How Can You Build Secure Software?

When you first begin developing a software of some sort, you might be tempted to overlook potential security issues. What this could mean in the long run is future software breaches and security failures. So instead of pushing off security issues for late, create a plan so you can integrate security aspects throughout your software development. Then you can move onto the first stages of secure software development.

The first stage includes a general overview of how your secure software development will interact with customers. First you should think of possible use and misuse cases. For example, a misuse case would be an unauthorized user trying to steal a customer’s data. The use case for this would be logging attempts and analyzing them. You should also do a risk assessment, so you will determine how to handle certain attacks. After this stage you then begin the secure design phase.

When designing your software, there is several things to pay attention to security wise. Minimal user privileges should be given toward the software architecture. This is because the software architecture has a lot of things that the user has no business accessing. When it comes to manipulating data in the software, only the higher privileged users should have access. There should be multiple security layers in your software. Only having one mode of defense in your software is not enough nowadays. It will leave you software weak and vulnerable. However, if a security failure does occur, you want your software to fail into a secure state. It should still preserve confidentiality even though it is not work in that moment. Moreover, your software should have user-friendly security. You want your software to be secure, but you want your users to still enjoy using it.

This lead into the development stage and then code review. After taking many security factors into consideration, you now can begin developing your software. Then once you finish, make sure to test your code so any security risks you missed you can fix.