Pragmatic Application Security
Thoughts on Secure Software Development
An often-seen anti-pattern in software architecture is the Ivory Tower Architect. It describes architects who work in isolation, disconnected from dev teams or real-world technical constraints. I like to refer to this as the InfoSec Tower Syndrome. While it’s not exclusive to AppSec, it’s particularly prevalent here with InfoSec often unaware of it. What is … Read more
Since “shift-left”, and also and “shift-right”, have increasingly been taken over as marketing terms, I believe it’s time to explore other directions as well. For instance upwards. In my opinion, one area that has received far too little attention is how we can elevate the priority of security and better promote its significance to management … Read more
With OWASP SAMM, BSIMM, and NIST SSDF, there have been excellent resources for some time that provide a basis for evaluating and improving application security within an organization. However, these sources often treat structural aspects, such as roles within an organization and their interdependencies, rather generally. For this reason, I want to share my personal … Read more
The significance of a positive security culture is more crucial than ever in times of the increasing complexity of business applications and threats. But what does this practically mean? Here are some indicators for a product-oriented development organization that I find helpful: Update: In a previous version of this post, I called the 4. indicator … Read more
In modern software development, there is a strong emphasis on aspects like speed and productivity. At first glance, this may appear to contradict a mechanism like a security gate, which, by definition, interrupts the process. At first glance, this may contradict in contrast to a mechanism like a security gate. That’s why many seem to … Read more
Security Champions have been a proven and popular security practice over the years. We’ve learned from initiatives at companies with an AppSec leadership reputation like Netflix, AWS, Adobe, or Salesforce about the remarkable advantages of integrating this role within development teams. This approach is endorsed by industry standards and organizations like SafeCode, OWASP SAMM, and … Read more
The concept of integrating security into the software development process is not new. While I cannot definitively assert that Microsoft was the pioneer of this concept, the Secure Development Lifecycle (SDL) published by Microsoft in 2002 undoubtedly laid the foundation for what is now commonly known as a Secure Software Development Lifecycle (Secure SDLC or … Read more
Many discussions on how to shift security left in the SDLC, or about implementing DevSecOps in particular, are primarily focused on the integration of various security scanning tools in CI/CD pipelines. Although the use of such tools is indeed an important aspect, it is actually not the most important one. Without proper processes, tools often … Read more
Securing the software (development) lifecycle of a large organization will usually take a lot of time. Especially when you have to start very much at the beginning. It’s therefore vital to focus on quick wins first — measures that are effective and easy to implement at the same time. This is not only important from a risk … Read more
Combining threat modeling with an agile development methodology such as Scrum is a quite challenging topic: Creating a threat model usually requires an experienced security expert and some effort to do this. But how does this work, when a model can be outdated quickly when new threats are introduced by every new user story and … Read more