An estimated 84% of security incidents happen at the application layer. And, with the number of cybersecurity threats steadily rising year-over-year, application security (AppSec) has become absolutely essential.
Application security refers to finding, fixing and preventing cybersecurity vulnerabilities throughout the entire development life cycle. By enforcing application security measures, you are able to ensure that weaknesses and vulnerabilities in your software are identified and dealt with as soon as possible in development before they can become serious security breaches. This also helps to keep the overall costs low and enables you to deliver a secure, reliable product on time.
AppSec Best Practices
In order to ensure that your application is secure against security threats and vulnerabilities, you must enforce application security best practices. While you and your team may have application security best practices that are specific to your own process, we recommend that you consider also using these best practices:
- Conduct an application security risk assessment to effectively identify potential security vulnerabilities and weaknesses.
- Eliminate—or, if elimination is not possible, mitigate—the security vulnerabilities and weaknesses that were identified in the risk assessment.
- Examine open source and third-party software for security vulnerabilities. Properly address any weaknesses that your examination may have uncovered.
- Use AppSec tools such as SAST and DAST.
- Provide your team with application security training.
By adopting the above best practices, you can be assured that you and your team will have a strong application security process.
AppSec Tools
As previously mentioned, one of the most effective ways to ensure application security is to use AppSec tools.
The most common AppSec tools are:
- SAST: A static application security testing (SAST) tool analyzes your code as it’s being written in order to detect and report weaknesses that can lead to security vulnerabilities.
- DAST: A dynamic application security testing (DAST) tool enables you to identify security errors, runtime issues and environment-related issues later in the development of your software.
By using these AppSec tools together, you are able to ensure application security throughout development.
Important Secure Coding Standards for AppSec
In order to effectively enforce application security, you should use secure coding standards to efficiently identify, prevent and eliminate software vulnerabilities.
The most important coding standards for application security include:
- CERT
- CWE
- DISA STIG
- OWASP
- ISO/IEC TS 17961
A static code analyzer should be used early in development to effectively enforce coding standards to ensure effective application security.
To read more, please visit: https://www.perforce.com/blog/kw/what-is-appsec
