Application Security Whitepaper

White Paper: Security Best Practices in Application Development

Keyhole Software Consulting, Keyhole Creations, Security Leave a Comment

This white paper provides key takeaways for application stewards and software leaders to improve application security, with examples of common application security liabilities and suggestions for remediation. Topics include:

An in-depth look into Security Culture and the importance of the people element in adopting a security-first outlook.
An explanation of common application practices we frequently see in the wild that can be inherently risky, with suggestions for best practices.
A security checklist to determine critical areas of higher risk to prioritize in your journey to a more secure application.
An explanation of the security Surface Area and how to minimize it starting from your source code.
Strategies to protect Authentication and Authorization and a comparison between Third-Party solutions and rolling your own auth.
A deep dive into built-in Application Security and an exploration of strategies that might help your business, including Network-Level Security, WAF, Payload Encryption, SSL, Cloud Configuration, and SIEM…

Application Security

Top Security Mistakes to Avoid in AppDev

Zach Gardner Architecture, Security Leave a Comment

Developing custom applications is one of the hardest professional endeavors, and making them secure is even harder. Malicious actors are constantly changing tactics and strategies, which, unfortunately, makes it impossible to completely eliminate any security threat.

There needs to be a balance between delivering features quickly to meet business objectives and mitigating security risks. Thankfully, these two goals are not mutually exclusive. This blog post dives into the top mistakes that can be made while developing custom applications.

These recommendations are different from what would commonly be seen in an OWASP list, and they should be used in addition to whatever security practices and procedures are already in place by an organization’s infosec department. These recommendations are also written from an application architect’s (rather than an enterprise infrastructure) perspective, so most of them aren’t covered by existing security checklists.

Solid: A New Web Standard Allowing People to Control Their Own Data

Rik Scarborough Development Technologies, Programming, Security Leave a Comment

This post contains a recap of my research into the subject and an exploration of Sir Tim’s so-called new Internet – a technology called Solid. We’ll start by exploring what Solid is, and then we’ll talk about its purposes and how to use it. It’s a pretty cool technology!

So, let’s dive in. What exactly has Sir Tim Berners-Lee created?

OWASP Dependency Check for Vulnerability Reporting

John Hoestje Development Technologies, Java, Security, Tutorial Leave a Comment

TL;DR: Add OWASP Dependency-Check to your build process to get insight into your dependency vulnerabilities.

Recent major data losses and security vulnerabilities in open source frameworks *(and the applications that use them)* have caused the companies that use those frameworks to have elevated concerns regarding vulnerabilities. The elevated awareness is for good reason, too. After all, no one wants to be the next one to lose sensitive data, be the punching bag of others, or be the example of what *not* to do security-wise.

If you happen to be in a group that doesn’t have any open source vulnerability reporting, OWASP Dependency-Check may be your short-term answer to get at least something in place. Adding OWASP Dependency-Check into your build process takes a relatively low effort. Other than not having the technology that stack Dependency-Check can help you with, there isn’t a reason not to at least add Dependency-Check to give a little insight into your open source dependencies.

The following parts will help you get Dependency-Check integrated into your Java project’s build process. The instructions will be adaptable to the other technologies Dependency-Check supports, like Gradle or JavaScript. Dependency-Check is also available as a command line tool for your favorite OS. In this example, I’ll use a Java project with Maven….