Application security is a significant challenge for software engineers, as well as for security and DevOps professionals. It comprises the measures taken to improve the security of online services and websites against malicious attacks by finding, repairing, and preventing security weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
The goal of application security is to prevent an application’s code or data from within the app from being compromised or stolen. Application security encompasses both the security considerations that are made during the development and design of the app as well as approaches and systems used to protect the app after it is deployed.
A great deal of time and money is invested in application security, as systems become more and more complex and hackers continue to increase their efforts to target applications. Web applications are considered by attackers to be high-priority targets due to:
Common targets for web application attacks include software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, database administration tools, and content management systems. Attacks can result in data theft, damaged relationships with clients, and legal consequences.
Application security may include hardware (like a router), software (like a firewall), and procedures (like an application security routine) that diagnose or reduce security vulnerabilities.
To improve their application security, companies should invest in tools that integrate with their development environment. This is especially important for companies that work with highly sensitive data, such as financial, healthcare, or government organizations.
The members of IT Central Station (soon to be Peerspot) were clear on what was most important when evaluating Application Security: while some also mentioned that the software should be silent and have the ability to lock down configuration settings, everyone agreed that quality Application Security should provide intelligent data and come with a solid reputation, a strong usage pattern, efficient data handling, and a clean design. Members also mentioned documentation and maintenance as benefits.
While both network security and application security seek out weaknesses in your company’s security posture and both are necessary for a comprehensive, multi-layered risk-management program, the two differ in the following ways.
Network security, also known as vulnerability management or vulnerability assessment, is network-level protection of information assets and systems from intrusions, breaches, and other threats. Network security consists of three different types of controls. Physical network security prevents unauthorized personnel from accessing physical network components such as routers and cabling. Access is prevented through controlled access, such as biometric authentication and locks. Technical network security protects data and systems both from authorized as well as unauthorized personnel. Administrative network security consists of rules, security processes, and policies that control user behavior. This includes levels of access, methods of authentication, overall threat protections, and how changes are made to the IT infrastructure. Network security involves workstations, routers, servers, and wireless networks and incorporates technologies such as intrusion prevention systems (IPS), firewalls, and data-loss prevention (DLP). In addition, vulnerability scanners, secure web gateways, and patch management tools may be used to discover and prevent security weaknesses.
Application security (AppSec), on the other hand, is the protection of applications on a software level. The majority of successful security breaches target vulnerabilities in the application layer rather than in the network layer. Application security includes front ends and source code and involves systems such as databases, websites, client and server applications, and mobile apps. Applications are secured using technologies such as web application firewalls, cloud access security brokers (CASBs), and source code analyzers. Proper AppSec can prevent security vulnerabilities in your own code as well as in third-party components used within your applications.
Application Security vs Software Security
Software and the infrastructure on which the software runs need to be protected. This involves both software security, which is proactive and takes place in the pre-deployment phase, and application security, which is reactive, taking place once the software has already been deployed.
Software security is about designing and building software that is secure.
It involves a holistic approach to improve your organization’s information security posture, safeguard its assets, and enforce data privacy.
Software defects can be exploited by malicious intruders and used to hack into systems. Internet-enabled software presents the most common security risk, and as software becomes more complex, the problem only grows.
Secure software is software that is engineered to continue to function correctly even under malicious attack. To ensure that software is secure, security must be built into all phases of the SDLC (software development life cycle).
Software security activities take place during the design, coding, and testing phases, and may include:
Application security, on the other hand, is about protecting software and the systems run by the software after it has been developed.
Application security activities include:
In order to protect your organization, it is important that you implement a mobile app security checklist. Here is what it should include:
1. Enforce multi-factor authentication
The three main factors used for authentication are:
Combining several of these reduces the risk of access by an unauthorized user. In addition, you can restrict use to certain times of day or locations.
2. Encrypt mobile communications
Strong encryption between mobile apps and app servers can help prevent threats such as snooping and man-in-the-middle attacks. Ensure that both traffic and data at rest are encrypted. When possible, prevent ultra-sensitive data from being downloaded to the end user device in the first place.
3. Patch OS and app vulnerabilities
In addition to flaws in mobile operating systems, there are constant updates and fixes to apps that can open up vulnerabilities. Make sure the latest updates and patches have been applied on mobile devices.
4. Scan apps for malware
Test apps for malicious behavior using signature-based scanning tools or virtual sandboxing or. Also perform malware scans on the servers for your virtual mobile solutions or mobile workspace.
5. Protect against device theft
In case a mobile device from within your organization is lost or stolen, you should either have a way to wipe sensitive corporate data from it remotely, or not have company data stored on the device to begin with.
6. Protect the data on your device
If you must store sensitive data on a device, make sure it is encrypted with the latest encryption technologies. And only store it in data stores, databases, and files.
7. Properly secure your platform
8. Prevent data leaks
Separate apps used for business from personal apps. Creating a secure mobile workspace can help prevent malware from accessing your organization’s apps and can also prevent users from copying or distributing sensitive data.
To prevent the leaking of confidential data:
9. Optimize data caching
In order to enhance your application’s performance, mobile devices generally store cached data. This opens up both the device and the app to vulnerabilities and often results in stolen user data. Requiring a password to access the app can help reduce these vulnerabilities. You can also set up an automatic process to wipe cached data each time the device is restarted.
10. Isolate app information
Using a container-based model can help you keep corporate data separate from your employee’s private data. This will help to reduce the risk of corporate data loss.
All applications have security flaws. No app is perfect. The faster and sooner in the development process you can find and fix these flaws, the better off your enterprise will be.
With today’s continuous deployment and integration of applications, apps are being updated and refined constantly. This means that security tools need to keep the pace, finding issues with code much faster than they did in the past.
Interestingly enough, as new applications continue to come out, new vulnerabilities are constantly introduced. We are actually creating many of the tools that cybercriminals use against us and building them right into our applications.
Your organization needs an application security program in order to ensure that as your apps are developed and managed, they are secure and are not opening your company up to attack.
There are four main reasons why application security is important:
One of the reasons apps are such a popular target is because organizations are not careful enough about securing them. In fact, 79% of developers have an ineffective application security process or none at all. While businesses spend billions securing their hardware, network, and perimeter, they are not investing sufficiently in the security of their applications.
You need to secure your apps because:
1. Your applications are inextricably tied to the success of your business. Insecure applications equal an insecure business.
2. Most, if not all, apps are vulnerable. According to a report by Veracode, 70% of all applications they looked at had at least one of the top 10 web vulnerabilities.
3. Apps are the number one attack target and attacks against them are growing by more than 25% per year.
4. You can’t afford not to. Data breaches cost businesses around the world hundreds of millions of dollars. If you experience a data breach, you will have to deal with:
The following are ten web application security best practices that will help to secure the web applications that you develop and maintain:
1. Keep track of your assets. Know what servers you’re using for what functions and what software is running in which app. If you don’t know exactly what you have, you can’t protect it. Automate the process as much as possible to prevent issues later on. Classify your assets as well, noting which ones are more critical or less important to your business functions. You will want to know this later when you are working on threat assessment and remediation strategy.
2. Perform a threat assessment. Once you know what needs protecting, you can start to figure out what you are protecting it against and how. Hire an external company to audit your application objectively. They can give you a baseline and let you know where your security is lacking.
3. Stay on top of patching. Patching your software with updates is one of the most important things you can do to keep your software safe. Whenever a vulnerability is discovered and reported, security advisories report it and, ideally, a fix is created. But the patch can’t help you if you don’t use it. Update and patch whenever updates and patches are available.
4. Implement proper logging so you will have all the information about what occurred, what led to it occurring, and what else was going on concurrently.
5. Manage privileges. Limit access to data and applications to those who really need it. This both protects you from insider threats and also reduces the damage a hacker can do once he infiltrates a particular part of your system.
6. Encrypt! It is important that you use encryption holistically to protect your application, considering data at rest as well as data in transit, and looking at encryption from every angle. Make sure you are using an SSL that is up-to-date. An HTTPS encryption is a good start but it’s not enough to protect you from all attacks. Use security products that come recommended and will get the job done.
7. Use real-time security protection and monitoring. In addition to a firewall and a WAF (web application firewall), use a RASP (Runtime Application Self-Protection) tool or an Application Security Management platform that can provide RASP and in-app WAF modules. This gives you the widest range of protection, both internally and externally.
8. Manage containers. Although containers come with security advantages, they still face risks, as does the code stored within them. Run automated scans for open source and proprietary vulnerabilities, and use a tool to sign all your own images.
9. Prioritize remediation ops. To do this, perform a threat assessment based on the severity of the vulnerability, the importance of the impacted app to your operations, and other factors. Then implement a strategy that prioritizes the most pressing threats first and leaves lower-risk ones to be dealt with later.
10. Use penetration testing. Hire either a professional hacking firm or a freelancer, but hire someone. Good pen testers will comb through your code to find weak points and figure out exactly how hackers will try to break into your application.
Application security:
Types of application security include:
RASP is a technology that is designed to detect attacks on an application in real time. When an application begins to run, RASP kicks in and analyzes the app’s behavior as well as the context of that behavior in order to identify threats that might have been overlooked by other security solutions..
RASP operates on the server the app is running on, and can protect both web and non-web apps. It makes sure that all calls from the application to the system are secure and directly validates data requests inside the app.
When a security event occurs, RASP takes control of the app. It can be set to diagnostic mode, in which case an alarm will alert the IT department that there is a problem. Or it can be set to protection mode, in which case it will try to stop the event by preventing the execution of an app or terminating the user’s session.
The application layer is the number one attack surface for hackers - 84% of cyber attacks occur on the application layer. You should be building security into the software development life cycle (SDLC). Below are four best practices for secure application development:
Test continually from end to end. Full integration testing will ensure that all the components are working together as expected. It also increases code coverage.
Consistency is key. Your team should have a style guide for their codebase and every member should stick to it.
The members of IT Central Station (soon to be Peerspot) were clear on what was most important when evaluating Application Security: while some also mentioned that the software should be silent and have the ability to lock down configuration settings, everyone agreed that quality Application Security should provide intelligent data and come with a solid reputation, a strong usage pattern, efficient data handling, and a clean design. Members also mentioned documentation and maintenance as benefits.
While both network security and application security seek out weaknesses in your company’s security posture and both are necessary for a comprehensive, multi-layered risk-management program, the two differ in the following ways.
Network security, also known as vulnerability management or vulnerability assessment, is network-level protection of information assets and systems from intrusions, breaches, and other threats. Network security consists of three different types of controls. Physical network security prevents unauthorized personnel from accessing physical network components such as routers and cabling. Access is prevented through controlled access, such as biometric authentication and locks. Technical network security protects data and systems both from authorized as well as unauthorized personnel. Administrative network security consists of rules, security processes, and policies that control user behavior. This includes levels of access, methods of authentication, overall threat protections, and how changes are made to the IT infrastructure. Network security involves workstations, routers, servers, and wireless networks and incorporates technologies such as intrusion prevention systems (IPS), firewalls, and data-loss prevention (DLP). In addition, vulnerability scanners, secure web gateways, and patch management tools may be used to discover and prevent security weaknesses.
Application security (AppSec), on the other hand, is the protection of applications on a software level. The majority of successful security breaches target vulnerabilities in the application layer rather than in the network layer. Application security includes front ends and source code and involves systems such as databases, websites, client and server applications, and mobile apps. Applications are secured using technologies such as web application firewalls, cloud access security brokers (CASBs), and source code analyzers. Proper AppSec can prevent security vulnerabilities in your own code as well as in third-party components used within your applications.
Application Security vs Software Security
Software and the infrastructure on which the software runs need to be protected. This involves both software security, which is proactive and takes place in the pre-deployment phase, and application security, which is reactive, taking place once the software has already been deployed.
Software security is about designing and building software that is secure.
It involves a holistic approach to improve your organization’s information security posture, safeguard its assets, and enforce data privacy.
Software defects can be exploited by malicious intruders and used to hack into systems. Internet-enabled software presents the most common security risk, and as software becomes more complex, the problem only grows.
Secure software is software that is engineered to continue to function correctly even under malicious attack. To ensure that software is secure, security must be built into all phases of the SDLC (software development life cycle).
Software security activities take place during the design, coding, and testing phases, and may include:
Application security, on the other hand, is about protecting software and the systems run by the software after it has been developed.
Application security activities include:
In order to protect your organization, it is important that you implement a mobile app security checklist. Here is what it should include:
1. Enforce multi-factor authentication
The three main factors used for authentication are:
Combining several of these reduces the risk of access by an unauthorized user. In addition, you can restrict use to certain times of day or locations.
2. Encrypt mobile communications
Strong encryption between mobile apps and app servers can help prevent threats such as snooping and man-in-the-middle attacks. Ensure that both traffic and data at rest are encrypted. When possible, prevent ultra-sensitive data from being downloaded to the end user device in the first place.
3. Patch OS and app vulnerabilities
In addition to flaws in mobile operating systems, there are constant updates and fixes to apps that can open up vulnerabilities. Make sure the latest updates and patches have been applied on mobile devices.
4. Scan apps for malware
Test apps for malicious behavior using signature-based scanning tools or virtual sandboxing or. Also perform malware scans on the servers for your virtual mobile solutions or mobile workspace.
5. Protect against device theft
In case a mobile device from within your organization is lost or stolen, you should either have a way to wipe sensitive corporate data from it remotely, or not have company data stored on the device to begin with.
6. Protect the data on your device
If you must store sensitive data on a device, make sure it is encrypted with the latest encryption technologies. And only store it in data stores, databases, and files.
7. Properly secure your platform
8. Prevent data leaks
Separate apps used for business from personal apps. Creating a secure mobile workspace can help prevent malware from accessing your organization’s apps and can also prevent users from copying or distributing sensitive data.
To prevent the leaking of confidential data:
9. Optimize data caching
In order to enhance your application’s performance, mobile devices generally store cached data. This opens up both the device and the app to vulnerabilities and often results in stolen user data. Requiring a password to access the app can help reduce these vulnerabilities. You can also set up an automatic process to wipe cached data each time the device is restarted.
10. Isolate app information
Using a container-based model can help you keep corporate data separate from your employee’s private data. This will help to reduce the risk of corporate data loss.
All applications have security flaws. No app is perfect. The faster and sooner in the development process you can find and fix these flaws, the better off your enterprise will be.
With today’s continuous deployment and integration of applications, apps are being updated and refined constantly. This means that security tools need to keep the pace, finding issues with code much faster than they did in the past.
Interestingly enough, as new applications continue to come out, new vulnerabilities are constantly introduced. We are actually creating many of the tools that cybercriminals use against us and building them right into our applications.
Your organization needs an application security program in order to ensure that as your apps are developed and managed, they are secure and are not opening your company up to attack.
There are four main reasons why application security is important:
One of the reasons apps are such a popular target is because organizations are not careful enough about securing them. In fact, 79% of developers have an ineffective application security process or none at all. While businesses spend billions securing their hardware, network, and perimeter, they are not investing sufficiently in the security of their applications.
You need to secure your apps because:
1. Your applications are inextricably tied to the success of your business. Insecure applications equal an insecure business.
2. Most, if not all, apps are vulnerable. According to a report by Veracode, 70% of all applications they looked at had at least one of the top 10 web vulnerabilities.
3. Apps are the number one attack target and attacks against them are growing by more than 25% per year.
4. You can’t afford not to. Data breaches cost businesses around the world hundreds of millions of dollars. If you experience a data breach, you will have to deal with:
The following are ten web application security best practices that will help to secure the web applications that you develop and maintain:
1. Keep track of your assets. Know what servers you’re using for what functions and what software is running in which app. If you don’t know exactly what you have, you can’t protect it. Automate the process as much as possible to prevent issues later on. Classify your assets as well, noting which ones are more critical or less important to your business functions. You will want to know this later when you are working on threat assessment and remediation strategy.
2. Perform a threat assessment. Once you know what needs protecting, you can start to figure out what you are protecting it against and how. Hire an external company to audit your application objectively. They can give you a baseline and let you know where your security is lacking.
3. Stay on top of patching. Patching your software with updates is one of the most important things you can do to keep your software safe. Whenever a vulnerability is discovered and reported, security advisories report it and, ideally, a fix is created. But the patch can’t help you if you don’t use it. Update and patch whenever updates and patches are available.
4. Implement proper logging so you will have all the information about what occurred, what led to it occurring, and what else was going on concurrently.
5. Manage privileges. Limit access to data and applications to those who really need it. This both protects you from insider threats and also reduces the damage a hacker can do once he infiltrates a particular part of your system.
6. Encrypt! It is important that you use encryption holistically to protect your application, considering data at rest as well as data in transit, and looking at encryption from every angle. Make sure you are using an SSL that is up-to-date. An HTTPS encryption is a good start but it’s not enough to protect you from all attacks. Use security products that come recommended and will get the job done.
7. Use real-time security protection and monitoring. In addition to a firewall and a WAF (web application firewall), use a RASP (Runtime Application Self-Protection) tool or an Application Security Management platform that can provide RASP and in-app WAF modules. This gives you the widest range of protection, both internally and externally.
8. Manage containers. Although containers come with security advantages, they still face risks, as does the code stored within them. Run automated scans for open source and proprietary vulnerabilities, and use a tool to sign all your own images.
9. Prioritize remediation ops. To do this, perform a threat assessment based on the severity of the vulnerability, the importance of the impacted app to your operations, and other factors. Then implement a strategy that prioritizes the most pressing threats first and leaves lower-risk ones to be dealt with later.
10. Use penetration testing. Hire either a professional hacking firm or a freelancer, but hire someone. Good pen testers will comb through your code to find weak points and figure out exactly how hackers will try to break into your application.
Application security:
Types of application security include:
RASP is a technology that is designed to detect attacks on an application in real time. When an application begins to run, RASP kicks in and analyzes the app’s behavior as well as the context of that behavior in order to identify threats that might have been overlooked by other security solutions..
RASP operates on the server the app is running on, and can protect both web and non-web apps. It makes sure that all calls from the application to the system are secure and directly validates data requests inside the app.
When a security event occurs, RASP takes control of the app. It can be set to diagnostic mode, in which case an alarm will alert the IT department that there is a problem. Or it can be set to protection mode, in which case it will try to stop the event by preventing the execution of an app or terminating the user’s session.
The application layer is the number one attack surface for hackers - 84% of cyber attacks occur on the application layer. You should be building security into the software development life cycle (SDLC). Below are four best practices for secure application development:
Test continually from end to end. Full integration testing will ensure that all the components are working together as expected. It also increases code coverage.
Consistency is key. Your team should have a style guide for their codebase and every member should stick to it.