Securing Applications Throughout the Software Development Lifecycle

In the last few years, many organizations from various industries, including retail, media, healthcare, automotive, finance, aviation, real estate, etc., have been affected by security incidents or data breaches. Q2 2023 saw 2.6 times more data breaches than Q1 2023. 110.8M accounts were leaked, with 855 accounts being leaked every minute. According to IBM, data breaches, on average, cost $4,45 million (2023), a 15% increase over three years. Surprisingly, half of the breached organizations are still unwilling to increase security spending despite soaring breach costs. The vulnerabilities in applications and environmental configuration are among the major factors resulting in the success of cyberattacks. 

To strengthen security, what needs to be changed in existing software development and maintenance processes? Let’s examine the additional measures and process adjustments your company should make for the well-tuned and secure Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). 

What Is a Secure Software Development Lifecycle? 

The secure SDLC is about integrating different practices into existing software development processes. The right combination of such practices at various cycle stages at the right time allows your company to get a product with a very high predictable level of security. 

Some of the main benefits of this approach are: 

• The software is more safe because security stays in focus throughout the entire lifecycle. 
• All interested parties are aware of security considerations. 
• Issues are discovered early on, even before they are incorporated into the code. 
• Costs may be reduced with early detection and elimination of vulnerabilities. 
• The minimization of the overall internal business risks for the company. 

We at Sigma Software apply several frameworks and standards that can be used to embed those practices — for example, ISO 27034, BSIMM, OWASP SAMM, and others. 

Penetration Testing 

This is the first thing to consider regarding safeguarding software security. 

Pentesters assess the existing apps, endpoints, environment configuration, and security controls and identify gaps and weaknesses. Ultimately, such a report highlights those gaps and recommends additional measures. 

In a nutshell, the whole process includes: 

• Analyzing potential threats, defining goals, and planning activity. 
• Gathering information about target systems through various techniques. 
• Vulnerability analysis aimed at identifying potential weaknesses that could be used to achieve pentest goals. 
• The exploitation phase is when the pen-testers validate and exploit the vulnerabilities they had identified earlier. 
• Post-exploitation phase to maintain persistent access to the system and to identify new potential attack vectors. 
• Results analysis and a final report including the findings and recommendations on mitigating identified issues and protecting your system. 

It has been extremely popular lately as it allows us to reveal system vulnerabilities, identify high-risk weaknesses, prioritize threats, and get valuable recommendations on removing them. Despite the apparent advantages, it also has several drawbacks: 

• It’s only testing. You would need to implement the recommendations provided to improve your app security. If you run penetration testing right before the app release, you may run out of time to fix the problems discovered, especially if they require substantial changes to the system. 
• High costs. Both the testing itself and the fixing of the issues identified. It is essential to understand that not many skilled pen testers can thoroughly check your application to find and exploit even its most minor vulnerabilities. Another cost driver is the investment required to fix the issues identified. Those fixes may often require more profound changes in your solution (even at the architecture level), driving substantial costs as you may locate them late in the development lifecycle. 
• Maintaining continuous security. Pentesting allows you to find the issues at a particular point in time. However, it cannot ensure your next release will be free from them. Thus, you will either need to conduct tests before each release or add other security activities that will allow you to find or even prevent the emergence of vulnerabilities before the penetration test. 

Incorporating security into every cycle phase is vital to identifying and fixing potential early-stage problems and lowering costs.  

Incorporating Security Into Every Phase 

Implementing a secure framework throughout the software development and operations cycle is not an easy thing to do. 

If your organization isn’t ready for a complete switch to Secure SDLC, you still may at least pay attention to the following aspects: 

• Security practice for development teams. Understanding common vulnerabilities and how to mitigate such problems will allow your company to avoid security issues and come to final testing with a minimum number of potential problems. 
• Threat modeling or threat assessment practice. It’s a risk-based approach to designing secure systems based on defining threats to develop measures to mitigate them. This activity can identify, evaluate, and manage system threats, architectural design flaws, and recommended security controls. Regular threat modeling ensures the planned implementation is safe and essential measures are not forgotten. 
• Security requirements. Focus on such requirements is crucial in the context of software security. The presence of those requirements before developing a specific product functionality helps avoid problems with implementation and subsequent testing. For specific examples that might help as a baseline, you can adopt requirements from the OWASP Application Security Verification Standard. You can use Mobile ASVS for mobile apps if you have a mobile application. 

Conclusion 

Implementing security in SDLC enables businesses to streamline the development process by addressing the root causes of security issues as early as possible. It’s important to remember that security-related activities should not end after the completion of the development phase. Security should be an inevitable part of the whole operation phase. With the growth of your business, it is recommended that you increase the maturity levels of your security practices.