Insecure design

So far, you focused on unwanted coding errors leading to security flaws; that is, implementation issues surrounding user authenticating, data encryption, and so on. Insecure design is different from insecure implementation. Insecure design has more to do with risks related to design and architectural flaws. A secure implementation might have an insecure design, which still renders an application vulnerable to attacks and exploits.

Exercise assume breach mentality: minimize the blast radius for breaches and prevent lateral movement by segmenting access by network, user, devices, and application awareness. Verify all sessions are encrypted end-to-end. Use analytics to get visibility, drive threat detection, and improve defenses. Authenticate and authorize based on all available data points. User identity, location, device health, service, or workload are some common data points.

You might be familiar with the term shift left. Most often, the term refers to testing your application early on during the application lifecycle to ensure high quality. Shift left also applies to considering security before you write a single line of code. A few activities to employ early on in the design process could include reviewing secure design patterns and principles, using reference architectures, and performing threat modeling.

Let’s discuss the latter in more detail. Threat modeling is an essential part of DevSecOps, because it informs your security design process and helps find vulnerabilities in your application. While it does fall under DevSecOps, it also sits neatly under education too.

You can use threat modeling to help mitigate threats from the early stages of application design.

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