Posted by: Praveen Joshi
August 10, 2022
An SSDLC, or Secure Software Development Life Cycle is one having security measures integrated throughout. In a secure SDLC, security protocol is in place at every stage of the development cycle. It figures out the security issues instantly and remediates them. To attain a secure SDLC, organizations adopt DevSecOps approach. DevSecOps addresses security right from the beginning instead of adding it as an additional step at the end.
Here’s your guide to a best way to approach Secure Development Lifecycle.
A secure SDLC is the result of combined and dedicated team efforts. Security issues are addressed in the development pipeline even before production starts. There are certain phases in the whole process. Let’s have a close look at these phases.
It is important to prepare a proper plan before initiating a task with several complex steps. The same goes with making an SDLC secure. Here as well, planning is the first and most critical stage to ensure efficient project delivery. Planning helps each to get clear on their roles and responsibilities throughout the SDLC. Furthermore, in this phase, the security and development teams get briefings on the project requirements and how the execution will move ahead.
After planning, the next task is to make crucial decisions. Requirements and Analysis are a substantial part of it. Here the development teams need to finalize a lot of elements including requirements gathering, technology, frameworks, and languages are considered. Moreover, this phase also involves understanding of the essential components required to execute the project. These components include the tools and resources you are going to use during the development. Last but not the least, analyzing the vulnerabilities that might pose threats to the application security is an important aspect of this phase.
To ensure a Secure Development Life Cycle, you need to implement security by design. The execution of design and architecture follows the guidelines projected in the previous phase through analysis. During the phase of architecture and design, all the strategies are focused on making the development process smooth and secure. Architecture risk analysis, threat modeling, and other such methods take place in this phase. Additionally, the design team focuses on making threat detection easy for the security teams. So, there is less chance of damaging the application later.
After the pre-production stages, this is the moving phase of the SDLC where the software takes its actual shape. Development in a secure SDLC software development life Cycle follows certain guidelines. Working within set security frameworks and following secure coding standards are the highlights of these guidelines. While the visual analysis of the code, developers need to look for the security vulnerabilities along with the specified features and functions. Also, they incorporate static analysis tools (SAST) and dynamic analysis tools (DAST) along with standard threat modeling to overcome any margin for error.
After the commencement of the development stage, it is all about testing and verification in a Secure Development Life Cycle. SAST and DAST are already incorporated in the development phase. Adding on to them in the testing phase, security tests, application testing, penetration testing, and other DevSecOps automation test processes take the charge.
The product is released to the customers after the testing phase is successful. But the cycle of secure development does not end here. After the deployment, a dedicated team initiates maintenance and continuous monitoring of the various processes and executions. The security team is continuously monitoring suspicious activities in the software and mitigates any risks found.
