Best Practices for Secure Coding
When a person hires builders to construct a new building, they expect them to adhere to the highest safety standards to prevent as many issues as possible. It is safe to say that if the same person walked into their new home and saw a cracked foundation and missing doors, they would have more than just minor issues with those builders.
Similarly, clients expect their companies or software development teams to ensure that their code for a new project meets the strictest cybersecurity standards available to protect their business. Secure coding standards help ensure that developers follow reliable methods to prevent vulnerabilities. The ultimate goal is to make it harder for hackers to access sensitive data, install ransomware, and create chaos through cyber threats.
What Are Secure Coding Standards and Practices?
Secure coding standards are rules, solutions, and coding methods used by developers throughout the software, application, and website development lifecycle. Their purpose is quite simple: to guarantee that developers write and use code that helps protect both the software owner and its users by minimizing security vulnerabilities.
Typically, there is more than one way to solve any development task, which also means varying levels of difficulty. This also implies that some solutions are more secure than others. Secure coding standards compel developers and development teams to choose the most secure approach, even if it is not the fastest path.
Although companies and business owners understand the value of rapid development and aim to minimize time-to-market, they must keep these secure practices in mind to ensure their survival. News is the best place for business owners to see the real-time value of these practices, as many companies suffer from data breaches and cyberattacks caused by using less secure code. Many never recover from them.
Best Practices for Secure Coding
Given the enormous number of devastating cyberattacks and constantly evolving methods, the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) has developed a set of recommendations or “best practices” for secure coding in the modern world. These recommendations help developers make the software development lifecycle as secure as possible while preparing for threats that await after production launch.
Key secure coding practices include:
- Password Management – Passwords are undoubtedly a weak access point for hackers. Low-complexity passwords are cracked in alarmingly short time, while strong passwords take some time but are still feasible. Fortunately, organizations in recent years have recognized this as an insecure area of their technology and have implemented multi-factor or two-factor authentication. Companies must ensure that all participants in development (and beyond) adhere to best practices for choosing complex and sufficiently long passwords to resist attacks as much as possible. For developers, this means users should select the most robust passwords for their products, disable password entry after several failed attempts, and never store passwords in plain text.
- Security by Design – The “security by design” approach makes security a top priority during development, rather than an afterthought once development has started. Sometimes companies prioritize other aspects, such as speed of development, over security. Typically, they later pay for this with data breaches or hacks. A security-first approach reduces the future cost of technical debt and mitigates risks before they arise. Throughout the software development lifecycle, developers should take time to analyze source code and implement security automation where possible.
- Access Control – By making the default response a denial for sensitive data, companies help prevent future data leaks. This access control includes restricting access only to those who truly need it and limiting privileges for sensitive data to those who have access. Additionally, developers should not allow business roles to dictate access. Managers often have the least technical training but the most access, which is very dangerous.
- Input Validation – Developers must ensure that their forms collect only accepted data formats for each form field and validate all input fields for length, range, character sets, expected data types, and character encoding. By filtering out dangerous “blacklist” characters, such as parentheses and special symbols, they help prevent hackers from infiltrating the data. Developers can address this in several ways, including encoding data to handle special characters correctly, using regular expressions to ensure expected characters are used, and parameterizing database queries to prevent theft, deletion, or modification of the database.
- System Configuration, Patching, and Vulnerability Management – Although not strictly a “development” aspect of software and application development, every member of the development team should clean their systems of unnecessary components. They should also take time to update all their tools, software, and platforms to the latest versions and patches. Outdated software gives hackers an entry point through vulnerabilities and bugs.
On the other hand, it is essential to monitor the release of patches and versions for the software developed in-house. This helps protect both the integrity and reputation of the company and the sensitive data of end users. Creating and releasing regular updates is one of the most important secure coding practices.
Although this is not an exhaustive list of all secure coding best practices, these are important factors that help companies avoid falling victim to digital criminals and cyber threats. By adhering to them, in addition to the full list of OWASP recommendations, developers gain the necessary tools to protect their code, end-user information, and their company.