Security Within Your Development, Staging, and Production Environments

by with No Comment SecuritySoftware development

A typical development workflow has three environments: development, staging, and production. Some developers don�t view staging as an environment, but we included it here to give you a full scope of the process.

Development Environment

A development environment is on your computer. It�s the environment where you�ll conduct all your code development without touching the actual data. In development, you can test upgrades, new features, and improvements without impacting the customer�s view. You may find bugs along the way, but that�s what this environment is meant to discover.

Typical use-cases for a development environment include:

  • Building new features, extending existing features, and code refactoring.
  • Running integration tests. 
  • Debugging.

There are few restrictions on what developers can do in their development environment, and they are free to experiment with code until they are happy with it, at which point they will push it to the staging environment.

Staging Environment

The staging environment is a production-like environment to see how your code will perform. This is the final testing ground before the code is pushed into production. Staging environments are often used for:

  • Quality assurance and performance testing.
  • Vulnerability testing and risk analysis.  
  • Integration testing, to ensure that the code integrates well with services and databases the app depends on. 

Staging environments also give other developers, project managers, and clients an opportunity to examine software before it goes live. 

Because extensive testing takes place in the staging environment, it�s important that it is as similar to production as possible, including both the software and hardware. While it�s fine to host a development environment on a laptop, the staging environment should be on a server with the same hardware it will run on in production. 

Production Environment

In a production environment, systems go live and your developed code is released to end-users. You deploy completed code that has endured proper vulnerability testing and risk analysis. All of the testings are complete and there�s the expectation that you�ll find only minor bugs if any. Once it�s released, you�re relying on it as a profit source, so you want to make sure it�s secure

In theory, major bugs and software vulnerabilities should have been discovered before the code goes to production, but that�s rarely the case for complex software systems. It is likely that at least some bugs made it through testing, so organizations must design and implement network and data security systems that assume the existence of vulnerabilities. 

Importance of Security Throughout Dev, Staging, and Production

With multiple environments comes the difficulty of securely managing them. The best practice is to separate your development, staging, and production environments. This allows each to evolve at its own pace � maybe the development environment is testing out features that won�t be available in production for at least a year � and reduces the risk of cross-contamination. Any bugs discovered in staging, for example, will be contained within that environment and not spread any further. Most importantly, keeping your development, staging, and production environment separate will help protect data.

Security Concerns in DevOps

For organizations that use the DevOps approach, security is an even greater concern. It�s face-based, there�s more overlap, there�s automation � there are many reasons to implement and verify security processes in DevOps.

To preserve high-level compliance practices within your development, staging, and production environments, you can implement configuration management techniques, monitoring, and logging processes, and even integrate infrastructure as code or policy as code. You can set yourself up for success by performing regular code review during the development process, making changes proactively to all environments, confirming that you have limited access to the proper channels, or even engage in continuous penetration testing to ensure no vulnerability is overlooked. These practices will ensure you�re doing your due diligence to securely manage your various environments.

DevOps Capabilities

by with No Comment Software development

DevOps defines 8 capabilities that cover most of the important aspects for ensuring successful DevOps in practices, these capacities are:

  • Continuous Planning
  • Continuous Integration
  • Continuous Delivery
  • Continuous Operations
  • Continuous Quality
  • Continuous Security
  • Continuous Collaboration
  • Continuous Improvement

Continuous Planning

This ensures that planning for software releases is not something fixed and can change by time according to the delivered value. During the planning, all team members are actually involved in planning the work that needs to be delivered, prioritizing what is important to be in the next release or sprint. This capability including its practices is the best fit with Agile methodology to ensure incremental value creation through sprints.

Continuous Integration

The main idea of continuous integration is to minimize the time between code developed by one of the team members to be integrated with the main code repository for the whole software. So, each team member is integrating his/her work more frequently.

The benefits from that are huge, for example, ensuring that actually, the code is working with other components, nothing is broken, minimizing the bugs and errors that can be found during the code integration process, also minimizing the time to recover from issues as well, and other benefits too.

Continuous Delivery

It is mainly the frequency of software releases after the testing to be deployed to the production for usage by the end-users.

Most of us can relate this experience with massive daily updates in mobile applications, each day, I found at least 5 to 10 apps need an update. This implies how those applications� owners are rapidly adding daily new features and enhancements to their applications.

Most of the legacy systems require manual deployment steps and if one step fails, it may require repeating the whole time-consuming process and it was a nightmare for the operations team and can take days and maintenance notice for customers which disrupts the business and harms companies revenue and in most cases produces huge losses.

When the final production deployment step needs to be triggered manually, we call this a Continuous Delivery, if the production deployment is automated without manual triggers and through automated pipelines, we call that a continuous deployment.

Continuous Quality

This capability needs an entire culture shift in how the organization is managing the software quality, it is about instead of assuring quality to continuous quality by not waiting until the acceptance test to ensure quality but embedding the quality early in the process which is known as Shifting left quality. This left-shift does not mean that we will not perform the normal testing process but it is important to balance them and start early in the process by ensuring requirements quality, code quality, and test automation across all types of testing, for example, unit, integration, system, regression, �etc.

Using a framework like Test Driven Development can enhance the quality of written code and also ensure that the requirements and user stories are testable. This will require also shared quality responsibilities between teams not only the testing team, so the quality is becoming each team member�s job.

Continuous Operations

Continuous operations is a capability to make sure that the organization is avoiding system downtime and outages due to any issue, fault, or damage. How will the system be resilient and reliable to be used? And how to maintain the system without affecting its operations and usage from the end-user.

Updates from operating systems, security patches, and integration services are almost changing every day. Managing these kinds of updates with even new deployments are important to ensure system availability without interruption. Technologies like cloud computing helped in achieving that.

Some important practices to achieve this capability are auto-failover, applications monitoring, and auto-scaling. Blue/green deployment is one of the famous practices to prevent having any downtime while upgrading or maintaining the system.

Continuous Security

The secure development life cycle is more important than ever, similar to the quality the security requires also a mindset shift and to become each role responsibility. This also needs to shift these security procedures, standards, policies, and assurance to the left of the life cycle. So, not having the security testing and code scanning at the end of the development.

Now, many tools can detect vulnerabilities in code while developing to highlight any security risks and ensure that the security policies and standards are followed. Not only that but even how to design the system from architecture, used technology, infrastructure, and data to be secured.

Continuous Collaboration

As we saw earlier that having all of these capabilities in place, will need strong team collaboration and alignment, from planning, testing, deployment, operations, �etc. to create this harmony. Most of the DevOps tools are now equipped with different collaboration tools and can integrate with other tools.

the collaboration on planning, task assignment, providing wikis for teams for the faster onboarding process. This will enable the involved team members to respond to the required changes even faster and prompt the interactions between them.

Continuous Improvement

Improvements are always required and most of the time, the team is very busy to pause and take some time to think about what needs to be improved.

So, this capability is important for the team to look over all the processes and practices used and spot what needs to be improved. Without proper measurement, you will not know exactly what needs improvement, so Defining proper metrics is important for continuous improvement.

What is DevOps?

by with No Comment Software development

DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization�s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.

The DevOps workflow consists of 6 different phases:

  • Planning the next iteration of the product�s development
  • Building the code
  • Testing and deploying to the production environment
  • Delivering product updates
  • Monitoring and logging software performance
  • Gathering customer feedback

Let�s review The Benefits of DevOps.

Speed

Move at a high velocity so you can innovate for customers faster, adapt to changing markets better, and grow more efficiently at driving business results. The DevOps model enables your developers and operations teams to achieve these results. For example, microservices and continuous delivery let teams take ownership of services and then release updates to them quicker.

Rapid Delivery

Increase the frequency and pace of releases so you can innovate and improve your product faster. The quicker you can release new features and fix bugs, the faster you can respond to your customers� needs and build a competitive advantage. Continuous integration and continuous delivery are practices that automate the software release process, from build to deploy.

Reliability

Ensure the quality of application updates and infrastructure changes so you can reliably deliver at a more rapid pace while maintaining a positive experience for end-users. Use practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery to test that each change is functional and safe. Monitoring and logging practices help you stay informed of performance in real-time.

Scale

Operate and manage your infrastructure and development processes at scale. Automation and consistency help you manage complex or changing systems efficiently and with reduced risk. For example, infrastructure as code helps you manage your development, testing, and production environments in a repeatable and more efficient manner.

Improved Collaboration

Build more effective teams under a DevOps cultural model, which emphasizes values such as ownership and accountability. Developers and operations teams collaborate closely, share many responsibilities, and combine their workflows. This reduces inefficiencies and saves time

Security

Move quickly while retaining control and preserving compliance. You can adopt a DevOps model without sacrificing security by using automated compliance policies, fine-grained controls, and configuration management techniques. For example, using infrastructure as code and policy as code, you can define and then track compliance at scale.

DevOps Security and DevSecOps

DevOps security, more commonly referred to as DevSecOps, refers to the discipline and practice of safeguarding the entire DevOps environment through strategies, policies, processes, and technology. The DevSecOps philosophy is that security should be built into every part of the DevOps life cycle, including inception, design, build, test, release, support, maintenance, and beyond.

Traditional security operates from the position that once a system has been designed, its security defects can then be determined and corrected before release. With the change to a DevOps model, traditional security practices occur too late in the development cycle and are too slow for the design and release of software built by iteration. Thus, they can become a major roadblock to delivering applications and services at speed.

With it, security becomes the focus of everyone on a DevOps team. DevSecOps has the goal of implementing security decisions at speed and scale without sacrificing safety. DevSecOps involves ongoing, flexible collaboration between release engineers and security teams. The concepts of �speed of delivery� and �building secure code� are merged into one streamlined process. Security testing is done in iterations without slowing down delivery cycles. Critical security issues are dealt with as they become apparent, not after a threat or compromise has occurred.

maria-email

Why using a company for your software development?

by with No Comment Software development

Choosing the right type of development partner is very important. You can hire a freelancer or a development company to build your software.

The main benefit of hiring freelance developers is affordability. You can find freelancers who can develop your app at a low rate. But, there are some serious disadvantages to hiring freelancers.

Building an app isn�t just limited to writing a few hundred lines of code. Many things need to be looked into, such as design, UI, UX, Architecture, Documentation, Security, Performance, DevOps.

If you decide to hire freelancers, you�ll need to find freelancers for your project�s different aspects. You might also need to manage the team all by yourself. But you won�t receive high-quality work and on-time delivery. And sometimes it cost you more because sometimes your projects may fail and you need to redevelop them.

On the other hand, a local app development partner can provide you with a slew of benefits. The main advantages of working with a development agency include:

  • Quality assurance
  • Efficient project management
  • All-inclusive services
  • Schedule and discipline
  • Deep involvement
  • Ease of communication
  • Accountability
  • Better architecture
  • Better performance
  • Better security
  • Extendibility of the software in the future
  • Standard and clean codding that help your product extend more easily

As for the cost, freelancers generally cost less but take longer, and in the long-term usage of the software and growing your business, you will cost more and sometimes it puts your business at fail risk when the number of the users will grow. while the local development firm may cost more at first but produce higher quality and faster results and in the long term, you will save the money and you will put yourself on the safe side

maria-email

Outsourcing Vs. In-House: What’s The Best Approach?

by with No Comment Software development

Whether you are an entrepreneur, a digital agency, or an enterprise planning for digital transformation, you must have found yourself at this crossroads. A crossroad that leads you to either of the two- hiring an in-house development team or taking your operations global through outsourcing. 

Let?s review the Pros of In-House Development

They are the people working beside you in your establishment. No matter what the issue, you can just rush to them and get things sorted in real-time. Working under the same roof, they have a greater understanding of what you want in the software development project

If you have a good hiring team and good managers then an in-house team could Fit Your Corporate Culture more They know exactly what the company wants to deliver or solve through the product being developed. 

You could get Real-Time Inputs From Team In case there is a critical project or a task that needs some changes.

You could have Face-To-Face Communication. There are minimum chances of misunderstanding and the results come out to be more effective and as expected.

Let?s review the Cons of In-House Development

With close communication and better cultural fit, there come some unavoidable cons as well. You require the overhead cost of setting up the required space and IT equipment for employing the team. 

You have to pay Greater Cost. For companies that are running on a tighter budget, hiring and setting up a team of developers could cause a fund crunch. Hiring The cost of expanding the space, putting up the techs, installing hardware and software could burn a hole in the company?s pocket. You might also have to include other expenses of hiring like sick leaves, training, employee benefits, etc.

They will be Limited Skill & Tech Stack. they might just not be up to the mark when it comes to the latest techs. You employ them and in case a new tech comes up, you either need to train them or let your competitors make better use of the technology.

You will face Higher Developer Turnover. The market is looking out for talent and developers would seize any opportunity that comes knocking on their door. The employee turnover in the developer community is thus, pretty high. Companies might have to chip in extra funds to retain the developers whom they have trained.

Let?s review the Pros of Outsourced Development

You will save Cost From Employee Hiring & Retention. The biggest cost for in-house development comes while headhunting and then when trying to retain the talent they?ve found.

You could Reduced Stress On The Core Resources. Outsourcing cleans out the work from their hand so that they can focus on the core competencies and work towards bettering the company?s main offerings.

You could hire an outsource company when you have a need.  If you want to develop your product or you want to add a feature when you need it then you could make a contract. You can not just hire or fire in-house team as per the requirement or performance

You could Delivery your product Quicker to Market. You no longer have to spend manhours in finding the right developers and then training them for the required tech.

You will access to different skills and technology experts part-time or full-time. In the software development process, you need different skills in your team. Hiring all of them full-time in an in-house team model is too hard. But with the outsourcing model, you access to all of them when it is needed.

duan tran-email

What is Secure Software Development Life Cycle

by with No Comment SecuritySoftware development

Security is an important part of any application that encompasses critical functionality.
Security applies at every phase of the software development life cycle (SDLC) and needs to be at the forefront of your developers’ minds as they implement your software’s requirements.
It requires a mindset that is focused on secure delivery, raising issues in the requirements and development phases as they are discovered.


Let’s review 5 phases of the Secure Software Development Life Cycle
Phase 1: Requirements
In this early phase, requirements for new features are collected from various stakeholders. It’s important to identify any security considerations for functional requirements being gathered for the new release.


Phase 2: Design
This phase translates in-scope requirements into a plan of what this should look like in the actual application. Here, functional requirements typically describe what should happen, while security requirements usually focus on what shouldn’t.


Phase 3: Development
When it’s time to actually implement the design and make it a reality, concerns usually shift to making sure the code well-written from the security perspective. There are usually established secure coding guidelines as well as code reviews that double-check that these guidelines have been followed correctly. These code reviews can be either manual or automated using technologies such as static application security testing (SAST).
That said, modern application developers can’t be concerned only with the code they write, because the vast majority of modern applications aren’t written from scratch. Instead, developers rely on existing functionality, usually provided by free open source components to deliver new features and therefore value to the organization as quickly as possible.

Phase 4: Verification
The Verification phase is where applications go through a thorough testing cycle to ensure they meet the original design & requirements. This is also a great place to introduce automated security testing using a variety of technologies. The application is not deployed unless these tests pass. This phase often includes automated tools like CI/CD pipelines to control verification and release.


Phase 5: Maintenance and Evolution
The story doesn’t end once the application is released. In fact, vulnerabilities that slipped through the cracks may be found in the application long after it’s been released. These vulnerabilities may be in the code developers wrote, but are increasingly found in the underlying open-source components that comprise an application.


What are the benefits of Secure Software Development?
– Higher security. continuous monitoring for vulnerabilities results in better application quality and mitigation of business risks.
– Cost reduction. early attention to flaws significantly reduces the effort required to detect and fix them.
– Regulatory compliance. encourages a conscientious attitude toward security-related laws and regulations. Ignoring – – them may result in fines and penalties, even if no sensitive data is lost.
– Development teams get continuous training in secure coding practices.
– Security approaches become more consistent across teams.
– Customers trust you more because they see that special attention is paid to their security.
– Internal security improves when SDL is applied to in-house software tools.

duan tran-email

Software Development Life Cycle

by with No Comment Software development

Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is a process used by the software industry to design, develop and test high-quality software. The SDLC aims to produce high-quality software that meets or exceeds customer expectations, reaches completion within times and cost estimates.
SDLC is a process followed for a software project, within a software organization. It consists of a detailed plan describing how to develop, maintain, replace and alter or enhance specific software. The life cycle defines a methodology for improving the quality of software and the overall development process.

A typical Software Development Life Cycle consists of the following stages:

Stage 1: Planning and Requirement Analysis
Requirement analysis is the most important and fundamental stage in SDLC. It is performed by the senior members of the team with inputs from the customer, the sales department, market surveys, and domain experts in the industry. This information is then used to plan the basic project approach and to conduct product feasibility studies in the economical, operational, and technical areas.
Planning for the quality assurance requirements and identification of the risks associated with the project is also done in the planning stage. The outcome of the technical feasibility study is to define the various technical approaches that can be followed to implement the project successfully with minimum risks.


Stage 2: Defining Requirements
Once the requirement analysis is done the next step is to clearly define and document the product requirements and get them approved by the customer or the market analysts. This is done through an SRS (Software Requirement Specification) document which consists of all the product requirements to be designed and developed during the project life cycle.


Stage 3: Designing the Product Architecture
SRS is the reference for product architects to come out with the best architecture for the product to be developed. Based on the requirements specified in SRS, usually, more than one design approach for the product architecture is proposed and documented in a Design Document Specification.
This Design Document Specification is reviewed by all the important stakeholders and based on various parameters as risk assessment, product robustness, design modularity, budget, and time constraints, the best design approach is selected for the product.


The Design Document Specification could consist of:
Architecture � Specifies programming language, industry practices, overall design, and use of any templates or boilerplate
User Interface � Defines the ways customers interact with the software, and how the software responds to input
Platforms � Defines the platforms on which the software will run, such as Apple, Android, Windows version, Linux, or even gaming consoles
Programming � Not just the programming language, but including methods of solving problems and performing tasks in the application
Communications � Defines the methods that the application can communicate with other assets, such as a central server or other instances of the application
Security � Defines the measures taken to secure the application, and may include SSL traffic encryption, password protection, and secure storage of user credentials
Prototyping – it is like one of the early versions of software in the Iterative software development model. It demonstrates a basic idea of how the application looks and works. This �hands-on� design can be shown to stakeholders. Use feedback o improve the application. It�s less expensive to change the Prototype phase than to rewrite code to make a change in the Development phase.


Stage 4: Building or Developing the Product
In this stage of SDLC, the actual development starts, and the product is built. The programming code is generated as per DDS during this stage. If the design is performed in a detailed and organized manner, code generation can be accomplished without much hassle.
Developers must follow the coding guidelines defined by their organization and programming tools like compilers, interpreters, debuggers, etc. are used to generate the code. Different high-level programming languages such as C, C++, Pascal, Java, and PHP are used for coding. The programming language is chosen with respect to the type of software being developed.


Stage 5: Testing the Product
This stage is usually a subset of all the stages as in the modern SDLC models, the testing activities are mostly involved in all the stages of SDLC. However, this stage refers to the testing only stage of the product where product defects are reported, tracked, fixed and retested, until the product reaches the quality standards defined in the SRS.


Stage 6: Deployment in the Market
Once the product is tested and ready to be deployed it is released formally in the appropriate market. Sometimes product deployment happens in stages as per the business strategy of that organization. The product may first be released in a limited segment and tested in the real business environment (User acceptance testing).
Then based on the feedback, the product may be released as it is or with suggested enhancements in the targeting market segment.


Stage 7: Operations and Maintenance
At this point, the development cycle is almost finished. The application is done and being used in the field. The Operation and Maintenance phase is still important, though. In this phase, users discover bugs that weren�t found during testing. These errors need to be resolved, which can spawn new development cycles.
In addition to bug fixes, models like Iterative development plan additional features in future releases. For each new release, a new Development Cycle can be launched.

SDLC shows you what�s happening, and exactly where your development process can improve.

duan tran-email

What is Application Security Testing

by with No Comment SecuritySoftware development

Application security testing is the process of making applications more resistant to security threats, by identifying security weaknesses and vulnerabilities in source code.
AST started as a manual process. Today, due to the growing modularity of enterprise software, the huge number of open source components, and a large number of known vulnerabilities and threat vectors, Application security testing must be automated.


Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
Static Application Security Testing tools use a white box testing approach, in which testers inspect the inner workings of an application. Static Application Security Testing inspects static source code and reports on security weaknesses.
Static testing tools can be applied to non-compiled code to find issues like syntax errors, math errors, input validation issues, invalid or insecure references. They can also run on compiled code using binary and byte-code analyzers.

Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST)
Dynamic Application Security Testing tools take a black-box testing approach. They execute code and inspect it in runtime, detecting issues that may represent security vulnerabilities. This can include issues with query strings, requests and responses, the use of scripts, memory leakage, cookie and session handling, authentication, execution of third-party components, data injection, and DOM injection.
Dynamic Application Security Testing tools can be used to conduct large-scale scans simulating a large number of unexpected or malicious test cases and reporting on the application�s response.


Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST)
Interactive Application Security Testing tools are the evolution of Static Application Security Testing and Dynamic Application Security Testing tools�combining the two approaches to detect a wider range of security weaknesses. Like Dynamic Application Security Testing tools, Interactive Application Security Testing tools run dynamically and inspect software during runtime. However, they are run from within the application server, allowing them to inspect compiled source code like Interactive Application Security Testing tools do.
Interactive Application Security Testing tools can provide valuable information about the root cause of vulnerabilities and the specific lines of code that are affected, making remediation much easier. They can analyze source code, data flow, configuration and third-party libraries, and are suitable for API testing.


Mobile Application Security Testing (MAST)
Mobile Application Security Testing tools combine static analysis, dynamic analysis and investigation of forensic data generated by mobile applications. They can test for security vulnerabilities like Static Application Security Testing, Dynamic Application Security Testing and Interactive Application Security Testing, and in addition address mobile-specific issues like jailbreaking, malicious wifi networks, and data leakage from mobile devices.


Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
Software Composition Analysis tools help organizations conduct an inventory of third-party commercial and open source components used within their software. Enterprise applications can use thousands of third-party components, which may contain security vulnerabilities. Software Composition Analysis helps understand which components and versions are actually being used, identify the most severe security vulnerabilities affecting those components, and understand the easiest way to remediate them.


Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP)
Runtime Application Self-Protection tools evolved from Static Application Security Testing, Dynamic Application Security Testing and Interactive Application Security Testing. They are able to analyze application traffic and user behavior at runtime, to detect and prevent cyber threats.
Like the previous generation of tools, Runtime Application Self-Protection has visibility into application source code and can analyze weaknesses and vulnerabilities. It goes one step further by identifying that security weaknesses have been exploited, and providing active protection by terminating the session or issuing an alert.
Runtime Application Self-Protection tools integrate with applications and analyze traffic at runtime, and can not only detect and warn about vulnerabilities but actually prevent attacks. Having this type of in-depth inspection and protection at runtime makes Static Application Security Testing, Dynamic Application Security Testing and Interactive Application Security Testing much less important, making it possible to detect and prevent security issues without costly development work.