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Application Security Powerpoint Presentation Slides

This Application Security PowerPoint presentation briefly overviews application security, its features, common threats, and benefits. It also includes the comparative analysis of vulnerability scanning and penetration testing and the difference between authentication and authorization. Additionally, this Application Security Testing PPT contains application security types, including authentication, authorization, access control, logging, encryption, cloud-native application security, etc. Furthermore, Unlocking the Authentication for Application Security Template consists of various types of security testing, including penetration testing, code review, and vulnerability scanning. Moreover, The Application Security Testing Presentation consists of the application security trends and the Compound Annual Growth RateCAGR of application security. Lastly, this Cloud Native Application Security Deck outlines best practices, a checklist, a training budget, a timeline, a roadmap, and the impact of application security. Download our 100 percent editable and customizable template, also compatible with Google Slides.

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PowerPoint presentation slides

Deliver this complete deck to your team members and other collaborators. Encompassed with stylized slides presenting various concepts, this Application Security Powerpoint Presentation Slides is the best tool you can utilize. Personalize its content and graphics to make it unique and thought-provoking. All the seventy three slides are editable and modifiable, so feel free to adjust them to your business setting. The font, color, and other components also come in an editable format making this PPT design the best choice for your next presentation. So, download now.

People who downloaded this PowerPoint presentation also viewed the following :

IT , Cyber Security
Authentication ,
Authorization ,
Access Control ,
Security Testing ,
Penetration Testing

Content of this Powerpoint Presentation

Slide 1 : This slide introduces Application Security. State Your Company Name and begin. Slide 2 : This slide is an Agenda slide. State your agendas here. Slide 3 : This slide shows a Table of Contents for the presentation. Slide 4 : This slide is an introductory slide. Slide 5 : This slide discusses the overview of application security which includes its objectives such as protecting data, minimize risk, etc. Slide 6 : This slide outlines the key characteristics of application security which include authentication, authorization, encryption, logging, etc. Slide 7 : This slide highlights the key advantages of application security which include minimum risk exposure, security, etc. Slide 8 : This slide discusses the vulnerabilities and security threats in web application such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, etc. Slide 9 : This slide is an introductory slide. Slide 10 : This slide depicts the market growth of application security by software tools such as white-box testing, black-box testing, etc. Slide 11 : This slide showcases the five trends of application security which include, AppSec & CloudSec merge, expanding attack surfaces, etc. Slide 12 : This slide is an introductory slide. Slide 13 : This slide discusses about the overview of authentication in application security and the various elements of MFA. Slide 14 : This slide highlights the introduction of second type of web security, that is, cloud native application security. Slide 15 : This slide is an introductory slide. Slide 16 : This slide discusses the introduction of encryption in application security for protection of specific fields in an application. Slide 17 : This slide outlines the characteristics of encryption in application security such as security, easy-to-use, document support, etc. Slide 18 : This slide portrays the objectives of application-level encryption in application security which include data protection, increased security, etc. Slide 19 : This slide is an introductory slide. Slide 20 : This slide ertains to the application security testing tool pyramid which includes tools such as correlation tools, test coverage analysis, etc. Slide 21 : This slide embarks the application security testing tools reference model along with the workflow. Slide 22 : This slide is an introductory slide. Slide 23 : This slide mentions the overview of authorization in application security for authorized access of resource. Slide 24 : This slide is an introductory slide. Slide 25 : This slide highlights the introduction of access control safeguards in application security for preventing malicious attacks in applications. Slide 26 : This slide outlines the different types of access control safeguards in application security. Slide 27 : This slide represents the installation process of access control system for application security in an organization. Slide 28 : This slide is an introductory slide. Slide 29 : This slide entails the introduction of log management in application security for decreasing the security threats. Slide 30 : This slide discusses the selection of security events that need to be logged for application security to ensure user accountability. Slide 31 : This slide highlights the best approaches of logging implementation which include preventing inappropriate actions, employ logging tools, etc. Slide 32 : This slide is an introductory slide. Slide 33 : This slide depicts the overview of penetration testing for application security which includes the purpose of penetration testing. Slide 34 : This slide highlights the steps for implementing penetration testing which include planning and reconnaissance, gaining access, etc. Slide 35 : This slide is an introductory slide. Slide 36 : This slide outlines the introduction of secure code review in application security for efficient working of an application. Slide 37 : This slide puts the two types of secure code review in application security which are automated code review and manual code review. Slide 38 : This slide is an introductory slide. Slide 39 : This slide outlines the overview of vulnerability scanning in security testing for application security. Slide 40 : This slide highlights the tools used for vulnerability scanning in security testing in application security which include Acunetix, Akto, etc. Slide 41 : This slide is an introductory slide. Slide 42 : This slide outlines the problems and relevant solutions of application security deployment to ensure smooth functioning. Slide 43 : This slide is an introductory slide. Slide 44 : This slide puts the difference between vulnerability scanning and penetration testing based on aspects such as nature, purpose, etc. Slide 45 : This slide caters to the difference between authentication and authorization in application security on aspects such as purpose, operation, etc. Slide 46 : This slide is an introductory slide. Slide 47 : This slide discusses the best approaches for application security deployment which include assess threats, shift security left, control rights, etc. Slide 48 : This slide entails the actions performed while deploying application security, person responsible, status and comments for the same. Slide 49 : This slide is an introductory slide. Slide 50 : This slide represents the training schedule for IT teams in an organization to efficiently implementing application security. Slide 51 : This slide showcases the technology cost breakdown for different components such as internet, software, IT staff, etc. Slide 52 : This slide provides a 30-60-90-day plan with text boxes. Slide 53 : This slide outlines the different steps performed while deploying application security, including planning phase, requirement gathering, etc. Slide 54 : This slide depicts the 30 60 90 days plan for application security which includes tasks such as assessment, security implementation, etc. Slide 55 : This slide puts the steps to deploy application security in organization such as defining objectives, planning, monitoring, etc. Slide 56 : This slide showcases the performance tracking dashboard for application security to analyze and monitor security of application. Slide 57 : This slide is an introductory slide. Slide 58 : This slide showcases the after application security impact on business along with factors that have improved the overall performance. Slide 59 : This slide shows the comparative analysis of the before versus after implementation of application security situation of an organization. Slide 60 : This slide is an introductory slide. Slide 61 : This slide highlights the overview of the company, problems faced, and their related solutions in the case study. Slide 62 : This slide shows all the icons included in the presentation. Slide 63 : This slide is titled Additional Slides for moving forward. Slide 64 : This slide showcases the suitable graph/chart. Slide 65 : This slide is a Timeline slide. Show data related to time intervals here. Slide 66 : This slide depicts a Venn diagram with text boxes. Slide 67 : This slide is a financial slide. Show your finance-related stuff here. Slide 68 : This slide contains a Puzzle with related icons and text. Slide 69 : This slide is Our Goal slide. State your firm's goals here. Slide 70 : This slide is an Idea Generation slide to state a new idea or highlight information, specifications, etc. Slide 71 : This slide provides a 30-60-90-day plan with text boxes. Slide 72 : This slide shows Post-It Notes. Post your important notes here. Slide 73 : This slide is a thank-you slide with address, contact numbers, and email address.

Application Security Powerpoint Presentation Slides with all 82 slides:

Use our Application Security Powerpoint Presentation Slides to effectively help you save your valuable time. They are readymade to fit into any presentation structure.

Ratings and Reviews

by Christoper Chavez

March 26, 2024

by Rhys Moore

March 25, 2024

Best practices
Security operations

How to build a successful application security program

By Natalia Godyla, Sr. Business Planner
By Tanya Janca, Chief Executive Officer, We Hack Purple
Microsoft Security Insights
Security strategies

The security community is continuously changing, growing, and learning from each other to better position the world against cyber threats. In the latest Voice of the Community blog series post, Microsoft Product Marketing Manager Natalia Godyla talks with Tanya Janca, Founder of We Hack Purple Academy and author of the best-selling book “ Alice and Bob Learn Application Security .” Previously, Tanya shared her perspectives on the role of application security (AppSec) and the challenges facing AppSec professionals. In this blog, Tanya shares how to build an AppSec program, find security champions, and measure its success.

Natalia: When you’re building an AppSec program, what are the objectives and requirements?

Tanya: This is sort of a trick question because the way I do it is based on what’s already there and what they want to achieve. For Canada, I did antiterrorism activities, and you better believe that was the strictest security program that any human has ever seen. If I’m working with a company that sells scented soap on the internet, the level of security that they require is very different, their budget is different, and the importance of what they’re protecting is different. I try to figure out what the company’s risks are and what their tolerance is for change. For instance, I’ve been called into a lot of banks and they want the security to be tight, but they’re change-adverse. I find out what matters to them and try to bring their eyes to what should matter to them.

I also usually ask for all scan results. Even if they have almost no AppSec program, usually people have been doing scanning or they’ve had a penetration test. I look at all of it and I look at the top three things and I say, “OK, let’s just obliterate those top three things,” because quite often the top two or three are 40 to 60 percent of their vulnerabilities. First, I stop all the bleeding, and then I create processes and security awareness for developers. We’re going to have a secure coding day and deep dive into each one of these things. I’m going to spend quality time with the people who review all the pull requests so they can look for the top three and start setting specific, measurable goals.

It’s really important to get the developers to help you. When you have a secure coding training, a bunch of developers will self-identify as the security developer. There will be one person who asks multiple questions. We’re going to get that person’s email. They’re our new friend. We’re going to buy that person some books and encourage open communication because that person is going to be our security champion. Eventually, many of my clients start security champion programs and that’s even better because then you have a team of developers—hopefully one per team—that are helping you bring things to their team’s attention.

Natalia: What are some of the key performance indicators (KPIs) for measuring security posture?

Tanya: As application security professionals, we want to minimize the risk of scary apps and then try to bring everything across the board up to a higher security posture . Each organization sets that differently. For an application security program, I would measure that every app receives security attention in every phase of the software development life cycle . For a program, I take inventory of all their apps and APIs. Inventories are a difficult problem in application security; it’s the toughest problem that our field has not solved.

Once you have an inventory, you want to figure out if you can do a quick dynamic application security testing (DAST) scan on everything. You will see it light up like a Christmas tree on some, and on others, it found a couple of lows. It’s not perfect, but it’s what you can do in 30 days. You can scan a whole bunch of things quickly and see OK, so these things are terrifying, these things look OK. Now, let’s concentrate on the terrifying things and make them a little less scary.

Natalia: Do you have any best practices for threat modeling cloud security?

Tanya: For threat modeling generally, I introduce it as a hangout session with a security person and try not to be too formal the first time, because developers usually think, “What is she doing here? Danger, Will Robinson, danger. The security person wants to spend time with us. What have we done wrong?” I say, “I wanted to talk about your app and see if there’s any helpful advice I can offer.” Then, I start asking questions like, “If you were going to hack your app, how would you do it?”

I like the STRIDE methodology , where each of the letters represents a different thing that you need to worry about happening to your apps. Specifically, spoofing, tampering, repudiation, information disclosure, denial of service (DOS), and elevation of privilege. Could someone pretend to be someone else? Could someone pretend to be you? I go through it slowly in a conversational manner because that app is their baby, and I don’t want them to feel like I’m attacking their baby. Eventually, I teach them STRIDE so they can think about these things. Then, we come up with a plan and I say, “OK, I’m going to write up these notes and email them to you.” Writing the notes means you can assign tasks to people.

With threat modeling in the cloud, you must ask more questions, especially if your organization has had previous problems. You want to ask about those because there will be patterns. The biggest issue with the cloud is that we didn’t give them enough education. When we’re bringing them to the cloud, we need to teach them what we expect from them, and then we’ll get it. If we don’t, there’s a high likelihood we won’t get it.

Natalia: How can security professionals convince decision-makers to invest in AppSec?

Tanya: I have a bunch of tricks. The first one is to give presentations on AppSec. I would do lunch and learns. For instance, I sent out an email once to developers: “I’m going to break into a bank at lunch. Who wants to come watch?” and then I showed them this demo of a fake bank. I explained what SQL injection was and I explained how I’d found that vulnerability in one of our apps and what could happen if we didn’t fix it. And they said, “Woah!” Or I’d ask, “Who wants to learn how to hack apps?” and then I showed them a DAST tool. I kept showing them stuff and they started becoming more interested.

Then, I had to interest the developer managers and upper management. Some were still not on board because this was their first AppSec program and my first AppSec program. No one would do what I said, and I had all these penetration test results from a third party, and we had hired four different security assessors and they’d reported big issues that needed to be addressed.

So, I came up with a document called the risk sign-off sheet, which listed all the security risks and exactly what could happen to the business. I was extremely specific about what worried me. I printed it and I had a sign-off for the Director of Security for the whole building and the Chief Information Officer of the entire organization. I went to them and said, “I need your signature that you accept this risk on behalf of your organization.” I put a little note on the risk sign-off sheet that read: Please sign.

The Director of Security called and said, “What is this, Tanya?” and I told him, “No one will fix these things and I don’t have the authority to accept this risk on behalf of the organization. Only you do. I don’t have the authority to make these people fix these things. Only you do. I need you to sign to prove that you were aware of the risks. When we’re in the news, I need to know who’s at fault.” Both the CIO and the Director of Security refused to sign, and I said, “Then you have to give me the authority. I can’t have the responsibility and not have the authority” and it worked. I’ve used it twice at work and it worked.

It’s also important to explain to them using words they understand. The Head of Security, who is in charge of physical security and IT security, was a brilliant man but he didn’t know AppSec. When I explained that because of this vulnerability you can do this with the app, and this is what can result for our customers, he said, “Oh, let’s do something.” I had to learn how to communicate a lot better to do well at AppSec because as a developer, I would just speak developer to other developers.

Elevate your security posture with Microsoft Cloud App Security , Microsoft’s Cloud Access Security Broker.
Learn about Microsoft’s Cloud Security approach.
Get started with Azure Security Center .

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

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Home > Learning Center > Application Security: The Complete Guide

Article's content

Application security: the complete guide, what is application security.

Application security aims to protect software application code and data against cyber threats. You can and should apply application security during all phases of development, including design, development, and deployment.

Here are several ways to promote application security throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC):

Introduce security standards and tools during design and application development phases. For example, include vulnerability scanning during early development.
Implement security procedures and systems to protect applications in production environments. For example, perform continuous security testing.
Implement strong authentication for applications that contain sensitive data or are mission critical.
Use security systems such as firewalls, web application firewalls (WAF), and intrusion prevention systems (IPS).

What Types of Applications Does a Modern Organization Need to Secure?

Web application security.

A web application is software that runs on a web server and is accessible via the Internet. The client runs in a web browser. By nature, applications must accept connections from clients over insecure networks. This exposes them to a range of vulnerabilities. Many web applications are business critical and contain sensitive customer data, making them a valuable target for attackers and a high priority for any cyber security program.

The evolution of the Internet has addressed some web application vulnerabilities – such as the introduction of HTTPS, which creates an encrypted communication channel that protects against man in the middle (MitM) attacks. However, many vulnerabilities remain. The most severe and common vulnerabilities are documented by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), in the form of the OWASP Top 10.

Due to the growing problem of web application security, many security vendors have introduced solutions especially designed to secure web applications. Examples include the web application firewall (WAF), a security tool designed to detect and block application-layer attacks.

Learn more in our detailed guide to website security

API Security

Application Programming Interfaces (API) are growing in importance. They are the basis of modern microservices applications, and an entire API economy has emerged, which allows organizations to share data and access software functionality created by others. This means API security is critical for modern organizations.

APIs that suffer from security vulnerabilities are the cause of major data breaches. They can expose sensitive data and result in disruption of critical business operations. Common security weaknesses of APIs are weak authentication, unwanted exposure of data, and failure to perform rate limiting, which enables API abuse.

Like web application security, the need for API security has led to the development of specialized tools that can identify vulnerabilities in APIs and secure APIs in production.

Learn more in the detailed guide to API Security

Cloud Native Application Security

Cloud native applications are applications built in a microservices architecture using technologies like virtual machines, containers, and serverless platforms. Cloud native security is a complex challenge, because cloud native applications have a large number of moving parts and components tend to be ephemeral—frequently torn down and replaced by others. This makes it difficult to gain visibility over a cloud native environment and ensure all components are secure.

In cloud native applications, infrastructure and environments are typically set up automatically based on declarative configuration—this is called infrastructure as code (IaC). Developers are responsible for building declarative configurations and application code, and both should be subject to security considerations. Shifting left is much more important in cloud native environments, because almost everything is determined at the development stage.

Cloud native applications can benefit from traditional testing tools, but these tools are not enough. Dedicated cloud native security tools are needed, able to instrument containers, container clusters, and serverless functions, report on security issues, and provide a fast feedback loop for developers.

Another important aspect of cloud native security is automated scanning of all artifacts, at all stages of the development lifecycle. Most importantly, organizations must scan container images at all stages of the development process.

Learn more in the detailed guides to:

Containerized architecture
Serverless architecture

Intensifying DDoS Threats: Latest Trends & Live Attack Demo

Application Security Risks

Web application security risks: owasp top 10.

Software applications can be affected by numerous threats. The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Top 10 list includes critical application threats that are most likely to affect applications in production.

Broken Access Control

Broken access control allows threats and users to gain unauthorized access and privileges. Here are the most common issues:

It enables attackers to gain unauthorized access to user accounts and act as administrators or regular users.
It provides users with unauthorized privileged functions.

You can remediate this issue by implementing strong access mechanisms that ensure each role is clearly defined with isolated privileges.

Cryptographic Failures

Cryptographic failures (previously referred to as “sensitive data exposure”) occur when data is not properly protected in transit and at rest. It can expose passwords, health records, credit card numbers, and personal data.

This application security risk can lead to non-compliance with data privacy regulations, such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and financial standards like PCI Data Security Standards (PCI DSS).

Injection (Including XSS, LFI, and SQL Injection)

Injection vulnerabilities enable threat actors to send malicious data to a web application interpreter. It can cause this data to be compiled and executed on the server. SQL injection is a common form of injection.

Cross Site Scripting (XSS)
Local file injection (LFI)
SQL injection (SQLi)
Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF)

Insecure Design

Insecure design covers many application weaknesses that occur due to ineffective or missing security controls. Applications that do not have basic security controls capable of against critical threats. While you can fix implementation flaws in applications with secure design, it is not possible to fix insecure design with proper configuration or remediation.

Security Misconfiguration (Including XXE)

Security misconfigurations occur due to a lack of security hardening across the application stack. Here are common security misconfigurations:

Improperly configuring cloud service permissions
Leaving unrequired features enabled or installed
Using default passwords or admin accounts
XML External Entities (XXE) vulnerabilities

Learn more in the detailed guide to XML External Entities (XXE)

Vulnerable and Outdated Components

Vulnerable and outdated components (previously referred to as “using components with known vulnerabilities”) include any vulnerability resulting from outdated or unsupported software. It can occur when you build or use an application without prior knowledge of its internal components and versions.

Identification and Authentication Failures

Identification and authentication failures (previously referred to as “broken authentication”) include any security problem related to user identities. You can protect against identity attacks and exploits by establishing secure session management and setting up authentication and verification for all identities.

Software and Data Integrity Failures

Software and data integrity failures occur when infrastructure and code are vulnerable to integrity violations. It can occur during software updates, sensitive data modification, and any CI/CD pipeline changes that are not validated. Insecure CI/CD pipelines can result in unauthorized access and lead to supply chain attacks.

Security Logging and Monitoring Failures

Security logging and monitoring failures (previously referred to as “insufficient logging and monitoring”) occur when application weaknesses cannot properly detect and respond to security risks. Logging and monitoring are critical to the detection of breaches. When these mechanisms do not work, it hinders the application’s visibility and compromises alerting and forensics.

Server Side Request Forgery

Server-side request forgery (SSRF) vulnerabilities occur when a web application does not validate a URL inputted by a user before pulling data from a remote resource. It can affect firewall-protected servers and any network access control list (ACL) that does not validate URLs.

Learn more in the detailed guide to SSRF

Learn about additional cyber threats in our guide to cyber attacks

API Security Risks: OWASP Top 10

APIs enable communication between different pieces of software. Applications with APIs allow external clients to request services from the application. APIs are exposed to various threats and vulnerabilities. The OWASP compiled a list prioritizing the top 10 API security risks.

Broken Object Level Authorization

APIs often expose endpoints handling object identifiers. It creates a wider attack surface Level Access Control issue. Instead, you should check object level authorization in every function that can access a data source through user inputs.

Broken User Authentication

Incorrectly implemented authentication mechanisms can grant unauthorized access to malicious actors. It enables attackers to exploit an implementation flaw or compromise authentication tokens. Once it occurs, attackers can assume a legitimate user identity permanently or temporarily. As a result, the system’s ability to identify a client or user is compromised, which threatens the overall API security of the application.

Excessive Data Exposure

Generic implementations often lead to exposure of all object properties without consideration of the individual sensitivity of each object. It occurs when developers rely on clients to perform data filtering before displaying the information to the user.

Lack of Resources & Rate Limiting

APIs usually do not impose restrictions on the number or size of resources a client or user is allowed to request. However, this issue can impact the performance of the API server and result in Denial of Service (DoS). Additionally, it can create authentication flaws that enable brute force attacks.

Broken Function Level Authorization

Authorization flaws enable attackers to gain unauthorized access to the resources of legitimate users or obtain administrative privileges. It can occur as a result of overly complex access control policies based on different hierarchies, roles, groups, and unclear separation between regular and administrative functions.

Mass Assignment

Mass assignment is usually a result of improperly binding data provided by clients, like JSON, to data models. It occurs when binding happens without using properties filtering based on an allowlist. It enables attackers to guess object properties, read the documentation, explore other API endpoints, or provide additional object properties to request payloads.

Security Misconfiguration

Security misconfiguration usually occurs due to:

Insecure default configurations
Open cloud storage
Ad-hoc or incomplete configurations
Misconfigured HTTP headers
Permissive cross-origin resource sharing (CORS)
Unnecessary HTTP methods
Verbose error messages that contain sensitive information

Injection flaws like command injection, SQL, and NoSQL injection occur when a query or command sends untrusted data to an interpreter. It is typically malicious data that attempts to trick the interpreter into providing unauthorized access to data or executing unintended commands.

Improper Assets Management

APIs usually expose more endpoints than traditional web applications. This nature of APIs means proper and updated documentation becomes critical to security. Additionally, proper hosts and deployed API versions inventory can help mitigate issues related to exposed debug endpoints and deprecated API versions.

Insufficient Logging & Monitoring

Insufficient logging and monitoring enable threat actors to escalate their attacks, especially when there is ineffective or no integration with incident response. It allows malicious actors to maintain persistence and pivot to other systems where they extract, destroy, or tamper with data.

Learn more in the detailed guide to OWASP

What is Application Security Testing?

Application Security Testing (AST) is the process of making applications more resilient to security threats by identifying and remediating security vulnerabilities.

Originally, AST was a manual process. In modern, high-velocity development processes, AST must be automated. The increased modularity of enterprise software, numerous open source components, and a large number of known vulnerabilities and threat vectors all make automation essential. Most organizations use a combination of application security tools to conduct AST.

Key considerations before testing applications

Here are key considerations before you can properly test applications for security vulnerabilities:

Create a complete inventory of your applications.
Understand the business use, impact and sensitivity of your applications.
Determine which applications to test—start from public-facing systems like web and mobile applications.

How to test

You must determine the following parameters before you can successfully test applications for security vulnerabilities:

Authenticated vs. non-authenticated testing—you can test applications from an outsider’s perspective (a black box approach). However, there is a lot of value in performing authenticated testing, to discover security issues that affect authenticated users. This can help uncover vulnerabilities like SQL injection and session manipulation.
Which tools to use—testing should ideally involve tools that can identify vulnerabilities in source code, tools that can test applications for security weaknesses at runtime, and network vulnerability scanners.
Testing production vs. staging—testing in production is important because it can identify security issues that are currently threatening the organization and its customers. However, production testing can have a performance impact. Testing in staging is easier to achieve and allows faster remediation of vulnerabilities.
Whether to disable security systems while testing—for most security tests, it is a good idea to disable firewalls, web application firewalls (WAF), and intrusion prevention systems (IPS), or at least whitelist the IPs of testing tools, otherwise tools can interfere with scanning. However, in a full penetration test, tools should be left on and the goal is to scan applications while avoiding detection.
When to test—it is typically advisable to perform security testing during off periods to avoid an impact on performance and reliability of production applications.
What to report—many security tools provide highly detailed reports relating to their specific testing domain, and these reports are not consumable by non-security experts. Security teams should extract the most relevant insights from automated reports and present them in a meaningful way to stakeholders.
Validation testing—a critical part of security testing is to validate that remediations were done successfully. It is not enough for a developer to say the remediation is fixed. You must rerun the test and ensure that the vulnerability no longer exists, or otherwise give feedback to developers.

Learn more in the detailed guide to:

Security testing
Dependency management
Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)

Application Security Testing vs. API Security Testing

Application Security Testing (AST) and API Security Testing are both critical components of a comprehensive security strategy, but they focus on different aspects of the software ecosystem.

Application Security Testing is broader and encompasses the security of entire applications, including web, mobile, and desktop applications. It targets vulnerabilities that could be exploited by attackers to gain unauthorized access, manipulate data, or disrupt services. AST covers various areas, such as code vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and runtime behaviors.

API Security Testing is more specialized and focuses on securing APIs. APIs can be particularly vulnerable because they expose endpoints that can be targeted by attackers. API security testing typically checks for issues like improper authentication, lack of encryption, excessive data exposure, and rate limiting. It ensures that the APIs only allow legitimate interactions and protect against common API-specific threats, such as injection attacks and broken access controls.

Learn more in the detailed guide to API security testing

Types of Application Security Testing

There are three main types of application security tests:

Black Box Security Testing

In a black box test, the testing system does not have access to the internals of the tested system. This is the perspective of an outside attacker. A testing tool or human tester must perform reconnaissance to identify systems being tested and discover vulnerabilities. Black box testing is highly valuable but is insufficient, because it cannot test underlying security weaknesses of applications.

Learn more in the detailed guide to black box testing

White Box Security Testing

In a white box test, the testing system has full access to the internals of the tested application. A classic example is static code analysis, in which a testing tool has direct access to the source code of the application. White box testing can identify business logic vulnerabilities, code quality issues, security misconfigurations, and insecure coding practices. White-box testing can also include dynamic testing, which leverages fuzzing techniques to exercise different paths in the application and discover unexpected vulnerabilities. The drawback of the white-box approach is that not all these vulnerabilities will really be exploitable in production environments.

Learn more in the detailed guide to white box testing

Gray Box Security Testing

In a gray-box test, the testing system has access to limited information about the internals of the tested application. For example, the tester might be provided login credentials so they can test the application from the perspective of a signed-in user. Gray box testing can help understand what level of access privileged users have, and the level of damage they could do if an account was compromised. Gray box tests can simulate insider threats or attackers who have already breached the network perimeter. Gray box testing is considered highly efficient, striking a balance between the black box and white box approaches.

Learn more in the detailed guide to gray box testing

Application Security Tools and Solutions

Web application firewall (waf).

A WAF monitors and filters HTTP traffic that passess between a web application and the Internet. WAF technology does not cover all threats but can work alongside a suite of security tools to create a holistic defense against various attack vectors.

In the open systems interconnection (OSI) model, WAF serves as a protocol layer seven defense that helps protect web applications against attacks like cross-site-scripting (XSS), cross-site forgery, SQL injection, and file inclusion.

Unlike a proxy server that protects the identity of client machines through an intermediary, a WAF works like a reverse proxy that protects the server from exposure. The WAF serves as a shield that stands in front of a web application and protects it from the Internet—clients pass through the WAF before they can reach the server.

Learn more about Imperva Web Application Firewall

Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP)

RASP technology can analyze user behavior and application traffic at runtime. It aims to help detect and prevent cyber threats by achieving visibility into application source code and analyzing vulnerabilities and weaknesses.

RASP tools can identify security weaknesses that have already been exploited, terminate these sessions, and issue alerts to provide active protection.

Learn more about Imperva Runtime Application Self-Protection

Vulnerability Management

Vulnerability management is a critical aspect of application security. It involves identifying, classifying, prioritizing, and mitigating software vulnerabilities. Vulnerability management tools scan your applications for known vulnerabilities, such as those listed in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database.

Once identified, these vulnerabilities are classified based on their severity. The next step is to prioritize the vulnerabilities that need to be addressed first. This priority list helps organizations focus their efforts on the most critical security issues. Finally, the vulnerabilities are mitigated, often through patch management procedures.

Learn more about vulnerability management

Software Bill of Materials (SBOM)

A Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) is a comprehensive list of components in a piece of software. It provides transparency into an application’s composition, making it easier to track and manage any vulnerabilities. An SBOM can include details about the open-source and proprietary components, libraries, and modules used in the software.

With an SBOM, organizations can quickly identify any components with known vulnerabilities. It helps streamline the process of vulnerability management and ensures a swift response when a security flaw is discovered. SBOM is becoming increasingly important, especially with the rise of open-source software and the associated security risks.

Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

SCA tools create an inventory of third-party open source and commercial components used within software products. It helps learn which components and versions are actively used and identify severe security vulnerabilities affecting these components.

Organizations use SCA tools to find third-party components that may contain security vulnerabilities.

Learn more about Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

SAST tools assist white box testers in inspecting the inner workings of applications. It involves inspecting static source code and reporting on identified security weaknesses.

SAST can help find issues, such as syntax errors, input validation issues, invalid or insecure references, or math errors in non-compiled code. You can use binary and byte-code analyzers to apply SAST to compiled code.

Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST)

DAST tools assist black box testers in executing code and inspecting it at runtime. It helps detect issues that possibly represent security vulnerabilities. Organizations use DAST to conduct large-scale scans that simulate multiple malicious or unexpected test cases. These tests provide reports on the application’s response.

DAST can help identify issues such as query strings, the use of scripts, requests and responses, memory leakage, authentication, cookie and session handling, execution of third-party components, DOM injection, and data injection.

Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST)

IAST tools employ SAST and DAST techniques and tools to detect a wider range of security issues. These tools run dynamically to inspect software during runtime. It occurs from within the application server to inspect the compiled source code.

IAST tools can help make remediation easier by providing information about the root cause of vulnerabilities and identifying specific lines of affected code. These tools can analyze data flow, source code, configuration, and third-party libraries. You can also use IAST tools for API testing.

Mobile Application Security Testing (MAST)

MAST tools employ various techniques to test the security of mobile applications. It involves using static and dynamic analysis and investigating forensic data collected by mobile applications.

Organizations use MAST tools to check security vulnerabilities and mobile-specific issues, such as jailbreaking, data leakage from mobile devices, and malicious WiFi networks.

A cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) provides a centralized control panel for the tools required to protect cloud native applications. It unifies cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) and cloud security posture management (CSPM) with other capabilities.

CNAPP technology often incorporates identity entitlement management, API discovery and protection, and automation and orchestration security for container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.

Application Security Best Practices

Here are several best practices that can help you practice application security more effectively.

Perform a Threat Assessment

Having a list of sensitive assets to protect can help you understand the threat your organization is facing and how to mitigate them. Consider what methods a hacker can use to compromise an application, whether existing security measures are in, and if you need additional tools or defensive measures.

It is also important to be realistic about your security expectations. Even with the highest level of protection, nothing is impossible to hack. You also need to be honest about what you think your team can sustain over the long term. If you push too hard, safety standards and practices can be ignored. Remember that safety is a long-term endeavor and you need the cooperation of other employees and your customers.

Shift Security Left

Companies are transitioning from annual product releases to monthly, weekly, or daily releases. To accommodate this change, security testing must be part of the development cycle, not added as an afterthought. This way, security testing doesn’t get in the way when you release your product.

A good first step before making these changes is to help security staff understand development processes and build relationships between security and development teams. Security staff need to learn the tools and processes used by developers, so that they can integrate security organically. When security is seamlessly integrated into the development process, developers are more likely to embrace it and build trust.

You also need to find a way to automate security testing for CI/CD pipelines. Integrating automated security tools into the CI/CD pipeline allows developers to quickly fix issues a short time after the relevant changes were introduced.

Learn more in the detailed guide to shift left testing

Prioritize Your Remediation Ops

Vulnerabilities are growing, and developers find it difficult to address remediation for all issues. Given the scale of the task at hand, prioritization is critical for teams that want to keep applications safe.

Effective prioritization requires performing a threat assessment based on the severity of the vulnerability—using CVSS ratings and other criteria, such as the operational importance of the affected application. When it comes to open source vulnerabilities, you need to know whether proprietary code is actually using the vulnerable feature of open source components. If the function of the vulnerable component is never invoked by your product, then its CVSS rating is significant, but there is no impact and no risk.

Measure Application Security Results

It is important to measure and report the success of your application security program. Identify the metrics that are most important to your key decision makers and present them in an easy-to-understand and actionable way to get buy-in for your program.

Giving executives too many metrics at an early stage can be overwhelming and frankly unnecessary. The main goal is to indicate how the application security program is compliant with internal policies and show the impact in terms of reduction of vulnerabilities and risks and increased application resilience.

Manage Privileges

It is important to limit privileges, especially for mission critical and sensitive systems. Application security best practices limit access to applications and data to those who need them, when they need them—this is known as the least privilege principle. Least privilege is critical for two reasons:

Hackers might compromise less privileged accounts, and it is important to ensure that they cannot gain access to sensitive systems.
Insider threats are just as dangerous as external attackers. If insiders go bad, it is important to ensure that they never have more privileges than they should—limiting the damage they can do.

Application Security with Imperva

Imperva provides comprehensive protection for applications, APIs, and microservices:

Web Application Firewall – Prevent attacks with world-class analysis of web traffic to your applications.

Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) – Real-time attack detection and prevention from your application runtime environment goes wherever your applications go. Stop external attacks and injections and reduce your vulnerability backlog.

API Security – Automated API protection ensures your API endpoints are protected as they are published, shielding your applications from exploitation.

Advanced Bot Protection – Prevent business logic attacks from all access points – websites, mobile apps and APIs. Gain seamless visibility and control over bot traffic to stop online fraud through account takeover or competitive price scraping.

DDoS Protection – Block attack traffic at the edge to ensure business continuity with guaranteed uptime and no performance impact. Secure your on premises or cloud-based assets – whether you’re hosted in AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Public Cloud.

Attack Analytics – Ensures complete visibility with machine learning and domain expertise across the application security stack to reveal patterns in the noise and detect application attacks, enabling you to isolate and prevent attack campaigns.

Client-Side Protection – Gain visibility and control over third-party JavaScript code to reduce the risk of supply chain fraud, prevent data breaches, and client-side attacks.

See Additional Guides on Key Application Security Topics

Authored by Imperva	Authored by Imperva Learn about the most common cyber attacks and how to prevent them.
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Application Security | Application Security Tutorial | Cyber Security Certification Course | Edureka

This Edureka PPT on "Application Security" will help you understand what application security is and measures taken to improve the security of an application often by finding, fixing and preventing security vulnerabilities. Following are the topics covered in this PPT: Introduction to Cybersecurity What is Application Security? What is an SQL Injection attack Demo on SQL Injection Follow us to never miss an update in the future. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/edureka_learning/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/edurekaIN/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/edurekain LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/edureka Read less

Application Security

Jul 13, 2014

810 likes | 1.3k Views

Application Security. CISSP Guide to Security Essentials Chapter 3. Objectives. Types of applications Application models and technologies Application threats and countermeasures Security in the software development life cycle. Objectives (cont.). Application security controls

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Application Security CISSP Guide to Security Essentials Chapter 3

Objectives • Types of applications • Application models and technologies • Application threats and countermeasures • Security in the software development life cycle CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Objectives (cont.) • Application security controls • Databases and data warehouses CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Types of Applications • Agents • Standalone programs that are part of a larger application • Examples: • Anti-virus • Patch management • Configuration management CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Types of Applications (cont.) • Applets • Software programs that run within the context of another program • Example: media players within browser CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Types of Applications (cont.) • Client-server • Separate programs on clients and servers communicate via networks and work together • Few developed now but many are in use CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Types of Applications (cont.) • Distributed • Software components run on several systems • Two-tier, three-tier, multi-tier • Reasons: scalability, performance, geographical CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Types of Applications (cont.) • Web • Web browser as client, application server back-end • Client software nearly universal • Application software centralized CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Application Models and Technologies • Control flow languages • Structured languages • Object oriented languages • Knowledge based languages CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Control Flow Languages • Linear, sequential • Use of “if – then – else” • Branching with “go to” • Examples: • BASIC, COBOL, Cold Fusion, FORTRAN, Perl, PHP, Python, VBScript CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Structured Languages • Nested, heavy use of subroutines and functions • Little or no “go to” • Examples: • C • Pascal CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Object Oriented Languages • Utilize concepts of object programming • Classes, objects, instances, and inheritance • Methods, instantiations • Encapsulation, abstraction, polymorphism • Examples • C++, Java, Ruby, Simula, Smalltalk CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Knowledge Based Applications • Neural networks • Modeled after biological reasoning processes • Artificial neurons that store pieces of information • Given cases about situations and outcomes, can predict future outcomes CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Knowledge Based Applications (cont.) • Expert systems • Inference engine and knowledge base of past situations and outcomes CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Threats to Applications • Reasons for attacks • Industrial espionage • Vandalism and disruption • Denial of service • Political / religious CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Threats to Applications (cont.) • Buffer overflow attacks • Disrupt a software application by providing more data to the application than it was designed to handle CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Threats to Applications (cont.) • Buffer overflow attacks (cont.) • Types • Stack buffer overflow • NOP sled attack • Heap overflow • Jump to register attack CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

In Java • Instance variables and Objects lie on Heap. • Local variables and methods lie on the Stack. So if we have a main method which calls the go() method which calls the gone() method then the stack from top to bottom would consist of CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

gone() • go() • main() CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Threats to Applications (cont.) • Examples: Morris worm, ping of death, code red worm • Buffer overflow attack countermeasures • Use safe languages and libraries • Executable space protection • Stack smashing protection • Application firewalls CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Threats to Applications (cont.) • Covert channel • Unintended and hidden channel of communications • Types: • Covert storage channel: read a storage location and learn about the application or other data CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Threats to Applications (cont.) • Covert channel types (cont.) • Timing channel: observe timings in an application to determine what is happening in the application • Countermeasures • Careful software analysis, good software engineering • Newer versions of firewall CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Threats to Applications (cont.) • Side channel attack • An attack on a cryptosystem based upon physical information gained from the system • Examples: timing, power consumption, emanations, and even sounds CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Threats to Applications (cont.) • Countermeasures • Limit release of information through shielding and other means CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Threats to Applications (cont.) • Malicious software • Types: viruses, worms, Trojan horses, rootkits, bots, spam, pharming, spyware, key loggers • Purpose • Steal, corrupt, or destroy information • Remote control • Denial of service CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Threats to Applications (cont.) • Types of malware • Virus: human assisted replication, embed in programs, files, master boot records • Worm: self replicating, scan for victims, rapid spread • Trojan horse: claims one function, but is malware CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Threats to Applications (cont.) • Types of malware (cont.) • Rootkit: hide within or beneath the operating system • Bot: remote control zombie • Spam: unsolicited e-mail CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Threats to Applications (cont.) • Types of malware (cont.) • Pharming: attack on DNS to redirect traffic to decoy application • Spyware: collect information about usage, forward to central server • Key logger: logs keystrokes and mouse movements, forwards to central server CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Threats to Applications (cont.) • Malware countermeasures • Anti-malware • Patches • Firewalls and application firewalls • Hardened systems CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Threats to Applications (cont.) • Malware countermeasures (cont.) • Intrusion detection systems • Decreased privilege levels • Penetration testing CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Threats to Applications (cont.) • Input attacks • Buffer overflow • Script injection • Cross site scripting • Cross site request forgery CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Threats to Applications (cont.) • Countermeasures • Input field filtering, application firewall, application vulnerability scanning, software developer training CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Threats to Applications (cont.) • Object reuse • Use of a resource belonging to another process, including: • Memory, databases, file systems, temporary files, and paging space CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Threats to Applications (cont.) • Object reuse countermeasures • Application isolation • Server virtualization • Developer training CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Threats to Applications (cont.) • Mobile code • Executable code, active content, downloadable content • Examples: active website content, downloaded programs • Some is desired, but some is malicious in nature CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Threats to Applications (cont.) • Mobile code countermeasures • Anti-malware, mobile code access controls • Reduced user privileges CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Threats to Applications (cont.) • Social engineering • Attack on personnel to gain secrets • People are vulnerable because they want to help • Social engineering countermeasures • Security awareness training that includes accountability CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Threats to Applications (cont.) • Time of check / time of use (TOCTOU) • Also known as a “race condition” • Defect in resource allocation and management controls • Possible exploitation to cause harm or steal data CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Threats to Applications (cont.) • TOCTOU countermeasures • Reviews of resource allocation controls • Improve privacy of communications CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Threats to Applications (cont.) • Back door / maintenance hook • Access holes deliberately planted by a developer • To facilitate easier testing during development • To facilitate production access • To facilitate a break-in CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Threats to Applications (cont.) • Back door countermeasures • Code reviews • Source code control CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Threats to Applications (cont.) • Logic bombs • Deliberate malfunction that causes harm • Time bombs • Malfunction on a given date and time • Event bombs • Malfunction on a specific event CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Threats to Applications (cont.) • Logic bomb countermeasures • Software source code review, external audits CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Security in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) • SDLC • The entire collection of processes used to design, develop, test, implement, and maintain software CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Security in the Software Development Life Cycle (cont.) • Security must be included in each step of the SDLC • Conceptual • Requirements and specifications development • Application design, coding, and testing CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Security in the Software Development Life Cycle (cont.) • Security in the conceptual stage • Presence of sensitive information must be identified • Access controls (users, administrators, third parties) • Regulatory conditions • Security dependencies CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Security in the Software Development Life Cycle (cont.) • Security application requirements and specifications • Functional requirements • Standards • Security requirements • Roles, access controls, audit logging, configuration management CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Security in the Software Development Life Cycle (cont.) • Requirements and specifications (cont.) • Regulatory requirements • Test plan a byproduct of requirements CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

Security in the Software Development Life Cycle (cont.) • Security in application design • Adhere to all requirements and specifications • Published design documents • Design reviews • Reviewed by all stakeholders including security CISSP Guide to Security Essentials

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InfoQ Homepage Presentations Making Sense of Application Security

Making Sense of Application Security

Adib Saikali provides a roadmap for application developers and architects to master application security, identifying the security skills needed as an application developer.

Adib Saikali is passionate about technology and entrepreneurship from assembly to JavaScript from pitching venture capitalists to advising senior IT executives at Fortune 500. Adib is currently a Principal Platform Architect at VMware.

About the conference

InfoQ Live is a virtual event designed for you, the modern software practitioner. Take part in facilitated sessions with world-class practitioners. Hear from software leaders at our optional InfoQ Roundtables.

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The Architect’s Guide to Elasticity

Presented by: Jonas Bonér - Co-founder and CTO at Lightbend

Saikali: Welcome to my talk, making sense of application security. This talk is an application developer's guide to all of the foundational things that you should know about security. The kinds of things that helps you debug tricky exceptions without having to visit lots of blog sites and Stack Overflow and trial and error your way to eliminating an exception, for example.

My name is Adib Saikali. I am a software developer, been a software developer since 1995, and a Code Janitor since 2014. I'm currently a Global Field Principal at VMware Tanzu. That basically means I spend enormous amounts of times doing things with Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, Spring, and a lot of time in customer code bases, that are multiple millions of lines long with like making them a billion dollars a year, and really advise customers on how to go towards modular monoliths or microservice architectures. I've accumulated a lot of patterns on how to refactor and modernize applications. Security has been a big part of that. One of the things I've observed is that developers struggle with security a lot. Because it's one of those things that one person on the team does, and then everybody else doesn't have to do it. You do it once a year, and so you every time have to remember and re-Google how to do it. I'm also currently working on a book called Securing Cloud Applications for Manning Publications. You can buy it and start reading the chapters as I finish them.

Why We Should Care About Application Security

Why should you care about security? You should care about it because it's a CEO level problem. What I mean by that is, if there's a large enough security incident, either your company is going to go bankrupt and shut down, or potentially more likely, the CEO is going to get fired. A good example of that is the Equifax CEO who did resign after that massive data breach they had in 2017, and so did a bunch of other senior executives. What are CEOs doing about this? CEOs, for the most part, are not developers or technical people. What they're doing is they're actually creating this, they have this role of chief information security officer. This is the individual responsible for the security of the enterprise, and they report directly to the CEO so that they can drive the transformation of the organization's security practices to whatever is needed to make it more secure. Even the U.S. president is getting in on the action. President Biden has issued two executive orders in the past year or so around how to improve security and requirements for secure infrastructure and applications in the U.S. government.

What AppSec Means for App Developers

With this extreme focus from executives on security, what does that mean for you as an application developer? I think it actually means four things. Number one, is you're expected to use all product security features. For example, if a database you're using has an option to allow you to encrypt data at rest, turn that on. If you are making a call from one microservice to another, you can make that call over mutual TLS as opposed to over a plain, regular non-encrypted channel. The other thing that's expected of you is to follow corporate security standards. More organizations have published standards that say, when you do certain things like a service calls another service, or when you go to a database and you want to access it, you have a password for the database, where does that password get stored? How is it managed? Thirdly, there's just general expectation that you're going to be able to design and implement secure applications, which I think is a reasonable assumption in 2022. In order to design and implement secure applications, there's foundational things about security that you need to be familiar with. Lastly, in all of these organizations I talk to, there is a transformation program around doing more DevSecOps. You are the developer in the DevSecOps tool chain or process.

What Senior Business Leaders Want

If we take a step back and say, let's double click on those four things, how do we go about doing those? If you look at it from the point of view of the senior business leaders at the top of the pyramid, they just want a secure application. In order to do a secure application, you as the developer need to do two things. Number one, is you need to write your code using some programming language using the libraries of that language, and that framework. For example, maybe you're a Java developer building Spring Boot applications running on Kubernetes, which is then running on a public cloud. The second part is that you follow the corporate standards for secure software development lifecycle. When you start doing that middle layer, people usually get stuck. They get stuck because there's something about the underlying layer that they don't understand.

For example, let's say you're configuring Spring Security to allow you to log in with your Google account into the application. You have to provide it with this thing called a client ID and a client secret, because it implements something called the OpenID Connect protocol. The documentation for Spring Security is not going to teach you the OpenID Connect protocol, you're expected to show up to the party knowing that protocol. If you want to avoid getting stuck, what you want to focus on as a developer is the bottom layer of the pyramid. If you learn the bottom layer of the pyramid, you can always more easily learn the second layer, the middle layer of the pyramid whenever you need to. That's really what I want to talk to you a little bit about, in particular, that standards, protocols, and patterns that's in the bottom left corner of the pyramid.

Key Security Skills for Application Developers

If we extract from that bottom left corner, what are the four things that you may want to focus on? It's going to be, number one, secure your communication channels between your application and everywhere else using TLS. Number two is implement single sign-on in your applications, and try to get rid of passwords. You don't want to store them in your app. You don't want your users to have them either. Number three is you want to manage your credentials securely, all those API keys, database passwords, that your application might have. Number four, is when you have a microservice architecture, and you have one service calling another service, calling another service, you need a way to secure that call chain. We'll talk about some of these. Again, my purpose here isn't to solve these problems, but to more guide you as a developer on the things and then the direction that you need to go with.

Typical Legacy Enterprise App

What does securing communication channels mean? Let's take a look at a classic typical legacy enterprise application, the simplest things of all. We have a three-tier application with some JSON HTTP coming in from a mobile app or a web browser, going to a monolithic backend, and going to a SQL database. When you think in terms of security from the enterprise, people will come back and they will say something like, I'm going to put firewalls on here. What does putting firewalls do? It assumes that you have this network zone that usually people call the red zone, where that's exposed to the internet, maybe bad actors could get in. We're going to have a firewall to basically say, the application server will only accept requests from a load balancer, and the database will only accept requests from the application server. This idea of segmenting the network into zones so that you can say the green zone is where I can keep my data, the yellow zone is where I keep my business logic, and the red zone is that edge to the internet that I have.

The key thing here is that this is not enough, because you can have a bad actor internally, you're not the only application on the network. There could be other applications that have security issues, and they break down. There's this move towards doing everything with zero trust. We don't want the application server to trust the network, we want it to assume that its communication from the load balancer has to come in over mutual TLS, so the application server can make sure that the request only came from the load balancer. The load balancer can make sure that it sent the request to the application server. Similarly, the application server wants to know that it connected to the correct database. The database wants to know that the application server is the right application server talking to it. This means as a developer, you're expected to be in more situations where TLS is being used. It used to be that TLS was just something you did at the edge of the network between the internet and your load balancer.

How to Learn Cryptography as a Developer

What do you have to know in order to understand this? There's a lot that you need to know. This mind map here shows you how you need to approach this. There's a lot of stuff on here. It's possible when you go through this to get lost in all of the cryptography rules. If you're looking at this and you're like, I got to learn encryption. There's this thing called authenticated encryption. What does that mean? There's this elliptic curves, and key exchange, and certificates, and perfect forward secrecy, and all the different tradeoffs that cipher suites represent? I'm overwhelmed as a developer, what do I do? My advice to you is to think about cryptography not in terms of the math that it's implemented in, although that's very fascinating, but to think of cryptography as a set of primitives that are like black boxes, tools in your toolbox. You bring out different cryptographic primitives for different purposes. For each cryptographic primitive, it always provides you some security guarantees. For example, AES with authenticated encryption allows you to make sure that data is not only confidential, but you can detect if somebody has modified the encrypted data. You have to know how to configure it correctly. Because, unfortunately, some of these standards have settings on them that are no longer secure, because there were breakthroughs in attacking these algorithms. Or maybe just the computers got faster, and they're no longer considered secure.

These primitives can also be misused, so it's important that you understand the wrong ways of using them so you can avoid using it incorrectly. Lastly, you got to write some code using these primitives. It turns out that some cryptographic libraries out there are hard to use, because they assume that you're an expert, and it's easy to do the wrong thing with them. Then the end result is an insecure application. It's always important to find a high quality implementation of one of those libraries. Finally, you got to learn how these cryptographic primitives come together into a protocol like TLS.

Problem 1: Detect Accidental Data

My most important recommendation to you is to actually wrap your head around these cryptographic primitives by looking at some simple problems that are realistic, things that you may actually encounter in the real world. I've got four problems for you to think about, and try to implement in your favorite programming language. On subsequent slides I also include links to a GitHub Org that has solutions to these in Java and Spring. Number one is, think about it as I want to detect accidental data corruption. In this scenario, you're a shoe retailer who sells shoes online. People return shoes they don't like. They arrive at your warehouse, and the warehouse employees look at the shoes that have been returned, check that they meet the return criteria. Then use the warehouse management application to approve a refund. That's awesome. Then, what happens is that the warehouse management system generates a refunds.json. Think of it as having like an order number, say order number 123, is going to get a $50 refund. Then that is filed. The refunds.json goes on to the Payment Service, where the Payment Service is able to look at the Order ID and the amount to refund, and actually return the money to the credit card of the customer.

The problem we're solving here is not even a security problem. We just want to basically say, how does the Payment Service make sure that the refunds.json is actually correct? It wasn't accidentally data corrupted because there was a disk error, for example, or a network transfer error? The answer to that is you could use something called the Secure Hash Function to do that, and calculate a signature. That's a problem for you to go to figure out how to solve on your own.

Problem 2: Detect Tampering and Validate Identity of File Creator

Number two is, now you're like exactly the same scenario but this time the Payment Service wants to know that the warehouse management service was the one that generated the refunds.json file, and it wasn't some rogue employee or hacker. Now what we say is that, the warehouse management application is going to sign the refunds.json file with a secret key that it knows. The Payment Service is going to read that refunds.json, and use that secret key to not only detect corruption of the data but also check that the only way this refunds.json could have been created was by somebody who possessed that secret key. That takes you to what's called the Hash Message Authentication Code that was on my mind map earlier. Really simple to implement in something like Java, and incredibly useful as a foundational concept to wrap your head around.

Problem 3: Detect Corruption, Tampering, and Privacy of File Contents

The next requirement is, ok, I've got this refunds.json file, but it's in plaintext. What I'd like to do is to encrypt it, so if somebody intercepts it, they cannot see what's in the refunds.json. That's where this idea of the Advanced Encryption Standard will come in, and you can do this with the Advanced Encryption Standard.

Problem 4: Solve Problem 1, 2, 3 without Using a Shared Secret

The next complication of the problem is, I have this shared secret, the warehouse management needs to know the password that was used to encrypt the refunds.json file, and the Payment Service needs the password in order to decrypt that. Sharing keys between things is a really hard problem. This is where public key cryptography comes in, and you can learn by solving this with a sample I've linked from a GitHub repo. You can learn how to actually do this using what's called a Diffie-Hellman key exchange with the JOSE suite of libraries. I built it in such a way that it's simple for a developer to follow along, again, with the goal of just understanding the concept, not really actually doing it like the way I would solve it here, because you just use TLS for that.

Standards to Learn

This is a list of all the things that you might want to know as a developer. For Java libraries, if you're looking for stuff, I recommend the Google Tink library. It's a developer friendly API for doing cryptography in general in Java and other languages, which is used by Google in production. It's designed to allow you to not accidentally do the wrong thing.

Logging in Human Users

The next problem we run into is, we have all these users, we need to log them in. How do we do them, and we really don't like passwords anymore. The answer to that is when we look at what do people want to do? How do they want to log in again? Think of the shoe retailer, ACME's web shopping application. You might have a user who wants to log in with their thumbprint from their MacBook, another one wants to log in with the face ID on their iPhone. Somebody else wants to log in with their Facebook account, and somebody else wants to just use a plain old username and password. Those are all ways that you have to log in. Do you have to actually support all these ways to log in inside your app? The answer is no. What you should be doing is you should be delegating all of that into some single sign-on service. You can get these single sign-on services from the cloud, like a SaaS offering, things like Auth0 and Okta. Or you can write your own single sign-on service, maybe on top of something like Spring authorization server, or you could use a prepackaged authorization server that's built into a platform that you're using that comes with a larger platform maybe based on Kubernetes. The key thing here is that you as a developer only learn one protocol, which is the OpenID Connect protocol. That allows you to interact with all single sign-on servers, regardless of who wrote them, if that single sign-on server supports the OpenID Connect protocol.

Use a Phishing Resistant Hardware Key

However, even with all of these, when you do have that single sign-on server, you probably want to configure it to be phishing resistant. Hackers are getting very sophisticated, and they'll create a fake website that looks just like your bank's website. They'll send you a text message, and this and that, to try to trick you into going to this fake website and actually entering your real username and password, and potentially your real one-time password, and get it. One of the ways to get around that is you can use something like this guy here. It's a hardware security key. Let me just demonstrate how that works. I'm going to plug it into my MacBook. I'm going to switch over here to my GitHub. When I try to sign in, it's going to say, your password was correct but I need you to use security keys. I'm going to say, yes, use a security key. Now it pops up and says, which security key do you want to use? I want to use the USB that I just plugged in. It's flashing, but when I press it, I'm in. What that security key is doing is it's checking that I'm actually talking to GitHub, so I don't accidentally say yes to a website that is a phishing site.

Web Authentication Protocol

Another really exciting technology that you want to know about as a developer is something called web authentication. This is a protocol that allows you to really register users without ever asking them for a password. For example, I have my YubiKey plugged into my laptop right now. If I go here, and I say Adib Saikali, and I click on Register. It's going to say, ok, how are you going to authenticate yourself? I'm going to use my hardware key. That's going on. I'm going to press the button again, success. Let me log in now. When I log in, how would you like to log in? I'd like to use my hardware security key, please. I'm in. You can see here it actually knows who I am. It's given me a user ID and it's given me a public key. This Web Authentication Protocol actually works with all web browsers. This works on your iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows. It's pretty prevalent these days. As you can see, this is wonderful for user experience, because how do you even have to sit there and come up with a password? What are the password rules for? How many characters and special characters and capital letters? You take that frustration out of the process. Bottom line is, as a developer, go ahead, learn OpenID Connect and learn web authentication.

Managing Credentials Securely

The next thing we want to talk about is credentials. How do you store them? You've got your monolithic app, and you've got a database password and an API key for the credit card processing API. Where do you store those keys? You should most definitely not store them in a text file on a server, because that's easy for somebody to steal. You should put them in what's called a credential service. The credential services are available from the cloud providers like Google KMS, or Azure Key Vault, or you can install your own vaults like HashiCorp Vault. That is very much a learn-the-credential vault that you have access to in your organization first. Once you learn how to use one of those vaults, it's easy to learn other vaults later on. Bottom line, two things you should know about as a developer, know about OpenID Connect, know about web authentication, and learn how to use your credential service, that's part of your organization.

Securing the Service-to-Service Call Chain

The last problem we want to talk about is the service-to-service call chain. Let's actually break it down with a concrete example. Let's say I have a webpage that looks like this, a product catalog. I've highlighted in the squares where some of the microservices might exist on the page. For example, you might have a price discount calculation service that factors in what marketing promotions are going on right now to assemble the page. If we take a step back, we'll say, we've got a product service page. It calls a book detail service to get the details of the book. Calls the pricing service, which in turn calls the buying habits service, to find out what you're buying habits are. Factor that into how much discount you're getting, and whatever current marketing promotions are happening. This example can be generalized into this thing over here, whereby you have some external clients, requests enter at the edge microservice layer, and the microservice at the edge call other microservices down the chain. As you can see here with the service J in the bottom right corner, service J might want to know, who is the actual human at the other side of this application? Is it Adib or not? Whereas microservice H there in the middle, it basically says I don't care who Adib is, who the user is, but I do need to know who called me? Was it microservice B, or was it microservice E? This is the idea of service identity versus user identity. It's important to actually know both at all times.

This gets a little bit more complicated, because the lines on the diagram earlier were not really one protocol. I could have a situation where from the user to my edge microservice, it's over HTTP, and that's written, that's a Java service, which uses OpenID Connect and web authentication to log the user in. You can then have that edge microservice in Java making an HTTP REST call to an internal microservice written in C#, which uses gRPC to call an internal service written in Go, which posts the message on a RabittMQ broker using the AMQP protocol, which is then picked up by a JavaScript Node.js service that is using AMQP. Looking at propagating user identity down the call chain, or service identity, you run into, how do I do that, or the variety of protocols that exist?

I have some bad news for you. There is no industry standard way of doing this, no app. There are patterns that can be used to solve this problem. The most important of those patterns is that you should use mutual TLS everywhere. Every service-to-service call should be over mutual TLS. Even if it's going over messaging, you need to do it twice, on both ends. That's why you need to be really good at TLS as a developer. Then, for the user identity, you've seen lots of ways to do it. People typically will say, I'm going to take a JWT token that describes the user, and signed by the login server, and I will just pass that down the chain and maybe bind it to a request with another signature or something like that. Lots of patterns that you can learn. However, if you know TLS, if you learn TLS, you will have the cryptography background to more easily understand this type of thing. Practically, there's lots of infrastructure pieces that can help you with it. For example, if you might have a service mesh available in your Kubernetes cluster, that could be very helpful for implementing this or an API gateway.

I want to take a step back and say, as a developer looking to upskill yourself in security, here's what I would do if I were you. I would start on this pyramid in the bottom left corner and focus on learning the standards and protocols. Set the goal for yourself to get really good at TLS, because that will force you to learn a lot of basic cryptography. Then, after you've figured that out, actually get good with a particular framework or language. For example, maybe you learn Spring Authorization Server, or Spring Security, Spring Cloud Gateway, and you learn how to put something together in Java, if you're a Java dev. Then you also got to focus on learning some industry best practices, maybe like, how do I containerize my workload security?

Next, I just have some technologies and suggestions for things you may want to learn. Here's my list of standards to learn to wrap your head around cryptography. Number one is what Secure Hash Function is, SHA-2 and SHA-3. Then learn about the Advanced Encryption Standard, in particular, the mode called authenticated encryption with associated data. What does that do? Then learn a bit about the JSON Object Signing and Encryption, because that's used in the OpenID Connect protocol, so it helps you learn that later. Plus, it gives you some cool practical technologies you can use. You can't escape knowing X.509 digital certificates, they're part of TLS. You got to obviously learn TLS. You can learn the OpenID Connect protocol for the purpose of logging users in. The Web Authentication Protocol, so you can do these passwordless logins. Then finally, the Secure Production Framework for Everyone, or SPIFFE is an emerging standard for how to bootstrap trust. That really helps with solving some of the difficult problems in the service-to-service call chain scenario.

Frameworks for Java Developers

For Java frameworks, I recommend Google Tink, Nimbus for JOSE. Spring Security is just a general java security framework. The Spring Authorization Server is a brand new project from the Spring team, which gives you all the infrastructure you need to build your own custom SSL server. This can be handy when you're trying to integrate with legacy environments where you have a non-standard internal service. There's also Spring Cloud Gateway, which is wonderful for implementing a lot of patterns around the service-to-service call chain.

Cloud Infra

Finally, for cloud infrastructure, I'm assuming you're doing stuff on Kubernetes because that's emerged as the industry standard these days for cloud native. How do you containerize securely? Highly suggest you learn about something Called Cloud Native Buildpacks, for building a process to keep your containers patched all the time. Obviously, you got to learn how to run applications on Kubernetes in secure ways. There's concepts on service mesh, like Istio. SPIRE is the runtime environment for SPIFFE, so that's useful to know. Of course, whatever key vault you happen to have available in your environment.

Questions and Answers

Losio: The first question was really about TLS. That was, what if I run two different services inside the same container, or same cluster, or whatever, what's really the benefit to do encryption using TLS or any kind of encryption? Here we are always assuming that we keep running for life inside the same cluster. Any thought or any feedback?

Saikali: In my line of business, I spend most of my time with customers, and there's this kind of always the magical tool that's going to mean you need to know less as a developer. I have yet to meet this tool. It doesn't matter what it is. I remember back in the day when Hibernate came out, it was like, you don't need to know SQL. Of course, you needed to know SQL sometimes better because, yes, I don't have to spend all my time writing SQL statements but I need to know what my tools are using. I have maybe not a different perspective. The perspective I run into is a whole lot of people basically say your infrastructure is going to take care of things for you, and you don't have to know anything as a developer. You don't have to know anything about TLS. You don't have to know anything about mutual TLS. A lot of security people have really given up on developers learning security. I'm the opposite of that. I actually have a very strong belief in the potential of developers to increase their security skills and what that means for the industry.

From my point of view, you don't have to be an expert in TLS to learn the basics of TLS, and then you can configure your service mesh better, if you have a service mesh. You can participate more meaningfully in interactions with customers. I've seen insane stuff happen, where people basically thought that certain things gave them security when they didn't. There were certain things that really did give them security and they thought they didn't secure things. I think it's a worthy goal for developers to learn TLS to a level that a developer needs to understand TLS, not to the level where you're implementing the protocol. Just like you drive your car, you learn the rules of the road. It's the same thing, why not learn TLS?

Losio: Actually, you raised another very good point, something that I was thinking when you started your presentation, talking about cloud services and things that are very available to use. I was thinking, even sometimes the cloud provider make things even too easy that if with a click of a button with just a true, false in an API call, I can encrypt data. Think about Amazon S3, I can encrypt data. When I store my data, I can say, encrypt by default with the default key, whatever. The problem is, on one side, if it's easy enough that you should really do it, why not? On the other side, it's easy enough that you might not even know what you're doing, and assume that it's much more than what that service is doing. You think, my data is secure just because I enable that. I think it is back to your problem of saying that, yes, you need to know, more or less, not just what the service provider, what test tool is there, but what it's supposed to do.

Saikali: I 100% agree. It's really because what I find in all of the different customer engagements I've been on for the last seven years, there's always a point in the process where you get to go talk to InfoSec. They want to know how this application is secure. At that point is where you run into the issues of, can you speak the InfoSec's language or is this all a black box? If they see that you are more knowledgeable about security, you can have a more fruitful conversation, and you can more easily get your application approved to go to production. If you don't, then you're going to struggle just getting through that internal review process and it may cause project delays. I've seen both of those situations pan out. For me, as a developer, I look at technologies from, what should I focus my energy on? What should I learn?

I use this model from Scott Ambler, where he talks about if you learn a paradigm, that knowledge is good for 25 years, if you learn a particular platform or technology, it's only good for 10 years. For example, if you learned Kubernetes in 2015, you could charge whatever hourly rate you want, but you can bet that in three years, everybody that wants to know Kubernetes, knows Kubernetes, or needs to know Kubernetes knows Kubernetes. Over time, a lot of these technologies, they lose their value of the knowledge, but some of the things at the core of security, they're never going to lose their value. If you learn what a cryptographic hash function is, and how AES works, these things are going to be around for a very long time, or TLS. The details will change. There'll be a new version of the protocol. There'll be a new version of the algorithm, but that's timeless knowledge, in my opinion, for a developer far more useful than learning how to use a service mesh right now. If you have 10 hours to learn something and your choice is learn TLS or learn service mesh, go learn TLS. You're going to use that TLS knowledge for the rest of your career. Service mesh, who knows how long that'll be useful for?

Losio: Actually, there was something you mentioned in the beginning that I found quite interesting, was when you said basic application security is a CEO level problem, because the CEO can define that as well, how management is concerned about safety. I was thinking basically of two different scenarios. One is, I'm a software developer in a large corporation. In reality, I might be worried about the reputation of my company, but not too much about the CEO. I think like, it's his problem, it's there. If he gets fired. That's not the reason why I'm implementing security. That's the first problem. On a more realistic level, I was thinking more in the startup scenario, where I'm not saying that people don't care about security, but it's usually not high on the agenda because even the concept of risk is on a different level. If you tell a CEO of a startup that is trying to survive, make it through in very short time, if you say there's a risk that your application gets hacked, and you're going to lose everything. He is probably going to tell you, there's a very high risk that I'm going to lose everything anyway. How do you get that mindset more so in the startup world, in a new company, when the pressure is just to get fast, get big, and whatever?

Saikali: Let's break down those two scenarios. Let's say you're the enterprise developer working in a Mega Corp with 5000 other developers, and you're like, CEO, who cares? The CEO is going to go buy a private island, I don't care if they get fired. They have lots of money to play. That's actually true, so I don't care as a developer about the fate of the CEO. What I do care about is the quality of the tools that I'm using. What I see in a lot of these Mega Corps is really archaic processes, where it's like, you would like to use something that makes your life better as a developer, but you're not allowed to, or why aren't you allowed to, because information security needs to approve it. Why doesn't information security approve it? Because they're scared to approve anything that isn't already approved? Because that senior vice president who runs the security team doesn't want to get fired. It has an impact on you. My call to action is, there's like a cultural change that we need to go through as an industry around security. That's what we have to do.

I'll give you a really interesting story. On Sunday, I hosted a Matrix Resurrections watching party, and invited a bunch of family and friends, including my electrician who did the Reno in my house, because he helped me set up the TV. When he showed up, he's like, my Google account got hacked, and all these people started buying laptops with my credit card and all the stuff that was saved. The mistake he did was he signed in on some unknown computer with his Google ID, with his personal ID, and the hack started. He was showing me off his Google key that he bought, the hardware key, the equivalent of the YubiKey. I was having to explain to him like, yes, never ever log in. These things have real world consequences. You should care about this as a developer. Just change your attitude around security. That's number one.

In the startup world, startups are starting to get more complicated. The cost of launching a startup in 2022 is significantly higher than it was in 1995, or even 2000, or 2012. I look at it from the point of view, how many hours do I need to invest to learn the security stuff as a developer? How much more valuable I am. Security isn't hard to do if you know how to do it. It's difficult to do when you don't know how to do it. The other side about not knowing the security stuff as a developer in a startup is like, how much time are you going to waste on Stack Overflow, "I got a TLS handshake error when I called this thing or that thing." You waste more time because you didn't take the time to learn it. This is why I'm putting this book together. I am not "a security professional." I am basically saying, I want to explain the basics of security to software developers in a way that makes sense to security developers, so security developers can have a seat at the table with the wider InfoSec community and enable that higher, more meaningful communication. Where the InfoSec people don't just literally say developers can't be trusted, because they don't know anything about security.

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Recorded at:

Jul 01, 2022

Adib Saikali

This content is in the DevOps topic

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Are you ready to enhance your application security? Application security is the practice of protecting software applications from vulnerabilities, threats, and attacks by implementing preventive measures, secure coding practices, and regular testing and monitoring. Discover the three core principles of Application Security: prevention, detection, and response, and learn how to implement robust measures to defend against vulnerabilities. Our dynamic presentation template provides an engaging visual platform to educate and empower your audience with essential knowledge for securing their applications effectively.

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15 Application Security Best Practices

Want to try it for yourself?

The world of app development has experienced unprecedented growth since 2010. And with millions of mobile and web apps available, applications have become an essential part of our daily lives. In parallel, there has been an increase in the development of the internet of things (IoT), which has enabled the automation of manual processes.

But these positive developments have also brought with them a whole host of problems, with security issues, in particular, becoming commonplace. While the majority of developers and companies believe their applications to be sufficiently secure, they continue to push vulnerable code into production releases. Application security solutions like Snyk can help you get ahead of vulnerabilities by empowering developers to fix security issues early in the development lifecycle.

More Apps, More [Security] Problems

Among the most common application security challenges are:

Amateur programmers: As the demand for applications grows, the lack of qualified developers has led to a large number of amateur programmers writing mobile applications. All too often, development teams also lack the knowledge to solve the security issues that arise.

Inefficient use of tools: Developers often fail to use the testing tools they've invested in effectively. And many believe that these tools will slow down the development process .

Web app attack vector: Web applications are the main attack vector in data leaks. Enterprises should therefore be aware of the presence of APIs in their apps and the associated risks. Many API breaches affect businesses that are unaware these interfaces are present in their solutions.

No DevSecOps approach: Most organizations do not follow application development security best practices to secure their software. They often neglect to implement a DevSecOps process (the "shift-left” approach ), which is crucial for ensuring every security-related issue is dealt with and resolved as soon as possible.

Open-source vulnerabilities: Open-source software, with a great number of vulnerabilities contained in them, is one source of risk. It is estimated that 96% of enterprise market applications use open-source software and libraries.

By following the below application security checklist, you can avoid these pitfalls and achieve a higher level of security for your applications.

When it comes to application development security best practices and web application security best practices, the similarities in web, mobile , and desktop software development processes mean the same security best practices can often apply to both.

How to Perform an Application Security Gap Analysis

In this guide we'll walk through the steps to run a Application Security Gap Analysis for asset visibility, AppSec coverage and prioritization.

15 Application Security Best Practices Checklist

Adopt a DevSecOps Approach

Implement a Secure SDLC Management Process

Address Open-Source Vulnerabilities

Be Aware of Your Own Assets

Risk Assessment

Security Training for Developers

Manage Containers Properly

Limit User Access to Data

Update and Patch Regularly

Ensure Access to Log Data

Encrypt Your Data

Use Pentesting

Ensure Accurate Input Validation

Aim for Permanent Fixes

#1 Adopt a DevSecOps Approach

DevSecOps , or the shift-left approach , aims to detect security holes from day one in order to prevent security issues to begin with and to resolve them as quickly as possible if they do indeed arise. DevSecOps enables development teams to spot security issues at all stages of the software supply chain, from design to implementation.

#2 Implement a Secure SDLC Management Process

The secure software development life cycle management process (SSDLC) defines the product life cycle from the product security point of view. This process ensures that products in their life cycle are:

Developed and maintained by security-trained employees

Built in a secure environment following software security best practices

Securely delivered to customers

SSDLC applies to the holistic process of developing a new product from concept, throughout all development activities, until it is fully and securely deployed on the market as a mature product and until the end of its life cycle.

#3 Address Open-Source Vulnerabilities

While open-source tools offer a great number of benefits, including cost efficiency, they also expose you to significant vulnerabilities. When using open-source software, ongoing monitoring for vulnerabilities, regular updates, and patching vulnerabilities as quickly as possible are therefore crucial.

#4 Automate Simple Security Tasks

It is virtually impossible to mitigate the endless number of vulnerabilities that exist using a manual approach. Automation is therefore critical. All simple tasks should be automated in order to allow teams to focus on more challenging undertakings.

#5 Be Aware of Your Own Assets

Visibility is the first step toward gaining insight into your organization’s security state, as you can’t secure what you haven’t identified. Knowing precisely which assets make up your applications and software production infrastructure is key.

#6 Risk Assessment

Do a risk assessment by putting yourself in the attacker’s shoes. Make sure that all your bases are covered:

Create a list of all assets that require protection.

Identify your threats and how to isolate and contain them.

Identify attack vectors that put your application at risk of being compromised.

Ensure that you have the proper security measures in place in order to detect and prevent attacks.

Determine whether you need additional, or perhaps different, tools?

#7 Security Training for Developers

Because developers are also responsible for pushing code into production, it is critical that they receive training from your security team. This training of course should be tailored to the specific developer’s role and security needs.

#8 Manage Containers Properly

First, you should ensure your container images are signed with a digital signature tool (e.g., Docker Content Trust). It’s also important to run automatic scans for open-source vulnerabilities to secure the use of the container throughout the common integration pipeline.

#9 Limit User Access to Data

Further restricting access to your data is one of the best ways to improve security:

Determine who actually needs access to each specific resource.

Create access rules.

Ensure that access privileges remain up-to-date by removing active credentials once access to the data is no longer required.

#10 Update and Patch Regularly

Installing software updates and patches is one of the most effective ways to keep your software secure. Why try to solve problems yourself if something has already been remedied? However, it’s important to plan for each new update, as this requires designing the appropriate architecture in order to avoid API compatibility issues when upgrading to new versions.

#11 Ensure Access to Log Data

Having access to log data from your daily cloud operations is crucial for any incident response plan. The accumulation and interpretation of such data in the period leading up to an incident will have a direct impact on security and may also be relevant for subsequent investigations. Without this knowledge, you may well be left powerless when a security incident does occur.

#12 Encrypt Your Data

When it comes to web application security best practices, encryption of both data at rest and in transit is key. Basic encryption should include, among other things, using an SSL with a current certificate. It is unacceptable for sensitive user data such as IDs and passwords to be stored in plain text, which could lead to man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks . Ensure that you are using the strongest encryption algorithms.

#13 Use Pentesting

While automated tests manage to catch most security issues prior to release, there may still be potential gaps that have gone unnoticed. To minimize this risk, it is worth employing an experienced pentester to test the application. This type of ethical hacker attempts to break into the application in order to detect vulnerabilities and find potential attack vectors with the aim of protecting the system from a real attack. It is important that the pentester be an external expert who is not involved in the project.

#14 Ensure Accurate Input Validation

It is important that all input data is syntactically and semantically correct. The data should be validated for length—it should include the expected number of digits and characters; it should be the correct size, length, etc. While whitelisting is recommended, this validation method is not always possible to implement.

#15 Aim for Permanent Fixes

When analyzing CVE lists, it’s easy to notice that some types of vulnerabilities recur from time to time (e.g., cross-site scripting (XSS) , SQL injection , buffer overflow). Determining the root cause when a new vulnerability presents—rather than doing a partial patch—is therefore key to permanently eradicating it.

While there are certainly a wide variety of views and opinions among security experts when it comes to application security best practices, most would agree there are a few key points, as covered herein, that should be included in any application security review checklist.

However, it is always worth being more protected than the rest and doing your utmost to minimize the number of errors in your applications in order to make you a more challenging target to exploit.

Application Security FAQ

What is application security.

Application security is the process of identifying and mitigating application-level vulnerabilities. This is followed by hardening procedures that aim to increase the overall security posture of the application.

What application security testing tools are recommended?

There is no tool or testing protocol capable of mitigating every possible security risk. Rather, teams must apply a combination of tools, including static application security testing (SAST), interactive application security testing (IAST), dynamic application security testing (DAST) tools, and software composition analysis (SCA) testing tools.

What are the main approaches to application security testing?

One of the main ways to detect vulnerabilities in your product source code is through the use of static application security testing (SAST) tools. In contrast to SAST tools, dynamic application security testing (DAST) tools detect vulnerabilities by actively trying to exploit your application in runtime.

Secure your applications with our developer first tool

Efficient and actionable application security advice across IDEs, repos, containers, and pipelines.

Web Application Security Explained: Risks & Nine Best Practices

It’s vital for Developers to have knowledge of web application security so they can secure web apps as they’re developed, reducing the burden on security teams.

Snyk is a developer security platform. Integrating directly into development tools, workflows, and automation pipelines, Snyk makes it easy for teams to find, prioritize, and fix security vulnerabilities in code, dependencies, containers, and infrastructure as code. Supported by industry-leading application and security intelligence, Snyk puts security expertise in any developer’s toolkit.

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Web Application Security Testing Methodology - Slide 1

Grab our Application Security presentation template for MS PowerPoint and Google Slides to highlight the methods, tools, and practices to safeguard applications from potential risks, vulnerabilities, and threats.

IT security experts can capitalize on our deck to showcase the key features and components of an application security competency framework. You can also highlight the different types of attacks that impact the security of web applications and ways to handle or prevent them. Moreover, you can explain how enterprises can safeguard sensitive data, protect user privacy, and build trust with their customers by prioritizing app security.

Sizing Charts

Size	XS	S	S	M	M	L
EU	32	34	36	38	40	42
UK	4	6	8	10	12	14
US	0	2	4	6	8	10
Bust	79.5cm / 31"	82cm / 32"	84.5cm / 33"	89.5cm / 35"	94.5cm / 37"	99.5cm / 39"
Waist	61.5cm / 24"	64cm / 25"	66.5cm / 26"	71.5cm / 28"	76.5cm / 30"	81.5cm / 32"
Hip	86.5cm / 34"	89cm / 35"	91.5cm / 36"	96.5cm / 38"	101.5cm / 40"	106.5cm / 42"

Size	XS	S	M	L	XL	XXL
UK/US	34	36	38	40	42	44
Neck	37cm / 14.5"	38cm /15"	39.5cm / 15.5"	41cm / 16"	42cm / 16.5"	43cm / 17"
Chest	86.5cm / 34"	91.5cm / 36"	96.5cm / 38"	101.5cm / 40"	106.5cm / 42"	111.5cm / 44"
Waist	71.5cm / 28"	76.5cm / 30"	81.5cm / 32"	86.5cm / 34"	91.5cm / 36"	96.5cm / 38"
Seat	90cm / 35.4"	95cm / 37.4"	100cm / 39.4"	105cm / 41.3"	110cm / 43.3"	115cm / 45.3"

IMAGES

Application Security PowerPoint and Google Slides Template
Web Application Security Testing PowerPoint Presentation Slides
Application Security Assessment PowerPoint and Google Slides Template
Web Application Security Testing PowerPoint Presentation Slides
Web Application Security Ppt Powerpoint Presentation Outline Layouts
Mobile Application Security PowerPoint Presentation Slides

COMMENTS

Application Security Powerpoint Presentation Slides - SlideTeam
This Application Security PowerPoint presentation briefly overviews application security, its features, common threats, and benefits. It also includes the comparative analysis of vulnerability scanning and penetration testing and the difference between authentication and authorization.
How to build a successful application security program
Previously, Tanya shared her perspectives on the role of application security (AppSec) and the challenges facing AppSec professionals. In this blog, Tanya shares how to build an AppSec program, find security champions, and measure its success.
A PractitionerÕs Guide to Application Security
Fundamentally, application security is about designing, building, and maintaining secure software. Good software helps organizations and bad software hurts organizations. There are four main categories of application security activities - Govern, Find, Fix, and Prevent. To do application security well, you must govern the application security ...
What is Application Security | Types, Tools & Best Practices ...
Application security aims to protect software application code and data against cyber threats. You can and should apply application security during all phases of development, including design, development, and deployment. Here are several ways to promote application security throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC):
Application Security | Application Security Tutorial | Cyber ...
This Edureka PPT on "Application Security" will help you understand what application security is and measures taken to improve the security of an application often by finding, fixing and preventing security vulnerabilities.
PPT - Application Security PowerPoint Presentation, free ...
Objectives • Types of applications • Application models and technologies • Application threats and countermeasures • Security in the software development life cycle CISSP Guide to Security Essentials
Making Sense of Application Security - InfoQ
Adib Saikali provides a roadmap for application developers and architects to master application security, identifying the security skills needed as an application developer.
Application Security PowerPoint and Google Slides Templates
Get our application security PowerPoint and Google Slides themes. Secure your applications and protect sensitive data with security practices.
Application Security Best Practices Checklist 2023 | Snyk
What is Application Security? Application security is the process of identifying and mitigating application-level vulnerabilities. This is followed by hardening procedures that aim to increase the overall security posture of the application. What application security testing tools are recommended?
Application Security PowerPoint and Google Slides Template ...
Grab our Application Security presentation template for MS PowerPoint and Google Slides to highlight the methods, tools, and practices to safeguard applications from potential risks, vulnerabilities, and threats.

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Application Security Risks

Broken Access Control

Cryptographic Failures

Injection (Including XSS, LFI, and SQL Injection)

Insecure Design

Security Misconfiguration (Including XXE)

Vulnerable and Outdated Components

Identification and Authentication Failures

Software and Data Integrity Failures

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Server Side Request Forgery

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Broken Object Level Authorization

Broken User Authentication

Excessive Data Exposure

Lack of Resources & Rate Limiting

Broken Function Level Authorization

Mass Assignment

Security Misconfiguration

Improper Assets Management

Insufficient Logging & Monitoring

What is Application Security Testing?

Application Security Testing vs. API Security Testing

Types of Application Security Testing

Black Box Security Testing

White Box Security Testing

Gray Box Security Testing

Application Security Tools and Solutions

Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP)

Vulnerability Management

Software Bill of Materials (SBOM)

Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST)

Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST)

Mobile Application Security Testing (MAST)

Application Security Best Practices

Perform a Threat Assessment

Shift Security Left

Prioritize Your Remediation Ops

Measure Application Security Results

Manage Privileges

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