Training Tips to Help Developers Snag Security Gold

The 2016 Summer Olympics has spurred businesses to up their game, especially when it comes to security. Here are some ways developers can take home the gold.

An athlete wouldn’t attempt a course or routine without assessing potential risks first. So companies at the very least need to make sure threat modeling involves decomposing the application to understand the application and how it interacts with outside entities, determine risks accordingly, deem mitigation strategies and implement countermeasures.

When it comes down to game time, athletes can only depend on themselves and can’t assume anything outside of what they know. In the same way, organizations should treat open-source and third-party components with the same eye toward security as they do with their own products.

There is always room for improvement, so scrutinize your on-the-shelf frameworks. Create a list of guiding security principles for new projects. Create and maintain a list of recommended software frameworks and components that your security team and developers can and should use.

An Olympian athlete wouldn’t wait until the day of competition to assess any potential issues that could arise as he or she competes. For companies, it should be the same mentality when identifying both generic bugs and security bugs to eliminate vulnerabilities. The sooner they get fixed in the development process, the better to avoid additional issues—not to mention it’s less expensive to fix earlier in the cycle.

Create a platform where developers and the security team can get advice, ask questions and share security-related information, similar to how a coach serves as a sounding board and critical element to an athlete’s success.

Strive toward your personal best and achieve certain benchmarks within various stages of development. Benchmark locations can be during the coding or build processes, within the source code repositories and throughout the QA process.

Don’t assume the input is ever varied or has not been manipulated. Keeping business logic code verification on the server allows you to ensure the proper input sanitation without the concern of input manipulation. In much the same way, many athletes track their performance to uncover the factors behind their success and failures.

Use whitelist validation on user input, denying the requests your application allows. By describing the data that is allowed to be input into the application, you greatly sift out malicious input intent on abusing the app.

Once an athlete is caught making a certain facial expression or utters a particular statement, there isn’t anything he or she can do to take it back—former U.S. Olympic gymnast McKayla Maroney can tell you that firsthand. Ensure that an adversary cannot change a query’s intent, thus reducing the risk of an SQL injection, by using prepared statements.

If a test comes back with major issues, it’s time to break the build and make sure those vulnerabilities are fixed before the next step. In the same way, Olympic athletes address flaws in their performance prior to competing. Don’t wait until 2020 to test out these tips—stay ahead of the competition and make your next move the most secure one yet.