementation of the software takes place. During this phase, static analysis should be conducted to assess the source code for potential vulnerabilities, bugs, or threats. Static analysis is typically executed by an automated static code analyzer like SonarQube or Veracode.

While automated tools are valuable, manual code reviews are equally important. Experienced developers should manually review the code for security issues. Developers should also write unit tests that specifically target security aspects of the code. Conducting these tests can ensure that vulnerabilities are identified and patched early on before an application proceeds in the development cycle.

Common Vulnerabilities Identified During the Development Phase Include:

1. Injection attacks (e.g., SQL injection, XSS)
2. Insecure API usage
3. Cryptography weaknesses

How to Secure an Application in the Testing Phase

During the testing phase, as its name suggests, various testing activities, including functional, integrational, and security testing are conducted. The primary objective of this phase of development is to ensure that an application is functioning properly and secure for deployment. Part of the testing conducted during this phase is dynamic analysis security testing (DAST), which scans the running application for security vulnerabilities using tools that simulate attacks and uncover certain security issues.

Performing manual penetration testing to complement automated pentesting efforts will ensure that all known – and potential unknown – vulnerabilities are identified for remediation. A trained ethical hacker can focus on the most exploitable entry points of an attacker. PTaaS is a modern approach to pentesting that combines both manual and automated techniques in a hybrid approach.

Input validation testing is also an important part of the testing phase – it’s a security testing technique used to evaluate how well an application validates and handles user inputs. For example, consider a login page for a website. A hacker, instead of entering their username and password, inserts a piece of code like “admin’–” into the username field. If the website doesn’t properly validate and sanitize this input, the hacker could gain unauthorized access to an administrator account, potentially compromising the entire system.

Common Vulnerabilities Identified During the Testing Phase Include:

1. Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
2. Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
3. Broken authentication
4. Sensitive data exposure

Securing an Application in the Deployment Phase

The Deployment Phase is when the application moves to production. Ensuring that the environment is secure before deployment is essential to prevent post-deployment security incidents.

DevOps teams should assess the server and application configurations for security weaknesses with a configuration review. Misconfigured settings can introduce critical vulnerabilities. For example, if a company’s server is accidentally left exposed to the internet without a password, anyone with internet access can potentially access and manipulate sensitive data, risking data breaches and security threats.

Network security is another critical layer of defense because of the role network services and infrastructure play in application functionality. It helps protect communication channels and access points used by applications. Network security testing should be used to evaluate network-level security controls and firewalls to ensure they are correctly configured.

Common Vulnerabilities Identified During the Deployment Phase Include:

1. Weak configurations
2. Unnecessary open ports
3. Insufficient network security

Securing an Application in the Maintenance Phase

Once an application is securely deployed, continuous security testing is still important. As the application evolves, it’s essential to continue monitoring and testing when changes are implemented.

Security precautions during the maintenance phase include patch testing and continuous penetration testing to help both identify and address new vulnerabilities introduced by code changes or configuration updates and remediate them effectively. While penetration testing is often viewed as an annual or quarterly exercise, especially for smaller enterprises, it is important that it is conducted as often as major changes occur. One small vulnerability left undetected could lead to a damaging cyber incident if not identified and patched proactively.

Common Vulnerabilities Identified During the Maintenance Phase Include:

1. Unpatched vulnerabilities
2. Security misconfigurations due to updates

Addressing application security challenges in the SDLC is a proactive approach to safeguarding your applications and data. By integrating security into each phase, from design to maintenance, you can reduce the risk of security breaches, minimize the impact of vulnerabilities, and build resilient, secure applications without hindering innovation. Embracing security testing as a fundamental aspect of your development process is the key to a healthy and secure DevSecOps environment.

About BreachLock

BreachLock is a global leader in PTaaS and penetration testing services. BreachLock offers automated, AI-powered, and human-delivered solutions in one integrated platform based on a standardized built-in framework that enables consistent and regular benchmarks of attack tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), security controls, and processes. By creating a standardized framework, BreachLock can deliver enhanced predictability, consistency, and accurate results in real-time, every time.