Secure Software Development
By Brian Nadzan, Chief Technology Officer at Templum, Inc.
Approximately 33 billion account breaches will occur in 2023, with cyber-attacks occurring every 39 seconds. As a result, security has become an even more important aspect of software development. Secure software development is the process of building software that is resistant to attack and is necessary to minimize vulnerabilities and maintain user privacy.
Secure software development offers many benefits. It can help protect software from being hacked, which can lead to data breaches, financial losses and reputational damage. It can also help comply with regulations, such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Implementing secure software development in your organization starts with creating a security policy and training employees on security best practices. Additionally, security tools and frameworks to help develop secure software can be used.
One of the most important aspects of secure software development is penetration testing, which is a process of simulating an attack on software to identify security vulnerabilities. Penetration testers use a variety of techniques to try to exploit vulnerabilities in software, including:
- Brute force attacks, which involves trying to guess passwords or other access credentials.
- SQL injection attacks, which is done by inserting malicious code into a SQL database to gain unauthorized access to data.
- Cross-site scripting attacks, which involves injecting malicious code into a web page to steal user credentials or other sensitive information.
Another important aspect of secure software development is static software analysis, which is the process of analyzing software source code to identify potential security vulnerabilities. These tools can identify vulnerabilities by doing the following.
- Buffer overflow vulnerabilities: This occurs when a program attempts to write more data than a buffer can hold, which overwrites other data in memory and causes the program to crash or execute arbitrary code.
- Format string vulnerabilities: When a program uses a format string to print data to the screen, but the format string is not properly sanitized, attackers can inject arbitrary code into the program.
- Null pointers dereference vulnerabilities: This occurs when a program attempts to access a memory location that is not allocated, and will also cause the program to crash or execute arbitrary code.
Observability is the last key piece for secure software development. It allows businesses to understand the state of their software in real-time, which allows them to detect and respond to attacks in a timely manner. There are several ways to improve software observability, including logging and monitoring tools to collect data about the state of your software as well as tracing tools to track the execution of software.
Although secure software development is a complex process, it’s essential to protect software from attacks. By proactively doing things like penetration testing, static software analysis and taking observability measures, it is possible to develop software that is resistant to attack and can give peace of mind to the developer and its users.
