Security is one of the most important things to consider in today’s business world.
This is especially true when you consider the significant security breaches, which had happened over the past two years, and beyond.
Given all this, it’s important to take business application security extremely seriously at all times.
Now, in keeping with this, we’d like to present you with application security best practices which are designed to help your team develop and maintain secure applications easily.
9 Application security best practices:
1. Implement web security best practices — OWASP:
The web security best practices in the OWASP top 10 is a great place to start, and it typically contains a comprehensive list of the most critical web application security vulnerabilities — as identified by experts across the world.
The vulnerabilities listed by OWASP focuses on the integrity, confidentiality and availability of an application, as well as its developers and users.
As such, it is known to list attack vectors ranging from security mis-configuration, authentication and session management, sensitive data exposure, and even injection attacks.
Staying aware of these vulnerabilities, observing how they typically operate, and then using this knowledge to code in a secure manner can help you create applications that stand ahead of attacks.
2. Have a proper application security audit:
Another one of the web application best practices to take note of, as far as security is concerned, is to carry out regular application security audits.
Now, this step is necessary if you and your developers pay close attention to the OWASP top ten list of vulnerabilities, even if you have a security evangelist in your organization, and even though your developers self-test regularly.
This is because while the measures mentioned above are necessary and excellent, they are not very comprehensive, as they suffer from preconceived biases and filters.
As such, your team will be unable to critique the applications in an objective manner.
Now, this is why it’s important to get independent opinions — ones that aren’t guided by preconceived biases and notions, and also ones from those who have never seen the applications before.
These independent persons won’t make assumptions about the code, and will not run the risk of being biased by the company, or by any one in the company.
Additionally, this type of security audits can give you some ideas on which you can proceed further, and build secure applications faster.
3. Implement proper logging:
After you have suitably altered your code based on the findings of the security audit, it’s time to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
Now, pause to look at the factors that are often external which can still heavily influence the security of the application.
The practice and measure we are referring to in this section is what the industry commonly refers to as ‘logging’.
As you might well know from experience, there are always things that don’t quite go as planned in the development process.
For instance, there might be a bug which was considered insignificant, but in fact, opened up your application to attack.
When this occurs, you will be unable to respond to this situation in a swift enough manner — unless you have implemented proper logging.
Logging can provide you with knowledge about what exactly happened, what caused the situation, and what else was going on at the time.
To carry out proper logging, first you have to ensure that you’ve sufficiently instrumented your application. For this, there are a whole range of tools and services depending on your software language or languages, these services and tools include — NewRelic, Tideways, Blackfire and others.
After this, the information must be stored away in a manner that allows for swift and efficient parsing.
This can be done in several ways, including a Linux syslog, open source solutions like the ELK stack, and even SaaS services which include PaperTrail, Loggly and Splunk.
