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Continuous Security

Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) | Security and Aceleration

Parveen Bhandari | 08 November 2022

Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)

Introduction to SDLC

The Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is a process to develop high-quality software that includes well-defined processes. It is a well-structured sequence of stages that assists an organization in producing high-quality software that has been thoroughly tested and is ready for production.

What is a secure Software Development Life Cycle?

It means integrating security in the whole software development life cycle process. It entails implementing security testing and other operations into an existing development process.

The secured SDLC supports the identification of application/software security issues and vulnerabilities. This ensures that the process of developing secure software runs smoothly.

A procedure of testing early, testing regular, test everywhere, and automate. Click to explore about our, Role of Continuous Testing in Continuous Delivery

Why is it important to secure the SDLC?

The secure SDLC is important to ensure software security and identify flaws early in software development. Secure its structure, eliminates ambiguity, and eliminates security threats.

The primary advantages of using a secure SDLC:

  • Aids in the early detection of security issues and bugs in the development process, lowering the application's operational security risk.
  • All stakeholders should be included in the security concerns to ensure security is a significant concern.
  • Costs are reduced by detecting and resolving problems early in the project life cycle.

How does it works?

Integrating security testing and other activities into an existing development process is what a secure SDLC entails. Writing security requirements alongside functional requirements is one example of performing an integration risk analysis during the planning phase of it.

Software quality management activities are generally divided up into three core components: quality assurance, quality planning, and quality control. Click to explore about our, Software Quality Management Techniques

How to get started with securing SDLC?

A secure Software Development Life Cycle process necessitates a high level of attention to detail. Having a detailed and well-defined action plan is an excellent method to avoid security risks.

Adopting appropriate security technologies is a reliable approach to boosting efficiency and keeping an eye out for risks.

Every phase of the SDLC necessitates its own set of security policies and technologies. Prioritization, automated detection, and remediation technologies can be connected with a team's IDEs, code repositories, build servers, and bug-tracking tools at any stage to automatically detect potential dangers.

Planning

During the initial design phase, security experts and developers must consider the frequent threats that must be addressed during the application's development.

Requirements and Analysis

The application's technologies, frameworks, and languages were chosen in the second phase of the SDLC by security experts and developers. This is the stage in the design and development cycle where specialists analyze which vulnerabilities may pose a risk to the security of the development tools chosen.

Architecture and Design

Teams should focus on the architecture and design of the product or application in this phase to identify previously identified risks. We can ensure that vulnerabilities will not affect software in the development stage if identified early in the design phase.

Governance

Governance is the first stage. Prepare the ground rules and create a strategy and training plan. Salta, for example, is looking for a primary sql injection to hack into an acne company account. The new governance method is being used to train developers and to avoid vulnerabilities in Acme's to the entire developer team so that everyone was on the same page and knows how to code and make modifications in SQL statements safely, rewarding salt as the first action.

Testing

To improve the application's security, the testing process includes security testing utilizing automated DevSecOps technologies.

A practice of implementing security at every step in the DevOps Lifecycle with DevSecOps Tools. Click to explore about our, DevSecOps Tools and Continuous Security for Enterprises

Maintenance

While the teams put in a lot of effort during testing, the real world is never the same as the test environment. To ensure the configuration is accurate, we must be prepared to handle previously unnoticed risks or problems.

When building a secure software development life cycle, there are a few things to keep in mind:

  • Vulnerabilities discovered during testing should be addressed appropriately and promptly.
  • A development team should concentrate on deliverables like security milestones, essential certifications, vulnerability assessments, essential security resources, and required third-party resources when working on the scope of the SDL.
  • It would help if you examined the gap between the product's features and the baseline; this will help you discover the areas where the security baseline is not met.
  • The most severe issues are usually the most critical and challenging to resolve. A good strategy would be to concentrate on them rather than all of the project's threats or flaws.
  • Developers, designers, architects, and QA should all receive security training from the firm. They can concentrate on concepts of secure design, security concerns, web security, or encryption.
  • In the development lifecycle, model the software components to identify and manage threats. This aids the team in developing an incident response plan from the start, allowing them to prepare appropriate mitigations before the harm becomes more challenging.
  • The developers must understand the most prevalent code security pitfalls. They should employ a secure coding checklist to ensure that important security events are logged, the authentication procedure is permeabile, and the user input is validated. They should concentrate on performance while security testing to determine the product's vulnerability to assaults.
devsecops-pipeline
Security policies are implemented from the beginning of the planning phase and are followed throughout the SDLC process. Download to transform the organization with DevSecOps

Conclusion

The demand for more effective cybersecurity measures has risen in recent years. It also necessitates the development of more streamlined and long-term development models. The secure development lifecycle, i.e., secure Software Development Life Cycle, assists developers and organizations in planning, developing, and releasing high-quality products and meeting the need for securing its process phases or procedures.

The main thing is that security is at the heart of the Software Development Life Cycle, and every stage of the development process presents the possibility - and opportunity - of discovering a crucial issue that a regular SDLC would miss until it's too late.