According to the latest data breach investigation report, cyber-crime was at the top of the list. In order to guarantee your organization and customer’s security, software developers should be able to create codes that stand the test of time with accomplished proper techniques and best practices for secure coding.
Below are top ten secure coding tips that you can implement in your organization in order to prevent the most common risks that may affect your organization and learn best ways to prevent and resolve related concerns in future.
1. Adopt and define secure coding standards and requirements
Identify, develop and document security requirements with secure coding standards early in the development cycle that target advanced language and platform and which also ensure that successive development items are assessed for compliance with those specific requirements.
2. Threat modeling
Threat modeling enables you to anticipate the threats to which the software will be subjected. Determining the threats posed by your application is essential to enable you to rate the threats based on risk ranking and severe vulnerabilities immediately and fix them promptly.
3. Follow the principle of least privilege
Carefully design each process with the smallest amount of privileges. Any preeminent permission should only be accessed with the required least amount of time acceptable to finish the privileged task. This approach reduces the opportunities for any attacks that can be executed as a result of elevated privileges.
4. Validate data input
Ensure to authorize input from all un-trusted data sources in order to eradicate the vast majority of software susceptibilities including all input fields for length, character, range, character sets and encoding. Filtering out harmful and suspicious from most external sources is one possible approach of doing this.
5. Exercise defense in depth
Practice multiple defensive strategies to manage risks in such a manner that when a security layer proves to be insufficient another security layer can avert the safety flaws from consumable exposure and other consequences from the fruitful exploit. However, the number of layers and required tools differ from one organization to another.
6. Keep security simple
Adopt simple security design and practices. Complex designs increase the chances of errors that will affect implementation and configuration processes. In addition, achieving appropriate levels of assurance will not be realizable.
7. Sanitize data sent to other systems
Cleaning all data that passes through complex subsystems prevents attackers who invoke the unused functionality of these functionalities.
8. Data design and access
A little sabotage can cause great damage to your database. It’s important to take all the precautions to ensure variables are strongly typed and that all queries have the right parameters with stored procedures to prevent data access.
9. Positive security through default deny
It is important to base access decisions on permissions rather than elimination and outline only what is allowed while rejecting anything else. Consequently, entry will be denied when the defense scheme detects circumstances under which entry is allowed.
10. Plan and design for security policies
Proper planning with well-designed software that implements and enforces security policies prevents the vulnerability of the development life-cycle. Upfront identification of security requirements, providing software security, establishing secure coding standards and consistently verifying the effectiveness of security controls helps to enforce security policies.