What is application security ?

Applications are an essential part of daily life. From buying groceries to making payments, we rely on applications. Some of these applications also collect sensitive data to work properly, such as in mobile banking, e-commerce, account verification, and payments.

Because daily applications can have vulnerabilities, attackers often seek out weaknesses to steal information or disrupt operations.

The application security goal is to protect software from attackers and ensure that it is safe for the user, either an individual or an organization.

Core Principles of Application Security

Application security involves protecting software throughout its entire development lifecycle (SDLC), from writing code to deploying in production, with a secure-by-design mindset. This includes the integration of specific security tools at appropriate stages. Static Application Security Testing (SAST) is employed early to analyze source code and prevent vulnerabilities during development. Once the application is running, Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) is utilized to assess runtime issues. Throughout these processes, dependency scanners are applied to ensure third-party components maintain security standards. By embedding these tools into the development workflow, security measures travel with the code rather than being tacked on afterward. This proactive approach helps developers identify and mitigate security vulnerabilities effectively, ensuring robust application security.

In the context of Cybersecurity, application security is part of the broader cybersecurity space. While network and infrastructure security protect hardware and systems, application security protects on the software side.

Why Application Security is Important

Vulnerabilities in the application have big consequences, like data theft, ransomware, and losing the customer due to a loss of trust. Consider the story of a well-known retail chain that suffered a major data breach. Hackers exploited weaknesses in the retailer’s application to steal customer credit card information, leading to massive financial losses and a tarnished reputation.

The breach made headlines and resulted in customers feeling betrayed, costing the company millions in revenue and trust. This narrative emphasizes why preventing application vulnerabilities is crucial for protecting both financial interests and customer relationships.

In addition, application security can also help organizations maintain compliance standards such as GDPR, HIPAA, SOC2, and so on that require strong application security.

Beyond that, strong application security will become a foundation to avoid financial risks and build partners’ and customers’ trust.

Common Application Security Threats

Applications face many types of threats; one of the reference standards is OWASP Top 10, which highlights the top 10 most critical vulnerabilities in applications, from SQL injection, where attackers can manipulate databases from insecure queries, to broken authentication or access controls that allow unauthorized individuals to assume user identities, and misconfigurations that expose credentials. For instance, an SQL injection might occur when a hacker uses a login form to access users’ private data by inserting malicious code. In another scenario, broken authentication could allow an attacker to bypass login mechanisms and gain access to accounts. Misconfigurations might result in sensitive data being inadvertently exposed to the public. Each of these threats illustrates the importance of maintaining robust security measures and practices.

Each of these threats needs proactive security measurement and testing continuously.

Application Security Lifecycle

Application security can perform well if it is integrated along the software development lifecycle (SDLC), from designing the app to deployment and maintaining the operation.

At the design phase, application security can be implemented by designing the application security architecture and threat modeling to identify risks early. In the development phase, follow secure coding practices to reduce vulnerabilities before release.

Key practices include input validation to prevent unauthorized or malicious data from affecting the program, implementing the principle of least privilege to ensure that code and users have the minimum levels of permission needed, and conducting regular code reviews to catch and address potential security issues. To illustrate secure coding practices, consider the following example of input validation:

Before:

def process_input(user_input):

execute_query("SELECT * FROM users WHERE name = '" + user_input + "'")

After:

def process_input(user_input):

sanitized_input = sanitize(user_input)

execute_query("SELECT * FROM users WHERE name = ?", sanitized_input)

Using various testing methods, such as dynamic analysis (DAST), static analysis, and penetration testing, can provide an additional security overview before the application is released to production.

Modern applications move rapidly through continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. Securing these pipelines is very critical; a vulnerable pipeline can give attackers direct access to the application. To enhance security, it’s important to implement several key measures.

Start by scanning dependencies regularly to find and mitigate vulnerabilities before they become a threat. Employ secret managers to securely store and manage sensitive credentials needed during pipeline execution. Enforcing code signing ensures that the code has not been altered or corrupted after the developer signs off, providing integrity checks from commit to deployment. These steps, combined with regular audits and advanced monitoring, help ensure that the CI/CD pipelines are robust and secure.

Application Security in the Cloud Lifecycle

Beyond the code, today’s applications are deployed in the cloud and container environment. Container security plays an important role during this process; it will help us to secure images, registries, and orchestration platforms like Kubernetes. Each layer in the container environment, host, image, and orchestration, poses unique threats. The host layer can be vulnerable if misconfigurations expose it to attack, the image layer might include hidden vulnerabilities in its dependencies, and the orchestration layer, like Kubernetes, may suffer from weaknesses in its configuration that enable privilege escalation or unauthorized access. Recognizing these specific risks allows for the targeted application of security measures, ensuring robust defense across each layer.

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) helps you detect misconfigurations like open critical network ports or exposed storage buckets.

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) secures access across users, service accounts, APIs, and reduces the risks of overprivileged identities.

By combining them in our software development lifecycle approach, we will be able to build applications that are secure from design to run-time deployment.