Everything You Need To Know About SDLC Security

Since the SDLC was first introduced, the world has changed drastically. Now, computers are commonplace, smartphones are everywhere, and technology innovation is progressing at an impressive rate. This new world has resulted in a new business environment with constantly evolving priorities and expectations for software development, which calls for periodic reevaluation of our approaches to the SDLC.

In today’s landscape, business leaders value business agility and the rapid delivery of new application features to meet customer requests and requirements. Instead of a slow, methodical approach, they prefer to move faster to gain a competitive advantage. At the same time, software development leaders are striving to create environments that improve developer productivity and attract and retain top talent. These top performers, unsurprisingly, are often attracted to more modern companies that prioritize newer development approaches, like Agile.

Traditionally, security assessments and remediation have been left until the final stages of the software development framework, especially in older approaches like Waterfall. But as the technology landscape changes, this approach to security testing is changing, too. With today’s increasingly common cyber attacks targeting the software supply chain—specifically, those attacking the pre-product development environment—security must be addressed much earlier in the SDLC to prevent potentially devastating results–particularly once that code makes it into production.

GitHub, for example, is a popular source code management (SCM) system used by many organizations. Although convenient and useful, it has a few inherent security risks. Because it is so flexible, it opens the door for misconfigurations and human error that can open organizations up to attacks. It also doesn’t offer default configurations, leading to increased security exposure—especially for more inexperienced users.  As it has gained popularity, GitHub has become a relatively easy target for cybercriminals looking to take advantage. 

In 2020, SolarWinds—a system management software provider—was the victim of a devastating cyber attack. Hackers breached their software supply chain and gained access to the networks and systems of thousands of SolarWinds’ customers. Over 30,000 organizations were compromised in this attack.

These examples demonstrate the need for strict and thorough security measures within an organization’s own SDLC to secure their software supply chain. Without prioritizing these types of security protocols, it’s all too easy for businesses to fall victim to these types of attacks. But implementing security throughout SDLC can help organizations identify vulnerabilities earlier and keep their software supply chain better protected.

Prioritizing SDLC security is vital to protecting your software supply chain and limiting the likelihood of successful cyber attacks. Software supply chain attacks have been on the rise, with some estimating these attacks occurring three to six times more frequently than in the past. 

Mitigating these risks is critical to the success of any organization. Software supply chain attacks disrupt business operations, enable lateral attacks on other critical internal systems, and can embed vulnerabilities in your software that open up customers and clients to added risk. 

To prevent attacks, earlier identification of critical security vulnerabilities in the pre-production SDLC environment is vital. It not only reduces the cost of having to address vulnerabilities by resolving them before they’re released into production, but also reduces the time it takes to implement a resolution. 

Prioritizing your software supply chain security can also help improve organization-wide security—particularly throughout the software development process. But to do so, you must first implement a security-first approach across your SDLC. Instead of leaving security to the end of the process, shifting left and implementing continuous security at multiple touchpoints adds efficiency. Using this preventative approach helps reduce intrinsic business risks and prevent widespread negative impacts including: 

Instead, maintaining strict security measures and continually operating with a security-first mindset can help prevent these devastating incidents and keep your organization protected.

Key terms to know:

• Vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities are weaknesses in your product or application that leave you open to cyber attacks.
• Patching software. This type of software is designed to implement patches that update code and fix security vulnerabilities within existing software.
• Malicious code injection. This is a type of cyber attack that involves inserting malicious code into an existing product or application through an input field like a website form. 
• Denial of service (DoS) attacks. In this type of cyber attack, hackers overwhelm an application with a flood of requests and prevent legitimate users from gaining access or using the application.
• Automated security tools. These tools are designed to automatically help identify any existing security vulnerabilities within a product or application.  
• Secure coding practices. These are practices, principles, and protocols designed to help keep code secure and prevent vulnerabilities from being introduced during the SDLC. 
• Security issues. Security issues are vulnerabilities, secrets or misconfigurations that can be exploited within your code or application.
• Application security. Application security includes all of the security measures within your SDLC that are designed to mitigate risk and protect against vulnerabilities.
  
• Source code. Source code is the core programming that is the foundation of any application.

Implementing security measures throughout your SDLC can be a daunting task. But there are certain best practices that organizations can follow to heighten security and keep their applications and organization protected.

Improve Data Security

Having a clearly defined data security strategy is a critical aspect of protecting your software supply chain. Your strategy should include guidelines for everything from implementing security best practices throughout the SDLC with clearly defined risk management strategies to enforcing strong access control and other regulatory compliance requirements. 

Implement Strict Access Control

Evaluating your access permissions regularly is a must to keep your software supply chain secure. Use the principle of least privilege when possible, and only grant access to the resources required for team members to complete their tasks. Reexamine your access permissions regularly to ensure you’re revoking access from those who no longer need it. 

Track All Data

Knowing where your data is stored and having an up-to-date inventory of all entry and exit points allow you to closely monitor everything. Tracking access to data and the cloning and forking of code that may contain access to data can help you to stay ahead of possible security risks and ensure you always know who or what is accessing your data. It’s also helpful to keep track of when data is outdated or no longer needed, so that you can remove it from your repositories to keep everything current. 

Regularly Evaluate Risk

Don’t wait for attacks to happen before evaluating your security posture—instead, stay on top of your risk at all times. Proactively identifying vulnerabilities is a best practice that helps you stay ahead of potential exploits and threats. Automated vulnerability scans help reduce the workload on your team and will identify vulnerabilities that might be overlooked during software development. Leverage these tools to scan code, SDLC pipelines, systems, and infrastructure for comprehensive coverage.  

Leverage Discovery Tools

It’s not always easy to keep track of where your data is stored. Discovery tools can help you quickly find it, including data that might be stored in a forgotten, vulnerable location. Discover tools can search through your entire software supply chain, including repositories, servers, and artifact repositories, to find unused data that have been otherwise overlooked or would require extensive manual effort to locate and document.

Monitor Access Activity 

Keeping track of who accesses your data and files, and when, can help you spot suspicious activity before it becomes a potentially catastrophic breach. Use automated security tools to detect and notify you when suspicious or unusual access happens so you can stay ahead of the game.

Following these best practices can help you keep your SDLC protected and prevent cyber attacks before they happen.

Since its inception, the SDLC has been continuously evolving. While we’ve come a long way, the next iteration of the SDLC will have some important differences from where we stand today. 

Increased Automation & Machine Learning

The introduction of DevOps and automation tools have moved the SDLC for many orgs leaps and bounds ahead of where it used to be. But efficiency can only bring you so far. To take the SDLC to the next level, we expect that machine learning will be increasingly employed by a growing number of organizations. Instead of bringing on countless team members, these automated tools will be able to write code and run tests with unbeatable efficiency, allowing organizations to not only innovate faster but also to develop new code and applications more securely. 

Enhanced Security Across the Software Supply Chain

Security has grown significantly more important as cyber attacks have become increasingly common and attackers have become more and more sophisticated. To keep up, organizations must continue to evolve their security measures to better protect themselves across their entire SDLC. New SCA and SAST tools are emerging to continuously scan code for vulnerabilities, and new DAST tools are being created to work directly within runtime code to better assess risk and remediate vulnerabilities. 

Shift-Right Testing

As DevSecOps and the SSDLC have become a priority, shift-left testing has been the focus as of late. And while ongoing testing throughout the SDLC is imperative, it’s also vital to evaluate products in a production environment—not just a staging environment. Doing so allows teams to validate and verify software in the real world and ensure a higher-quality final product. 

Increased Attention on Reliability & Supportability

While the main phases of the SDLC are effective, they leave out important elements like reliability and supportability. Prioritizing reliability, resilience, and supportability, incorporating them into the SDLC, and integrating site reliability engineering teams into the process from the beginning helps to future-proof your applications.

Key terms to know:

• SSDLC. The secure software development lifecycle, or SSDLC, is the end-to-end process of developing software with a security-first mindset integrated into the entire process.
• Cybercriminals. These are malicious actors, like hackers, who commit cyber crimes for financial gain or to create chaos and cause damage.
• State-sponsored attacks. These types of cyber attacks are committed by cyber criminals who are funded by or affiliated with a nation or nation-state.
• Integrated security. This approach integrates security throughout the development process instead of leaving it to the end phase.
• CI/CD security. Continuous improvement/continuous development, or CI/CD, security is the process of identifying and resolving risks early in the SDLC to allow for faster innovation without compromising application security.
• Continuous security strategy. A continuous security strategy requires continuous security monitoring and risk remediation to identify threats and vulnerabilities.
• Secure coding training. This type of training empowers engineers to develop more secure code by educating them about security best practices.
• Ethical hackers. Ethical hackers are those who help organizations improve their security posture by using various tactics and techniques to try and gain unauthorized access to computer systems. This allows organizations to identify vulnerabilities and proactively prevent malicious attacks.