Cybercrimes are continuously becoming more common and the cost of handling these cybercrimes is increasing day by day. On average 780,000 data records are lost due to cybersecurity breaches every day.
Cybersecurity professionals have estimated the cost of cybercrime to be more than $2 trillion currently. Many of the cybersecurity incidents are caused by vulnerabilities in software products. These vulnerabilities might have been caused be programming mistakes that leave programmed products like web servers, web applications, or websites exposed.
This is why all software developers must create applications that are secure enough to prevent any vulnerabilities that can be exploited by cybercriminals. Cybersecurity strategies should begin at the software design level.
It is encouraged to use strategic design patterns that will be beneficial to security. Secure by design is becoming a common approach to ensure the security and privacy of software applications and systems. This model emphasizes that security controls should be implemented in every layer of the design process to minimise attack surface area.
Security architectural design decisions made by developers are becoming common and they are based on well-known patterns, strategies, and techniques for achieving a certain level of quality. The security patterns provide necessary solutions for enforcing authentication, confidentiality, privacy, data integrity, availability, and other desired secure features.
To build a secure software system, it is important to design a secure architecture and also include updated security tactics, strategies, and patterns. This will maintain persistence security in the software product.
Main Principles to Ensure Security by Design
There are different principles developers can follow to ensure security in their software products. The main principles are:
Minimising the attack surface
An attack surface is the entry and communication point for an information system with the outside environment. The attack surface is related to software or other factors like the operating system, libraries, read or write access, a network that has entities like an active IP, open ports, used protocols, and network flows.
The other two targeted attack surfaces are humans and the physical location. Humans pose a risk since attackers can perform social engineering or phishing attacks on them. The physical environment presents an opportunity for physical intrusion inside a building.
An information system or a software product that has a wide attack surface is more vulnerable to attacks. This is because it is harder to implement security controls.
When you identify entry points in your system, you should implement proper protection and surveillance tools. If your systems are very exposed, you should perform regular security audits and analysis.
Another design feature you can implement to strengthen security in the operating system is hardening. It involves analysing features and configurations that are not used in the system or are rarely used. This will close ports and services which will limit any possibilities of remote interaction with the system.
Defense in depth principle
Defense in depth is aimed at delaying the enemy. It aims at exploiting security techniques to reduce the risk when a system asset is defective or becomes compromised. Security is monitored and protected and there is a reaction plan in case of any incident. For defense in depth, companies can elaborate their defense policy, evaluate the defense mechanisms put in place from attack methods and provide feedback through control and auditing. Companies can also determine the security goals they want to achieve to build proper defense strategies. They can also elaborate the architecture of the system in relation to the company to define proper evaluation and control practices.
Principle of least privilege
For security by design, this principle states that an admin has access to admin areas for operational access and no other technical access to any other zones. In most cases, these areas are restricted to the directory only.
This principle can be well integrated with the security by design model through environment partitioning. The network is partitioned and there is a clear distribution of the allocated tasks and rights. Implementing this principle in such a segmented model makes it difficult to compromise a section of the environment. This is because the attack surface has been significantly reduced. Even if an attacker manages to compromise one part of the network, the damage is greatly reduced and the mitigation process is shortened.
Establish secure defaults
Applications must be secure by default. This means a new user has to pass the necessary security controls to be allowed to edit or obtain any higher privileges or even edit security measures.
Establishing safe defaults means that a company has to have strong security rules which show different practices like how user registrations are handled, how passwords should be to be complex, how frequently passwords should be changed, and other secure practices.
Separation of duties
Separating duties prevents individuals from acting fraudulently. If a user is from the marketing department, they should not have access to administrator resources. This is because some malicious users can change privileges to allow them to perform unauthorised tasks.
Administrators should also not have access to the marketing department privileges. All users should only have the least privileges to perform their work functions.
Always fixing security issues correctly
For systems to remain secure, any security vulnerabilities found in any application or systems should be well investigated and determined. Design security ensures the repaired errors and vulnerabilities are tested for better and secure systems.
If the affected application uses design patterns, then this error may also be present in other connected systems. This is why it is important to identify all affected systems when fixing a security issue to avoid further damage and proper security.
Failing securely
Applications should fail securely. A situation where failure comes up should not give a user additional privileges. The situation should also not show sensitive information like logs and database queries.
An application may fail because of different reasons leading to undesirable situations like failure to process a transaction. Even if such failures occur, no undesired operation like heightened privileges or unauthorised access to sensitive data should happen. Cyber security by design ensures applications fail securely.
Security principles and security mechanisms in software development help to avoid security issues in systems and applications. Malicious attacks on software are becoming common and this is why reducing the risk associated with them is important.
The cybersecurity design principles aim at improving information security for all digital assets which include network resources, information systems, and others. Cyber security by design increases security by reducing the risk of software vulnerability mistakes.
Programmers can rely on beneficial resources like the OWASP comprehensive list to look up design principles and features they should adhere to for secure applications. Secure applications will drastically reduce cyberattacks risks which save businesses a lot of capital that would have been used for security incidents mitigation.
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