What Is the SSDLC (Secure SDLC)?
A secure software development life cycle (SSDLC) framework incorporates security throughout the development process. The traditional SDLC framework defines the process of building an application from initial planning to production operations, maintenance, and eventual decommissioning. Common SDLC models include waterfall, iterative, and agile development.
The traditional SDLC implements security activities as part of the testing phase at the end of the cycle. Performing security after the development phase is complete results in missing security issues or discovering them too late. Fixing these issues, at that point, becomes a time-consuming and expensive endeavor.
A secure SDLC framework integrates security across the entire lifecycle to help identify and minimize vulnerabilities at early stages when it is easier to fix them. The SSDLC helps ensure that security assurance activities like penetration testing, architecture analysis, and code review become an integral part of the cycle.
This is part of a series of articles about application security.
The Importance of a Secure SDLC
Developers often view security and testing requirements as obstacles to a smooth development process. Secure SDLC helps break down the security process into easily implemented stages throughout the development pipeline. It provides a mechanism to unite developers and security team members with shared responsibility and ownership over the project, helping to ensure software protection without delaying the development process.
Developers can start with learning secure coding best practices and frameworks. They can use automated tools to help discover security risks in their code while they write it. Developers should also check for security vulnerabilities in the open source code they introduce.
Management teams can also benefit from SSDLC because it helps them implement a strategy for building secure products. For instance, a manager might conduct a gap analysis to learn about existing security policies and practices, identify missing security processes, and verify the effectiveness of the organization’s security strategy at each SDLC stage.
Establishing and enforcing a security policy is essential to implementing a streamlined SSDLC that allows development teams to meet software release deadlines. This policy should address high-priority issues such as compliance without manual reviews or intervention. You might use a security expert to evaluate your security requirements and build a plan to help improve your organization’s security profile.
Related content: Read our guide to application security testing
6 Phases of the Secure Software Development Life Cycle
The SSDLC incorporates security across all phases, implementing unique security tools and mechanisms for each phase. It includes automated detection, prioritization, and remediation tools throughout the entire lifecycle. You can integrate these tools with existing IDEs, build servers, code repositories, and bug tracking tools to quickly address potential risks.
1. Planning
The planning phase includes product and project management tasks such as resource allocation, capacity planning, provisioning, cost estimation, and project scheduling. During this phase, teams work to create schedules, project plans, procurement requirements, and cost estimations.
The SSDLC ensures the planning phase is a collaborative effort between project managers, development staff, operations personnel, and security teams. The goal is to ensure all perspectives are represented in the planning.
2. Requirements and Analysis
The second phase of the SSDLC involves making decisions regarding the project’s technology, languages, and frameworks. A secure SSDLC requires considering potential vulnerabilities that can impact the development tools and choosing the appropriate security mechanism for the design and development, building for security right from the beginning.
3. Design
The design process involves established patterns for software development and application architecture. Software architects typically use an architecture framework to compose the application from existing components, promoting standardization and reuse. Proven design patterns help solve algorithmic problems consistently.
The design phase can also include rapid prototyping (a spike) to compare solutions and find the most suitable option. This phase specifies design documents listing the patterns and components selected for the project and produces code by spikes as a starting point for development.
4. Development
A secure SDLC requires using secure coding standards during the development phase. It involves performing code reviews to ensure the project includes all specified functions and features and finding and remediating security vulnerabilities in the code.
5. Deployment
This phase releases working software to production. The modern SDLC utilizes automation during the deployment phase. High-maturity SSDLC implementations turn this phase into an almost invisible component, automatically deploying software the instant it is ready.
Implementations working with highly regulated industries typically require manual approvals but can often utilize a continuous deployment (CD) model. Application release automation (ARA) tools help automate the deployment of applications to production. ARA systems are typically integrated with continuous integration (CI) tools.
6. Maintenance
Security does not end after deployment. Testing phases can include thorough checks, but production is never the same as a testing environment. SSDLC should include mechanisms to address previously undetected risks and errors and ensure all configurations are performing as intended.
Security practices need to follow into software maintenance cycles. Ideally, the SSDLC should continuously update the product to ensure it remains secure from new vulnerabilities and compatible with newly integrated tools.
Secure SDLC Best Practices
Use the following best practices to implement an SSDLC.
Train Your Staff
Implementing a secure SDLC requires educating developers to ensure they incorporate security practices throughout the development life cycle. Training should include:
- Guidelines to help developers implement secure coding practices.
- Security awareness training.
- Remediation SLAs to clarify how quickly teams should address issues they discover in production.
Introduce Frictionless Security Processes
The modern software development pipeline should automate tasks wherever possible and minimize friction slowing down the development process. Developers often focus on writing and releasing code as quickly as possible, so they should leverage automation to achieve fast release cycles.
Developers often neglect security because they consider it an inconvenient burden compared to their primary objective of shipping code quickly to production. A secure SDLC requires removing the friction from security processes. For example, organizations can automate static and dynamic application security testing (SAST/DAST) and code reviews. These automated security pipelines should run seamlessly without delaying releases.
Control Code Repository Access
Embedding security in the SDLC helps ensure secure code, but it doesn’t protect against threats posed by malicious actors who infiltrate the development environment and insert arbitrary code.
Protecting access to all code repositories is an essential aspect of software security. Organizations should restrict access so that only verified users and entities can submit code to the repositories. It will prevent attackers from impersonating in-house developers and creating a backdoor.
Leverage Threat Modeling Where Appropriate
Threat modeling involves investigating a system’s design, operations, and data flows to identify potential vulnerabilities. It takes place early in the SDLC to allow security and development teams to redesign or reconfigure the system to address these vulnerabilities and prevent attackers from exploiting the system.
However, threat modeling is often time-consuming because it requires manual intervention to identify attack vectors. Thus, threat modeling often creates a bottleneck in the development process where most other components are automated. Organizations should use threat modeling sparingly and avoid wasting unnecessary time.
Threat hunting can provide a comprehensive list of all attack vectors, but identifying every potential attack window can hinder production without significantly increasing security.
Building an SSDLC with Imperva
Imperva deploys an integrated defense-in-depth model which provides a layered approach to enforce security from the application to the end user.
Imperva Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) is a lightweight agent that is incorporated during the software development cycle. RASP learns the unique behavior of the application and fortifies a security defense model around inherent security vulnerabilities, reducing pressure on development teams to immediately fix critical vulnerabilities before releasing to production, while ensuring immediate and effective protection against malicious exploits.
Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF), defends applications against all OWASP Top 10 threats including SQL injection, cross-site scripting, illegal resource access, and remote file inclusion.
Lastly, Imperva API Security, powered by machine learning and automation, continuously detects and classifies changes to APIs to identify potential misconfigurations and vulnerabilities before they become security incidents. This creates a feedback loop between the security and development teams, allowing organizations to embed security into their development lifecycle and streamline application release workflows.
