There are millions of lines of code that get produced every day. From parsing values in a spreadsheet to producing vaccines, code forms the basis of everything that we see and interact with today. A lot of times developers are oblivious to the significance of their work. The work that they do and the code that they produce have a far-reaching impact on lives halfway across the world. This realization and responsibility requires us to write code with adequate safeguards so as to ensure that the systems being powered by our software remain safe and secure. Also, security cannot be an afterthought as it becomes harder to catch and rectify errors in software that has been shipped to the market. It is also vastly more expensive and requires a significant number of resources to resolve security issues following the build and deployment cycle of an application.

This brings us to the philosophy of a secure SDLC in which the principles of security are baked right into the design, build, test, and deployment phase of software development.

At GRM technologies, our software and DevOps specialists will start with an architecture review as any flaws in this stage will carry through the development pipeline. An architecture review entails profiling your technology stack and uncovering vulnerabilities introduced during the design phase as this ensures your applications are secure by default. We will also carry out extensive threat modeling to gain an insight into your system from the perspective of an attacker. This will result in a detailed map of your assets and the threat vectors against them. This information will allow us to build a comprehensive checklist of security requirements to address the risk profile of your system. The items in the checklist can be translated into tickets, which can be added to sprints, and then completed while building the application.

Once in the dev environment, we will do a static code analysis to scan your code for any obvious issues related to injection, user input validation, authentication, and authorization. This step should be carried out as soon as the code is checked in and can be automated using Jenkins or any other CI/CD tool. We also conduct an open source analysis of all the third-party dependencies being used by your application to ensure that no unsafe versions are being used, which could lead to critical security vulnerabilities.

We will also scan your code for OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities. Our detailed code review checklists cover input validation, output encoding, authentication and password management, session management, access control, cryptographic practices, error handling and logging, database security, file management, and other general coding practices. Our team carries out reviews using automated tools and conducts manual deep-dive examinations of code that is of critical importance.

Once in the staging environment, we will undertake dynamic application security testing to catch any runtime bugs. This will allow us to look for vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit when an application is running in production. Dynamic testing is carried out using pen testing while the applications are running to uncover security findings related to user input validation, session hijacking, and SQL injection.

Finally, we cannot underscore any more the importance of creating a culture around building secure products. This involves conducting periodic security trainings to keep your dev teams aware and up-to-date of the latest attack vectors that threaten the integrity of computing systems. At GRM, we will work with you to establish a training model for your team that would seamlessly integrate into your development lifecycle.

With our software and security experts by your side, you can be rest assured that our team will work with you to codify best practices and security standards into your development lifecycle. A secure SDLC will result in a product that has an enhanced security posture, help you achieve compliance, earn customer trust in the marketplace, and secure the longevity of your business.