Secure Software Development: Best Practices for 2024

Secure software development includes enabling software security (security requirements planning, designing a software architecture from a security perspective, adding security features, etc.) and maintaining the security of software and the underlying infrastructure (source code review, penetration testing).

Introducing security practices will naturally increase the time and effort required for each SDLC stage. For example, strict code reviews lead to up to a 20–30% increase in coding time compared with a usual software development project. At the same time, it helps save millions in the future: the average data breach cost was reported to reach $3.86 million in 2020.

In software development since 1989 and in information security since 2003, Science Soft delivers full-range secure software consulting and development services for enterprises and product companies.

Stages of Secure Software Development 

The number and depth of security measures will differ depending on the level of security you want to achieve. Below is an overview of security aspects and practices Science Soft commonly employs.

Requirements gathering, prioritization, and analysis: mapping security requirements

Key deliverable: prioritized security and privacy software requirements.

Our security specialists prepare an application risk profile at the requirements gathering stage. The document describes possible entry points for attackers and categorizes security risks by the severity level, including their impact and likelihood.

Relying on the risk profile as well as organizational security and privacy policies and standards regulatory requirements (e.g., of HIPAA, PCI DSS, etc.), business analysts elicit and document security and resilience requirements for future software, including:

• Identification requirements
• Authentication requirements
• Authorization requirements
• Integrity requirements
• Non-repudiation requirements
• Privacy requirements
• Survivability requirements

Best practice: Science Soft describes only the most likely or severe risks to optimize the effort and time of planning and implementing countermeasures.

Software design threat modeling, secure architecture, planning security features

Key deliverables include categorized and ranked security threats, a security risk mitigation plan, and a documented secure software architecture.

After Science Soft’s team designed a high-level software architecture and established the significant data flows and entry points in future applications, they proceeded with threat modeling. Our team performs the following activities:

• They decompose the planned application architecture into functional components, determining threats to each component.
• Threats categorization and prioritization.
• Planning and prioritizing controls and countermeasures for possible attacks.

Based on the described security and resilience requirements and threat modeling activities, our team plans:

• Secure software architecture (e.g., employing application partitioning, container-based approach).
• Security features (cryptography (DES, 3DES, AES, RSA, blowfish), audit/log, user identification, verification, and authorization (password-based, multi-factor, certificate-based, token-based, biometrics).
• Test cases are to be executed at the testing and maintenance stages.

Threat modeling at Science Soft is typically iterative. It spans the entire SDLC cycle, from a high-level architecture (interaction between software modules) to a detailed architecture design and implementation (specific code functions and methods).

Best practice: At Science Soft, we make an extra effort to ensure security does not hinder UX. Users are likely to turn security features off if they’re overwhelming.

 Software development secure coding practices, static analysis, and regular peer review

Key deliverables included developing security features, documenting secure code, and describing vulnerabilities from an automated security code review and unit testing.

At this stage, Science Soft’s developers:

• Employ secure coding practices to mitigate or minimize high-risk implementation-level vulnerabilities.
• Use only secure development tools (libraries, frameworks, etc.).
• Perform regular unit tests.
• Perform automated static code analysis.
• Conduct language-specific, checklist-based code peer reviews to detect vulnerabilities that automated security review tools cannot identify.

Note: At Science Soft, we are guided by the Application Security Verification Standard Project by OWASP (one of the most authoritative organizations in software security), which provides a comprehensive list of secure coding practices and unit tests for developers.

Best practice: Science Soft opts for the automated gathering of information about target software. For example, we often add static application security testing (SAST) and dynamic application security testing (DAST) to CI/CD pipelines to scan each build according to the same scenario and detect where an attack on an app may be introduced.

 Software deployment and support: penetration testing, final security review, and an incident response plan

Key deliverables: a security testing results report describing the uncovered security issues, their risk level, impact, and ways to eliminate them, and a security monitoring and incident response plan.

At this stage, Science Soft’s team proceeds with:

• Conducting penetration testing of software and its infrastructure (black box, gray box, and white box pen testing); fixing identified security issues and conducting regression testing. Note: These activities are performed in every build when we develop software iteratively.
• Final Security Review (FSR) by subject-matter security experts to verify that security risks identified during the previous security activities have been adequately addressed (fixed or have a mitigation plan in place).
• I am creating an incident response procedure.
• I am setting up application security monitoring and performing manual and automated security regression testing.
• (if applicable) Submitting your application for external validation to attest to compliance with industry regulations officially.
• We are establishing a feedback process and tools for users, white hat hackers, etc., to report on revealed vulnerabilities.

Secure Software Development Services by Science Soft

Secure software development consulting

• Helping shape software vision, eliciting and structuring software requirements, including security requirements.
• Designing secure software architecture, helping choose a tech stack.
• We are developing a business case.
• Delivering PoC.
• We are delivering a detailed development roadmap.
• I am planning a DevSecOps strategy.

Go for consulting

Secure software development

• Software requirements engineering, including security requirements.
• Secure software design.
• Development using the best practices of secure coding.
• Regular code reviews by security experts.
• Post-commit penetration testing (automated/manual).
• Establishing secure CI/CD pipelines.

Go for development

Why Choose ScienceSoft for Secure Software Development

• In software development since 1989.
• In information security since 2003.
• In security testing since 2015.
• Certified Ethical Hackers.
• A quality-first approach based on a mature ISO 9001-certified quality management system.
• ISO 27001-certified security management based on comprehensive policies and processes, advanced security technology, and skilled professionals.
• ISO 13485-certified company to design and develop secure medical software according to the requirements of the FDA and the Council of the European Union.
• ScienceSoft is a 3-year champion in The Americas’ Fastest-Growing Companies rating by the Financial Times.

Popular Sourcing Models

The entire secure software development process is kept in-house

Pros:

• Complete control over the development process, infrastructure, and security measures.

Cons:

• Re-training existing resources or hiring additional staff since specific software security and resilience knowledge and skills are needed.

Partial outsourcing of secure software development project

Pros:

• Security expertise of qualified outsourced resources helps to implement security at each stage of SDLC.

Cons:

• Partial or total project team coordination, quality control, and risk management are required from your side.
• A comprehensive vendor security audit is needed.
• An audit of all digital points between you and the vendor is required.

Complete outsourcing of the secure software development process

Pros:

• A vendor assumes full responsibility for the security of the entire development infrastructure, team assembly and management, and the quality of the project results.
• We have established secure software development practices and methodologies for each SDLC stage.

Cons:

• High vendor risks.
• A comprehensive vendor security audit is needed.

Key Roles in Our Secure Software Development Teams

Project manager

• They planned time and budget to ensure that security and resilience requirements were thoroughly handled throughout the software development life cycle.

Business Analyst (BA)

• Gathers and documents functional and non-functional (including security and resilience) requirements from all software stakeholders.
• Helps with threat and countermeasure identification and assessment due to a deep understanding of specific business processes and data.
• Determines the value of the data to be collected, stored, and transmitted by planned software.

Security Engineer / DevSecOps

• Identifies software security flaws at all SDLC stages.
• Prepares the application’s risk profile.
• Performs static and dynamic software analysis, automates these types of analysis, and helps integrate security tools into CI/CD pipelines.
• Configures and implements computer security and networking diagnostic and monitoring tools.
• Identifies security risks to the infrastructure.
• Prepares incident response plans.
• Manages log analytics tools.

System architect

• Design software architecture according to security and resilience requirements.

Software engineer

• Develops secure backend and frontend employing secure coding practices.

Compliance (PCI DSS, HIPAA, etc.) expert

• Assumes ownership of all compliance requirements.
• Performs compliance audits and compiles reports.
• Documents compliance-related processes.

Pentester

• Plans and creates penetration scripts and tests.
• Simulates cyberattacks to expose and report weaknesses in security.
• Creates reports to document pen-testing findings.

Conclusion

In conclusion, secure software development protects sensitive data and maintains trust. Teams can build robust, resilient applications by integrating security practices throughout the development lifecycle. Prioritizing security helps mitigate risks, ensuring safe and reliable software for users and businesses.