Intro to Application Security

A developer-focused series about the fundamentals of cybersecurity

In the face of increasing cyberattacks, application security is becoming critical, requiring developers to integrate robust measures and best practices to build secure applications.

But what exactly does the term "secure application" mean?

Let's take a brief look at some notable security incidents in history:

T-Mobile data leak

In January 2023, T-Mobile was attacked via a vulnerability in an API, resulting in the data of 23 million clients being compromised.

It allowed attackers to access confidential information of users, such as names, emails and phone numbers.

Industrial Control Systems Attack

In 2019, Russian espionage group named "Turla" attacked an industrial facility in Europe. After gaining access to industrial control systems, the group started manipulating data from sensors, such as temperature and pressure.

The main target of attackers was to break the integrity of data, in order to cause incorrect operational decisions and lead to incidents.

Attack on Bandwidth.com

Bandwidth.com suffered a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack in October 2021. The attack compromised availability of service, making its services inaccessible to users.

Due to the interruption of services, the company experienced a big financial impact and lost an estimated $9-12 million dollars.

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Each of these security incidents broke one of the core principles of information security: confidentiality, integrity and availability.

These 3 principles are called CIA Triad:

C - Confidentiality:
Only authorized entities have access to specified resource or information and no one else.

I - Integrity:
Data saves its accuracy and consistency during its entire lifecycle, being protected from unauthorized alteration or destruction.

A - Availability:
Even in the event of failures or attacks, data and services are continuously available to authorized users.

Ensuring these principles are defended allows our application to be secure. This is an ongoing process that begins with planning and continues through maintenance.

The goal of AppSec is to ensure security on every stage of software development lifecycle (SDLC).

Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC)

The software development lifecycle is a step-by-step process used to create software in a systematic and efficient way.

It consists of 6 phases:

Requirements:
Setting goals, defining project's scope and understanding what the users need from software

Design:
Planning the structure and layout of the system, ensuring it meets all requirements

Development:
Writing the actual code to build the software.

Testing:
Checking the software to ensure it works correctly and is free of bugs.

Deployment:
Releasing the software for users to access and use.

Maintenance:
Updating and fixing the software as needed after it is in use.

We aim to implement security at each phase of the SDLC because the earlier vulnerabilities are detected, the lower the cost and effort required to fix them, preventing costly and complex issues later.

The approximate comparison of the cost of mitigating a security issue can be illustrated as follows:

The Role of AppSec Engineers

An AppSec engineer is one of the most important stakeholders responsible for security. They should know methodologies applicable at the application layer to detect and mitigate malicious traffic in order to build systems where potential threats are recognized and remediated before they can cause harm.

In addition to prevention measures, AppSec engineers play a big role in incident response. They collaborate with incident response teams and provide expertise on application-specific security concerns. An AppSec engineer's involvement is essential for detection, mitigation and post-incident analysis, helping to develop strategies to prevent incidents in future.

In this series of articles we will focus on best security practices at each phase of SDLC, explore such techniques such as JA3, JA4+, HTTP/2 fingerprinting and cover fundamentals of incident response.

Series Roadmap

Please note the roadmap is subject to change.

• Introduction to Application Security
• Security in Building Requirements
• Secure Design Principles
• Secure Coding Principles
• Security in Testing
• Secure deployment & maintenance
• Application layer fingerprinting
• Fundamentals of incident response