What is Secure Software Development?

The cost of damages caused by insecure software to organizations can be high. For this reason, security assessments should be performed at every stage of the software development cycle to minimize the security risks of the software. Many companies that develop software do not perform security assessments at the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) stages. Ignoring security checks in the first phase of the software development lifecycle leads to other successive phases carrying over the vulnerabilities that occurred in the previous phase, which increases the vulnerabilities in the resulting product. This can cause significant financial losses to the company that develops and uses the software.

The best way to develop secure software is to perform security assessments at every stage of the SDLC, from requirements analysis to maintenance, regardless of the project methodology. The earlier developers integrate security controls into the SDLC, the less likely it is that security vulnerabilities will occur. This will naturally minimize the costs to fix them. The development of secure software can be done in five stages. These stages are:

• Requirements Analysis
• Secure Design
• Development
• Testing
• Production & Post-Production

Requirements Analysis

Requirements are a guideline that influences and directs the software/project development process. When working with customers’ requirements, the secure software development process starts with the creation of certain combinations by considering the desired use and undesired (misuse) situations. Security consultants often say the phrase ‘the threat elements that may occur against the software should be foreseen in advance and what may happen in cases of misuse should be determined’ As NextDeveloper, we give great value to this statement. The clarification of undesirable use cases also determines the form and scope of the measures to be taken. When measuring security risks, we take the security guidelines in some internationally recognized authoritative sources such as HIPAA and SOX into account. These sources contain additional requirements specific to the business area in which the product is developed.

Secure Design

Safe design is a security approach that ensures that the security issue is taken into account in the process of creating the infrastructure design in order to ensure the security of the data of a project. In other words, the software development team (i.e. NextDeveloper team) prioritizes the security of the project before even starting the project and designs how the project will be developed accordingly.

Development

During the development phase of a secure software, the software must be coded to protect against the most critical security vulnerabilities known around the globe. Our software developers take the Top 10 vulnerabilities list of OWASP into account, OWASP being one of the competent organizations on software security. We aim to take precautions against such vulnerabilities in the SDLC so that there is no need for later correction, which reduces remediation costs and ensures customer security.

After the software is developed, NextDeveloper engineers perform source code review. Source code review is done by referring to the rules of the programming language in which the application is written in, and the rules for writing secure code. We wrap this stage up in this way.

Testing

The testing phase focuses on finding bugs that do not allow the software to work according to customer requirements. Our testing engineers perform functional and non functional testings to see if the software works or not. There are many tests performed at this stage, such as E2E testing, performance testing, security testing, etc.

Production and Post-Production

We create an incident response plan to address new threats that may occur after the software is installed in the production environment. We identify the people to contact in case of a security emergency. Also, there may be vulnerabilities that went unnoticed during previous checks. For this reason, the software should be examined one last time. All misuse cases and security risks need to be checked, which all would be identified during the requirements analysis phase. After verifying that all requirements are met, your software/project is approved. It is then archived for the next maintenance work. These are the basic checks we apply after installing Microsoft’s software product in the production environment.