The following model developed by David Wheeler, and referenced in the SANS Application Development Technology and Tools paper, shows how applications work and what vulnerabilities may be introduced during development. The bullets below show the model’s concepts followed by the recommended secure coding practices to remediate the associated vulnerability.
Inputs- Applications should validate the data that is coming in. This helps to prevent Script Injection and similar techniques.
Program Logic- The application should be well structured with good flow and controls. This helps to prevent issues like Race conditions.
Call out to external routines- The application should only call out to known, trusted resources. This helps to prevent cross-site scripting vulnerabilities.
Access to Data- The application should access the minimum data needed. This helps to prevent SQL Injection and Data Theft.
Output- The application should protect the data it sends making sure it’s properly formatted and aligned to user permissions. This helps prevent Script Injection.
Hi Matthew,
This is a great overview of the practices SANS explained on the reading. I believe it’s important that the team takes time to look all of it before developing or securing the applications. With increasing transformation to digital world, the vulnerabilities and threats against web applications are bigger concern so it became necessary to apply every secure coding practices. I think organization should have a good policy and understanding of these steps you listed here, so whoever engage in the process pay enough attention.
Thank Miray. I agree with your point about policy. It’s important that development teams are held accountable to secure coding practices. Without policy, developers will often practice security by obscurity which isn’t ideal. The recent issue with the Missouri Department of Education is a good example of this.
Validate inputs.-Validate input from all untrusted data sources. Proper input validation can eliminate most software vulnerabilities. Remain suspicious of most external data sources, including command line parameters, network interfaces, environment variables, and user-controlled files.
Architecture and design of security policies-Create a software architecture and design your software to implement and enforce security policies. For example, if your system requires different permissions at different times, consider dividing the system into various intercommunication subsystems, each with the appropriate set of permissions.
Denied by default-Access decisions are based on permissions rather than exclusions. That means that, by default, access is prohibited, and the protection scheme identifies the conditions under which access is allowed.
Nice point about denying permissions by default. It’s easy to over-permission users in applications if security isn’t front of mind. This coupled with zero-trust architecture helps limit attacker access when systems are breached.
SANS Institute explains the proper ways to secure programming practices. Programming model is important with its characteristics of inputs, program logic, call outs to external routines and access to data. There are so many secure coding practices to be ensured including input validation, output encoding, session management, access control, data protection, configurations, file and memory management. Since SANS reading was referencing the Open Web Application Security Project, I was able to take a look at the resource, and it addresses the importance of avoiding un-validated inputs.
To give an example of one of them, data type validations are the ones you can check the data type and validate against what the application expects. If the error handling is implement into program, it should handle if there is a mismatch to avoid vulnerabilities and threats. (Check for data length by enforcing the min and max lengths, nulls, patterns and legal valued) Most importantly, the application should not rely on client side validation.
Hi Miray, I like your reference to OWASP as a resource because they give a wide. variety of checklists and go in depth for all of these areas to make sure to check before deploying out any code.
I also referenced OWASP during this weeks readings. They do a very good job of summarizing secure programming processes without an overwhelming amount of text, and I found it very helpful to better understand the topic.
Secure coding practices apply a development process that seeks to predict and mitigate how attackers could exploit code flaws. Flaws may be present in various stages of development and may even exist within the development environment itself via inadequate people-centric access control. Secure coding practices reduce code tampering by third-party vendors and limit abuse by outside threats once the application goes to production, by testing the code for vulnerabilities at each stage of the process (ex. Input validation and data management).
I think it is also interesting how secure coding is relatively easy to conceptualize but companies make mistakes all of the time when coding. For example; at this point in the industry Microsoft Internet Explorer has become fun to pick apart since there is always security flaws. In fact, Google’s Project Zero has used Internet Explorer as an example for a lot of flaws as when finding one line of code that’s fixed – they discover faulty code right underneath it. As if nobody even bothered to check.
Secure code practice is a process of develop software code with security consideration regarding to various vulnerabilities to secure code at time of development against the defend cyber attacks.
So many time developers write the code for software and after that it will hack by hacker very easily due to various vulnerabilities in developed coding, to develop the secure application need to write secure code which is protected for the various cyber attacks.
Secure coding practices use to find and remove vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hacker after the developed the complete code.
Popular Secure coding practices:
• Data input validation
• Adhere to the principle of least privilege
• Sanitize data sent to other systems
• Practice defense in depth
• Adapt a secure coding standard
• Authentication and password management
• Cryptographic practice
• Logging and auditing
• Data protection and privacy
• Communication Security
Risk need to mitigate:
• Buffer Overflow
• SQL Injection
• Script injection and cross site script (XSS) Injection
• Format String
• Race Condition
Good point Mohammed,
It is far too often that software developers push code just to meet deadlines rather than having the luxury of the time to be able to implement secure coding practices and make extensive checks for security holes.
Secure coding practices are rules and guidelines that help reduce the number of security vulnerabilities. Using a simple programming model (input, program logic, call out, access to data, output) can help avoid buffer flow, SQL injections, script injections, and other vulnerabilities, as stated by SANS.
The risks needed to mitigate when coding are access control flaws, buffer overflow, SQL injection, Script & cross site script injection, command injection/shell escape, format string, and race conditions. This can all be prevented by following coding practice procedures such as input validation, output encoding, authentication and password management, access control, error handling and logging, session management, communication security, memory management, and cryptography. Some agile methodologies can help as well for example in DevOps you can shift left to test for any software early in the SDLC rather than later to ensure and prevent bugs during or after deployment.
What are secure coding practices? Secure coding is to design and develop software by avoiding weaknesses that lead to security-related vulnerabilities by following security standards. Best practices are: planning ahead to prevent security related surprises, validate data input, control access to applications, update network configuration to maintain security, and secure weak links.
What are the risks they intend to mitigate? Injection attacks (SQL), buffer overflow, missing encryption of sensitive data, use of hard-coded credentials.
What are secure coding practices and what risks are they intended to mitigate?
Per SANS, the secure coding practices are
-The input data should be validated and all the unnecessary input data should be discarded.
The application should be structured and written with good flow and controls.
-The application should only call other external resources that it knows, in other words, should call only the trusted resources. It should make sure that only valid data is passed to and received from the external resources.
The risks they intended to mitigate is
to avoid Command Injection/Shell escape, Cross-Site scripting vulnerabilities
to avoid Butter flow, Script injection, SQL Injection, Format Strings vulnerabilities and Countering SPAM
Secure coding practices are tools that are used to ensure that code is developed in the most effective way possible as to avoid risk. There are numerous techniques that can be used that are including but not limited to access control, session management, input validation, authentication and password management, memory management, and more. They are intended to mitigate risks of vulnerable code in application software such as access control flaws, buffer overflows, SQL injections, and so on.
You have given some good examples. Access control, session management, and input validation are all different protection techniques that organizations have taken proactive steps to help significantly reduce or eliminate vulnerabilities in software prior to deployment. It ensures that your runtime environment is as secure as your code, controlling commonly exploited software vulnerabilities at the root cause.
Secure coding is the practice of developing computer software in a way that guards against the accidental introduction of security vulnerabilities. Defects, bugs and logic flaws are consistently the primary cause of commonly exploited software vulnerabilities. Through the analysis of thousands of reported vulnerabilities, security professionals have discovered that most vulnerabilities stem from a relatively small number of common software programming errors. By identifying the insecure coding practices that lead to these errors and educating developers on secure alternatives, organizations can take proactive steps to help significantly reduce or eliminate vulnerabilities in software before deployment.
Secure coding is the practice of developing computer software in a way that prevents the accidental introduction of security vulnerabilities. The main causes of commonly exploited software vulnerabilities are defects, errors and logic flaws always. Software developers need to write software code with code security in mind. They maintain access to any code on a need-to-know basis will help prevent malicious execution of any insecure code. It ensures that your runtime environment is as secure as your code. To ensure good quality practices, use various assurance procedures such as code reviews and PEN testing to ensure quality. Secure coding practices are used to ensure that the risk of vulnerable code in application software is reduced. Organizations can take proactive steps to help significantly reduce or eliminate vulnerabilities in software prior to deployment.
I agree with your statement. Security is often secondary when developing applications, the most important thing to developers is that the application works, and security can be overlooked. In my previous roles, many of the senior developers always said security is a practice that needs to be implemented in every step of the application development process, and that is done with code reviews, input/output validation, and testing.
Hi Dan,
Great Point. The Secure Coding Practices Quick Reference Guide is a set of technology-agnostic general software secure coding practices integrated into the development lifecycle in a comprehensive checklist format.
Secure coding is writing code in concordance with the best security practices given based on the current industry standards for your system or application. Secure coding targets program logic in order to control input and output by a program to prevent an attacker from exploiting suspicious code in the system source code. An example of this would be developers controlling what the end user can enter into the application and prevent them from injecting code via a text box which could generate syntax errors and give them clues to other injections they may be able to access. Limiting user input is always advisable; if the user only needs to enter numbers then there (example: social security or credit card information) then they should not be able to enter letters or special characters. The application from a program logic level should apply least-privilege to prevent the end user from escalating their privilege into remote databases/resources. Section 4 of SANS reading 7 does a great job at outlying each practice and what it is used to prevent.
I also think that one of the most important factors of secure coding is restricting what input a user can enter. If an attacker is able to get a good visualization of the coding parameters and level of input verification, they may be smart enough take advantage of this and give themselves access to an entire system by exploiting vulnerabilities in the parameters.
What are secure coding practices and what risks are they intended to mitigate?
Secure coding standards and guidelines used to prevent security vulnerabilities. Unsafe coding practices result in vulnerabilities in application software that leads to sensitive data being exploited.
Risks secure coding practices intend to mitigate are: SQL injection attacks, buffer overflows, and script injections. Secure coding best practices to help protect against vulnerabilities are security by design, password management, access control, error handling and logging, system configuration, threat modeling, cryptographic practices, and input validation & output encoding.
Hey Victoria,
That’s a great post. Secure coding standards and guidelines are definitely used to prevent any security flaws while coding the application. The unsecure code does leads to exposure to the sensitive data as well as it can also affect the system as well through the attacks such as buffer overflows.
Unsafe coding practices result in costly vulnerabilities in application software that leads to the theft of sensitive data. Secure coding practices, on the other hand, prevent costly vulnerabilities in applications. The under-listed are examples of specific coding practices:
Adoption of the principle of least privilege
Data Sanitization
Defense in depth.
Input validation from trusted sources.
Heed compiler warnings
Architect and design for security policies
Code simplicity
Default deny
Secure coding practices expunge vulnerabilities that cyber attackers could exploit from ending up in the finished code. Therefore, it’s essential to ensure any software developed has checks and a system that helps strengthen the software and eliminate security issues like vulnerabilities.
That is a good list of examples of secure coding practices. It is important for companies to implement as many of these coding practices as possible but how does a company make time for all of them? Does only implementing a few of these have the same affect or do all need to be implemented in order to be successful?
Hello Ryan, excellent question.
I am a lobbyist for defense-in-depth, and I believe that security is never enough. The only time security becomes an issue is when it creates insecurity through disruptions. So if one can is adequate, stick with it. If two or more will do a better job, why not, if the process owner can afford and also implement it.
What are secure coding practices and what risks are they intended to mitigate?
There are many different approaches to securing code, which include code reviews for redundancy, source code scanners which seek for vulnerabilities that are known, most obviously input validation. The main components of secure coding include securing the 5 different domains of: input, logic, method calls, read/write access, and output. Validating these components first will protect against buffer overflows, injection attacks, etc. Proper programming logic mitigates race conditions which could be exploited to overtake flow of control. Calling known methods / routines will defend against shell escapes, xss, and command injection via trusted data being sent to trusted external resources. Data output must be emitted in a properly formatted type to also avoid BOFs, and Script Injection. Lastly, the read/write access should follow a least privilege principle to avoid SQL injection.
Great analysis and I had learnt a lot from your master piece. However, one might cynically and skeptically argue that the problem with software vulnerabilities is that they open up weaknesses in code – weaknesses that cybercriminals can exploit. Preventing cybersecurity incidents starts at the very beginning with software code itself. It is becoming increasingly important to look at the practice of secure coding and why it’s a vital discipline to understand so as to help the organization to combat weaknesses within the organization..
Hello Antonio, I like the breakdown of the above captioned, wherein you mentioned that “The main components of secure coding includes securing the five different domains of input, logic, method calls, read/write access and output. Validating these components will protect against buffer overflows, injection attacks, etc.” I also agree that, If these elements are adequately contained, they will mitigate most of the risks emanating from coding vulnerabilities
Accordingly, to the SAN article, the secure coding practice include knowing the environment where the application is being developed and where it would be deployed. It also includes the type of input the application accepts to avoid the buffer over flow, script injection, SQL injection. Applications also needs to be structured properly to avoid the buffer over flow, race condition, and script injection vulnerability. In addition, the application should also only accept the valid input that it requires to perform its task to avoid any SQL injection.
Hello Vraj, well said; knowledge of the development environment and proper structuring of the application architecture are essential components that must be considered to avoid compromise that may occur through malicious code injections, etc.
Secure coding practices help security professionals deter bad actors from penetrating or attacking their organizations assets. Security professionals should identify what inputs can be processed while also blacklisting any inputs that are not required to use the application. Vice versa, outputs produced by the application should be validated to ensure they can be accessed only by users who maintain appropriate access. Additionally, any application under development should allow communication only from trusted external sources. These practices can help ensure an application is secured from attacks such as Script injection, SQL Injection, and buffer overflows. Finally, access to data utilized by the application should be limited to ensure it the least amount of privilege is granted in order to run the application. This practice can help ensure an application is not compromised due to unauthorized access.
Hi Bryan, nice job! A lot of what you said ties into the OWASP Top 10 web application security risks (ie prevention of SQL injections, input validation, etc.). I attached the link if you want to check it out! https://owasp.org/www-project-top-ten/
Secure coding practices help ensure a secure, seamless development process for applications. Some of which were mentioned in the SANS reading included creating a programming model to map application processes/dataflow and ensuring data validation. Overall, secure coding practices seek to prevent application code being tampered with (therefore preserving integrity), avert issues revolving around availability in the time of a buffer overflow, DDOS attack, and ensure confidentiality by providing a secure environment where hackers cannot see invaluable source code and earn access into a system.
What are secure coding practices and what risks are they intended to mitigate?
These are best practices or patterns that should be emulated and applied when writing code. They describe a way to construct software and implement functions that are inherently more secure than anti-patterns. They allow software to be built without well known security flaws and reduce the probability that a piece of software could be hacked or used as an attack vector. OWASP is and example of and a great resource guidance on a set of secure coding practices.
Thanks for sharing Richard nice post. Your use of “emulated” really stuck out to me because it’s essential these best practices are applied on a consistent basis. Organizations should ensure adequate management oversight & governance is in place so it can support the implementation and subsequent monitoring of code.
What are secure coding practices and what risks are they intended to mitigate?
Simply put these are best programming principles that can be used to prevent flaws due to programming errors.
SANS reading let us know there are possible threat vectors and vulnerabilities, and in order to make sure the threats are managed well, the expectations from good programming practices
are:
The application should know what is coming in. All the input data should
be validated and all the unnecessary input data should be discarded. The
Benefits: Avoiding Buffer flow, Script injection, SQL Injection, Format
Strings vulnerabilities and Countering SPAM etc.
· The application should be structured and written with good flow and
controls. This includes program flow, data handling, memory handling,
error handling etc. The benefits: Avoiding Buffer Flow, Race conditions,
Script Injection vulnerabilities.
· The application should only call other external resources that it knows, in
other words, should call only the trusted resources. Also, it should make
sure that only valid data is passed to and received from the external
resources. The benefits: Avoiding Command Injection/ Shell escape,
Cross-Site scripting vulnerabilities.
Program Logic Output Input
Call out to external programs
Database
The application should limit access to only the data as needed for the
program logic and processing. If using databases for data access, the
application should insure that only validated queries are passed. The
“Principle of least privileges” should be strictly followed. The benefits:
Avoid SQL Injection, DATA theft etc.
· The application should guard what is being sent out; the output should be
properly formatted and data should sent only as per the user’s privileges
without disclosing too much of program information. The benefits:
Avoiding Script Injection, Format Strings, Buffer overflow etc.
Security by design is the method of integrating security considerations into every step of the development process, from pre- to post-production. This is to prevent common exploits from making their way into the end-product. On a similar note, privacy by design should also be considered.
Password management should be a consideration. Passwords should have a minimum level of complexity, and should be updated regularly. This hopefully prevents hackers from having long term access to the system, as the compromised credentials they are operating on should expire at some point. It also makes it more difficult to execute a brute force attack.
Access should be a consideration. Only those who absolutely need access to the system should be allowed access. The principle of least privilege means that in the event a hacker gained one set of credentials, ideally this wouldn’t provide access to everything on the network.
Secure coding practices are best defined as rules & guidelines that are used to prevent security vulnerabilities, such as broken authentication, SQL Injection, Cross-Site Scripting, etc. Some examples of secure coding practices are data input validation, access control, and user management. With data input validation, all input fields should be validated for things such as length and character encoding. This can be performed by whitelisting, and OWASP provides some examples on how to properly perform proper data input validation, examples being “encoding your data to ensure special characters are properly handled”, “use regular expressions to ensure all data uses expected and safe characters”, among others. Access control is as it sounds, by allowing only authorized users to access sensitive application data and files with strict controls in place to verify identity. Finally, user management is essential. Users can be the biggest threat to application data, regardless of intention. Authentication should be monitored and session time-outs should be implemented. By following these standards effectively, a user is able to prevent/detect/eliminate any errors that may compromise software security.
Secure coding practices are the rules and guidelines used to prevent security vulnerabilities. These guidelines are meant to govern the coding practices, techniques and decisions that developers make while building software. An example of mitigating the risks would be “default deny” approach to access permissions. It is code that denies access to sensitive resources. Some other best practices include: Password management, access control and system configuration.
Secure coding is a method of writing software and source code that’s shielded from cyber-attacks. With an increasing demand for rapid delivery, most businesses forsake best secure coding standards in their software development life cycle and development process. Such negligence will eventually negate the short-term benefits of rapid distribution as clients begin to vocalize their data breaches on social media and in the courtroom.
After a software has been fully developed, it should then be run through a series of cyber-attack scenarios it might encounter when deployed. This process of testing operational software is known as Dynamic Application Security Testing, or DAST.
DAST examines the functional resilience of software. If properly executed, DAST will uncover all security vulnerabilities that only surface when the software is in use. This is an essential secure coding practice that should be integrated into all software development life cycles.
The following model developed by David Wheeler, and referenced in the SANS Application Development Technology and Tools paper, shows how applications work and what vulnerabilities may be introduced during development. The bullets below show the model’s concepts followed by the recommended secure coding practices to remediate the associated vulnerability.
Inputs- Applications should validate the data that is coming in. This helps to prevent Script Injection and similar techniques.
Program Logic- The application should be well structured with good flow and controls. This helps to prevent issues like Race conditions.
Call out to external routines- The application should only call out to known, trusted resources. This helps to prevent cross-site scripting vulnerabilities.
Access to Data- The application should access the minimum data needed. This helps to prevent SQL Injection and Data Theft.
Output- The application should protect the data it sends making sure it’s properly formatted and aligned to user permissions. This helps prevent Script Injection.
Hi Matthew,
This is a great overview of the practices SANS explained on the reading. I believe it’s important that the team takes time to look all of it before developing or securing the applications. With increasing transformation to digital world, the vulnerabilities and threats against web applications are bigger concern so it became necessary to apply every secure coding practices. I think organization should have a good policy and understanding of these steps you listed here, so whoever engage in the process pay enough attention.
Thank Miray. I agree with your point about policy. It’s important that development teams are held accountable to secure coding practices. Without policy, developers will often practice security by obscurity which isn’t ideal. The recent issue with the Missouri Department of Education is a good example of this.
Validate inputs.-Validate input from all untrusted data sources. Proper input validation can eliminate most software vulnerabilities. Remain suspicious of most external data sources, including command line parameters, network interfaces, environment variables, and user-controlled files.
Architecture and design of security policies-Create a software architecture and design your software to implement and enforce security policies. For example, if your system requires different permissions at different times, consider dividing the system into various intercommunication subsystems, each with the appropriate set of permissions.
Denied by default-Access decisions are based on permissions rather than exclusions. That means that, by default, access is prohibited, and the protection scheme identifies the conditions under which access is allowed.
Nice point about denying permissions by default. It’s easy to over-permission users in applications if security isn’t front of mind. This coupled with zero-trust architecture helps limit attacker access when systems are breached.
SANS Institute explains the proper ways to secure programming practices. Programming model is important with its characteristics of inputs, program logic, call outs to external routines and access to data. There are so many secure coding practices to be ensured including input validation, output encoding, session management, access control, data protection, configurations, file and memory management. Since SANS reading was referencing the Open Web Application Security Project, I was able to take a look at the resource, and it addresses the importance of avoiding un-validated inputs.
To give an example of one of them, data type validations are the ones you can check the data type and validate against what the application expects. If the error handling is implement into program, it should handle if there is a mismatch to avoid vulnerabilities and threats. (Check for data length by enforcing the min and max lengths, nulls, patterns and legal valued) Most importantly, the application should not rely on client side validation.
Hi Miray, I like your reference to OWASP as a resource because they give a wide. variety of checklists and go in depth for all of these areas to make sure to check before deploying out any code.
Miray,
I also referenced OWASP during this weeks readings. They do a very good job of summarizing secure programming processes without an overwhelming amount of text, and I found it very helpful to better understand the topic.
Secure coding practices apply a development process that seeks to predict and mitigate how attackers could exploit code flaws. Flaws may be present in various stages of development and may even exist within the development environment itself via inadequate people-centric access control. Secure coding practices reduce code tampering by third-party vendors and limit abuse by outside threats once the application goes to production, by testing the code for vulnerabilities at each stage of the process (ex. Input validation and data management).
I think it is also interesting how secure coding is relatively easy to conceptualize but companies make mistakes all of the time when coding. For example; at this point in the industry Microsoft Internet Explorer has become fun to pick apart since there is always security flaws. In fact, Google’s Project Zero has used Internet Explorer as an example for a lot of flaws as when finding one line of code that’s fixed – they discover faulty code right underneath it. As if nobody even bothered to check.
Secure code practice is a process of develop software code with security consideration regarding to various vulnerabilities to secure code at time of development against the defend cyber attacks.
So many time developers write the code for software and after that it will hack by hacker very easily due to various vulnerabilities in developed coding, to develop the secure application need to write secure code which is protected for the various cyber attacks.
Secure coding practices use to find and remove vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hacker after the developed the complete code.
Popular Secure coding practices:
• Data input validation
• Adhere to the principle of least privilege
• Sanitize data sent to other systems
• Practice defense in depth
• Adapt a secure coding standard
• Authentication and password management
• Cryptographic practice
• Logging and auditing
• Data protection and privacy
• Communication Security
Risk need to mitigate:
• Buffer Overflow
• SQL Injection
• Script injection and cross site script (XSS) Injection
• Format String
• Race Condition
Good point Mohammed,
It is far too often that software developers push code just to meet deadlines rather than having the luxury of the time to be able to implement secure coding practices and make extensive checks for security holes.
Secure coding practices are rules and guidelines that help reduce the number of security vulnerabilities. Using a simple programming model (input, program logic, call out, access to data, output) can help avoid buffer flow, SQL injections, script injections, and other vulnerabilities, as stated by SANS.
The risks needed to mitigate when coding are access control flaws, buffer overflow, SQL injection, Script & cross site script injection, command injection/shell escape, format string, and race conditions. This can all be prevented by following coding practice procedures such as input validation, output encoding, authentication and password management, access control, error handling and logging, session management, communication security, memory management, and cryptography. Some agile methodologies can help as well for example in DevOps you can shift left to test for any software early in the SDLC rather than later to ensure and prevent bugs during or after deployment.
What are secure coding practices? Secure coding is to design and develop software by avoiding weaknesses that lead to security-related vulnerabilities by following security standards. Best practices are: planning ahead to prevent security related surprises, validate data input, control access to applications, update network configuration to maintain security, and secure weak links.
What are the risks they intend to mitigate? Injection attacks (SQL), buffer overflow, missing encryption of sensitive data, use of hard-coded credentials.
Hey Christopher,
Planning ahead really is a great way to prevent these potential threats. Thanks for your definition on secure coding.
What are secure coding practices and what risks are they intended to mitigate?
Per SANS, the secure coding practices are
-The input data should be validated and all the unnecessary input data should be discarded.
The application should be structured and written with good flow and controls.
-The application should only call other external resources that it knows, in other words, should call only the trusted resources. It should make sure that only valid data is passed to and received from the external resources.
The risks they intended to mitigate is
to avoid Command Injection/Shell escape, Cross-Site scripting vulnerabilities
to avoid Butter flow, Script injection, SQL Injection, Format Strings vulnerabilities and Countering SPAM
are*
Secure coding practices are tools that are used to ensure that code is developed in the most effective way possible as to avoid risk. There are numerous techniques that can be used that are including but not limited to access control, session management, input validation, authentication and password management, memory management, and more. They are intended to mitigate risks of vulnerable code in application software such as access control flaws, buffer overflows, SQL injections, and so on.
Hi Ryan,
You have given some good examples. Access control, session management, and input validation are all different protection techniques that organizations have taken proactive steps to help significantly reduce or eliminate vulnerabilities in software prior to deployment. It ensures that your runtime environment is as secure as your code, controlling commonly exploited software vulnerabilities at the root cause.
Secure coding is the practice of developing computer software in a way that guards against the accidental introduction of security vulnerabilities. Defects, bugs and logic flaws are consistently the primary cause of commonly exploited software vulnerabilities. Through the analysis of thousands of reported vulnerabilities, security professionals have discovered that most vulnerabilities stem from a relatively small number of common software programming errors. By identifying the insecure coding practices that lead to these errors and educating developers on secure alternatives, organizations can take proactive steps to help significantly reduce or eliminate vulnerabilities in software before deployment.
Hello Kofi,
You made some good points and the word that stuck out to me was “proactive”, which I believe is what secure coding boils down to
Secure coding is the practice of developing computer software in a way that prevents the accidental introduction of security vulnerabilities. The main causes of commonly exploited software vulnerabilities are defects, errors and logic flaws always. Software developers need to write software code with code security in mind. They maintain access to any code on a need-to-know basis will help prevent malicious execution of any insecure code. It ensures that your runtime environment is as secure as your code. To ensure good quality practices, use various assurance procedures such as code reviews and PEN testing to ensure quality. Secure coding practices are used to ensure that the risk of vulnerable code in application software is reduced. Organizations can take proactive steps to help significantly reduce or eliminate vulnerabilities in software prior to deployment.
Hi Dan Xu,
I agree with your statement. Security is often secondary when developing applications, the most important thing to developers is that the application works, and security can be overlooked. In my previous roles, many of the senior developers always said security is a practice that needs to be implemented in every step of the application development process, and that is done with code reviews, input/output validation, and testing.
Hi Dan,
Great Point. The Secure Coding Practices Quick Reference Guide is a set of technology-agnostic general software secure coding practices integrated into the development lifecycle in a comprehensive checklist format.
Secure coding is writing code in concordance with the best security practices given based on the current industry standards for your system or application. Secure coding targets program logic in order to control input and output by a program to prevent an attacker from exploiting suspicious code in the system source code. An example of this would be developers controlling what the end user can enter into the application and prevent them from injecting code via a text box which could generate syntax errors and give them clues to other injections they may be able to access. Limiting user input is always advisable; if the user only needs to enter numbers then there (example: social security or credit card information) then they should not be able to enter letters or special characters. The application from a program logic level should apply least-privilege to prevent the end user from escalating their privilege into remote databases/resources. Section 4 of SANS reading 7 does a great job at outlying each practice and what it is used to prevent.
Michael,
I also think that one of the most important factors of secure coding is restricting what input a user can enter. If an attacker is able to get a good visualization of the coding parameters and level of input verification, they may be smart enough take advantage of this and give themselves access to an entire system by exploiting vulnerabilities in the parameters.
-Mike
What are secure coding practices and what risks are they intended to mitigate?
Secure coding standards and guidelines used to prevent security vulnerabilities. Unsafe coding practices result in vulnerabilities in application software that leads to sensitive data being exploited.
Risks secure coding practices intend to mitigate are: SQL injection attacks, buffer overflows, and script injections. Secure coding best practices to help protect against vulnerabilities are security by design, password management, access control, error handling and logging, system configuration, threat modeling, cryptographic practices, and input validation & output encoding.
Hey Victoria,
That’s a great post. Secure coding standards and guidelines are definitely used to prevent any security flaws while coding the application. The unsecure code does leads to exposure to the sensitive data as well as it can also affect the system as well through the attacks such as buffer overflows.
Unsafe coding practices result in costly vulnerabilities in application software that leads to the theft of sensitive data. Secure coding practices, on the other hand, prevent costly vulnerabilities in applications. The under-listed are examples of specific coding practices:
Adoption of the principle of least privilege
Data Sanitization
Defense in depth.
Input validation from trusted sources.
Heed compiler warnings
Architect and design for security policies
Code simplicity
Default deny
Secure coding practices expunge vulnerabilities that cyber attackers could exploit from ending up in the finished code. Therefore, it’s essential to ensure any software developed has checks and a system that helps strengthen the software and eliminate security issues like vulnerabilities.
Olayinka,
That is a good list of examples of secure coding practices. It is important for companies to implement as many of these coding practices as possible but how does a company make time for all of them? Does only implementing a few of these have the same affect or do all need to be implemented in order to be successful?
Hello Ryan, excellent question.
I am a lobbyist for defense-in-depth, and I believe that security is never enough. The only time security becomes an issue is when it creates insecurity through disruptions. So if one can is adequate, stick with it. If two or more will do a better job, why not, if the process owner can afford and also implement it.
What are secure coding practices and what risks are they intended to mitigate?
There are many different approaches to securing code, which include code reviews for redundancy, source code scanners which seek for vulnerabilities that are known, most obviously input validation. The main components of secure coding include securing the 5 different domains of: input, logic, method calls, read/write access, and output. Validating these components first will protect against buffer overflows, injection attacks, etc. Proper programming logic mitigates race conditions which could be exploited to overtake flow of control. Calling known methods / routines will defend against shell escapes, xss, and command injection via trusted data being sent to trusted external resources. Data output must be emitted in a properly formatted type to also avoid BOFs, and Script Injection. Lastly, the read/write access should follow a least privilege principle to avoid SQL injection.
Great analysis and I had learnt a lot from your master piece. However, one might cynically and skeptically argue that the problem with software vulnerabilities is that they open up weaknesses in code – weaknesses that cybercriminals can exploit. Preventing cybersecurity incidents starts at the very beginning with software code itself. It is becoming increasingly important to look at the practice of secure coding and why it’s a vital discipline to understand so as to help the organization to combat weaknesses within the organization..
Hello Antonio, I like the breakdown of the above captioned, wherein you mentioned that “The main components of secure coding includes securing the five different domains of input, logic, method calls, read/write access and output. Validating these components will protect against buffer overflows, injection attacks, etc.” I also agree that, If these elements are adequately contained, they will mitigate most of the risks emanating from coding vulnerabilities
Accordingly, to the SAN article, the secure coding practice include knowing the environment where the application is being developed and where it would be deployed. It also includes the type of input the application accepts to avoid the buffer over flow, script injection, SQL injection. Applications also needs to be structured properly to avoid the buffer over flow, race condition, and script injection vulnerability. In addition, the application should also only accept the valid input that it requires to perform its task to avoid any SQL injection.
Hello Vraj, well said; knowledge of the development environment and proper structuring of the application architecture are essential components that must be considered to avoid compromise that may occur through malicious code injections, etc.
Secure coding practices help security professionals deter bad actors from penetrating or attacking their organizations assets. Security professionals should identify what inputs can be processed while also blacklisting any inputs that are not required to use the application. Vice versa, outputs produced by the application should be validated to ensure they can be accessed only by users who maintain appropriate access. Additionally, any application under development should allow communication only from trusted external sources. These practices can help ensure an application is secured from attacks such as Script injection, SQL Injection, and buffer overflows. Finally, access to data utilized by the application should be limited to ensure it the least amount of privilege is granted in order to run the application. This practice can help ensure an application is not compromised due to unauthorized access.
Hi Bryan, nice job! A lot of what you said ties into the OWASP Top 10 web application security risks (ie prevention of SQL injections, input validation, etc.). I attached the link if you want to check it out! https://owasp.org/www-project-top-ten/
Secure coding practices help ensure a secure, seamless development process for applications. Some of which were mentioned in the SANS reading included creating a programming model to map application processes/dataflow and ensuring data validation. Overall, secure coding practices seek to prevent application code being tampered with (therefore preserving integrity), avert issues revolving around availability in the time of a buffer overflow, DDOS attack, and ensure confidentiality by providing a secure environment where hackers cannot see invaluable source code and earn access into a system.
What are secure coding practices and what risks are they intended to mitigate?
These are best practices or patterns that should be emulated and applied when writing code. They describe a way to construct software and implement functions that are inherently more secure than anti-patterns. They allow software to be built without well known security flaws and reduce the probability that a piece of software could be hacked or used as an attack vector. OWASP is and example of and a great resource guidance on a set of secure coding practices.
Thanks for sharing Richard nice post. Your use of “emulated” really stuck out to me because it’s essential these best practices are applied on a consistent basis. Organizations should ensure adequate management oversight & governance is in place so it can support the implementation and subsequent monitoring of code.
What are secure coding practices and what risks are they intended to mitigate?
Simply put these are best programming principles that can be used to prevent flaws due to programming errors.
SANS reading let us know there are possible threat vectors and vulnerabilities, and in order to make sure the threats are managed well, the expectations from good programming practices
are:
The application should know what is coming in. All the input data should
be validated and all the unnecessary input data should be discarded. The
Benefits: Avoiding Buffer flow, Script injection, SQL Injection, Format
Strings vulnerabilities and Countering SPAM etc.
· The application should be structured and written with good flow and
controls. This includes program flow, data handling, memory handling,
error handling etc. The benefits: Avoiding Buffer Flow, Race conditions,
Script Injection vulnerabilities.
· The application should only call other external resources that it knows, in
other words, should call only the trusted resources. Also, it should make
sure that only valid data is passed to and received from the external
resources. The benefits: Avoiding Command Injection/ Shell escape,
Cross-Site scripting vulnerabilities.
Program Logic Output Input
Call out to external programs
Database
The application should limit access to only the data as needed for the
program logic and processing. If using databases for data access, the
application should insure that only validated queries are passed. The
“Principle of least privileges” should be strictly followed. The benefits:
Avoid SQL Injection, DATA theft etc.
· The application should guard what is being sent out; the output should be
properly formatted and data should sent only as per the user’s privileges
without disclosing too much of program information. The benefits:
Avoiding Script Injection, Format Strings, Buffer overflow etc.
Security by design is the method of integrating security considerations into every step of the development process, from pre- to post-production. This is to prevent common exploits from making their way into the end-product. On a similar note, privacy by design should also be considered.
Password management should be a consideration. Passwords should have a minimum level of complexity, and should be updated regularly. This hopefully prevents hackers from having long term access to the system, as the compromised credentials they are operating on should expire at some point. It also makes it more difficult to execute a brute force attack.
Access should be a consideration. Only those who absolutely need access to the system should be allowed access. The principle of least privilege means that in the event a hacker gained one set of credentials, ideally this wouldn’t provide access to everything on the network.
Secure coding practices are best defined as rules & guidelines that are used to prevent security vulnerabilities, such as broken authentication, SQL Injection, Cross-Site Scripting, etc. Some examples of secure coding practices are data input validation, access control, and user management. With data input validation, all input fields should be validated for things such as length and character encoding. This can be performed by whitelisting, and OWASP provides some examples on how to properly perform proper data input validation, examples being “encoding your data to ensure special characters are properly handled”, “use regular expressions to ensure all data uses expected and safe characters”, among others. Access control is as it sounds, by allowing only authorized users to access sensitive application data and files with strict controls in place to verify identity. Finally, user management is essential. Users can be the biggest threat to application data, regardless of intention. Authentication should be monitored and session time-outs should be implemented. By following these standards effectively, a user is able to prevent/detect/eliminate any errors that may compromise software security.
Secure coding practices are the rules and guidelines used to prevent security vulnerabilities. These guidelines are meant to govern the coding practices, techniques and decisions that developers make while building software. An example of mitigating the risks would be “default deny” approach to access permissions. It is code that denies access to sensitive resources. Some other best practices include: Password management, access control and system configuration.
Secure coding is a method of writing software and source code that’s shielded from cyber-attacks. With an increasing demand for rapid delivery, most businesses forsake best secure coding standards in their software development life cycle and development process. Such negligence will eventually negate the short-term benefits of rapid distribution as clients begin to vocalize their data breaches on social media and in the courtroom.
After a software has been fully developed, it should then be run through a series of cyber-attack scenarios it might encounter when deployed. This process of testing operational software is known as Dynamic Application Security Testing, or DAST.
DAST examines the functional resilience of software. If properly executed, DAST will uncover all security vulnerabilities that only surface when the software is in use. This is an essential secure coding practice that should be integrated into all software development life cycles.
https://www.upguard.com/blog/secure-coding