A Secure Software Development Policy outlines your organization’s software development lifecycle (SDLC) and how security is integrated into development. Many businesses often overlook security during development, but considering it can save time, money, and effort in penetration testing and worrying about their application getting hacked. This blog post aims to break down all the critical components within this policy and explain how to use our Secure Software Development Policy template within WatchDog Security’s Policy Manager to reinforce security commitments to your development team – whether they are offshore or onshore.
1. Development Change Management
During the software development process, a formalized change management process should be in place that tracks a history of changes made. Change management should include an approval process which a designated individual or department reviews proposed changes making sure they align with organization standards.
CRR Supplemental Resource: Configuration and Change Management (CISA.gov)
2. Version Control and Code Management
Restricting access to the Version Control system (e.g. GitHub, GitLab) based on the developer’s role is another essential element in a Secure Development Policy. Developers, unless required, should not be able to push their changes to production without a code review process. In GitHub, this can be a branch protection rule requiring an authorized reviewer before merging code into production. Furthermore, having a CI/CD pipeline with three separate branches (development, staging and production) further reduces the risk of introducing untrusted code into the production environment.
Merge request approval rules (GitLab) Merge request approval rules (GitHub)
3. Secure Development Principles
Secure Development Principles refer to defence in depth and the concept of security by design – another vital aspect of your Secure Development Policy. Security should be ingrained into each project design phase, and developers should use secure development principles when building the platform. For example, suppose a developer is building APIs to not reference objects by an ID (and instead using their JWT token to validate authorization) to prevent potential Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR) attacks. Another example could be sanitizing SQL queries with user input to prevent SQL injection or other injection-style attacks.
- Principles of Security (OWASP Developer Guide)
- Secure development and deployment guidance (National Cyber Security Centre)
Principles of Security (OWASP Developer Guide) Secure development and deployment guidance (National Cyber Security Centre)
4. Ensuring Security in Development Environments
Segregating your development, testing, and production environments is essential to minimize the risk of cross-contamination and exploitation of security weaknesses in development environments. Equally important is ensuring no production data is used within lower environments—whether this is an API token or customer data. When creating these three environments implement firewall rules and logical separation. These measures are crucial in preventing communication between environments, thereby preventing lateral movement into your production environment.
Network Firewall Developer Guide (AWS) Firewall Policy rule sets (Azure) VPC Firewall Rules (GCP)
5. Security Testing
Security testing is a crucial element during the development lifecycle. While developers can use Secure Code techniques, Security Testing is essential to validate that these techniques were followed. Automated tools, including commercial and open-source options, can be used within your CI/CD pipeline to perform Static Application Security Testing (SAST) and Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) to find vulnerabilities. Although SAST/DAST tools are effective at catching common vulnerabilities, a penetration test should be conducted annually to identify any vulnerabilities that these tools may miss. Our sister company, Mand Consulting Group, offers enterprise-quality penetration testing at an SMB price – check them out here.
Source Code Analysis Tools (OWASP) Free for Open Source Application Security Tools (OWASP)
6. Managing Vulnerabilities
A Vulnerability Management program refers to your process for tracking security issues detected across various platforms (whether this is penetration testing results, scans from tooling or other sources such as dependency checking results). Managing vulnerabilities in a centralized area is crucial for tracking and ensuring your developers know them. Defining vulnerabilities is one thing, but it’s essential to have internally established SLAs for how long it should take to remediate a critical, high, medium, low or informational issue, which should be adhered to upon reporting vulnerabilities. A basic yet compliant system is a new project on GitHub/GitLab that is used to create/centralize issues for vulnerabilities identified.
CRR Supplemental Resource Guide: Volume 4 Vulnerability Management (CISA.gov)
7. Continuous Developer Education
Developers should receive training at least annually that teaches them secure code practices and educates them on secure development practices. Ideally, the training should be focused on the language they work with to develop your platform or application.
Free Interactive Developer security training from Snyk
8. Final System Validation Before Deployment
Finally, it’s important to define internal acceptance criteria and perform comprehensive testing before pushing to production. Your Secure Development Policy must detail your formal approval process and acceptance criteria. This ensures stakeholders approve the changes internally and that all security and functional requirements are met.
Everything You Need to Know About Acceptance Criteria (Scrum Alliance)
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