Application Security Hygiene
Application security hygiene refers to the set of routine practices and procedures that development, security, and operations teams should consistently follow to maintain the security of applications throughout their lifecycle. It's about consistently applying security fundamentals to reduce vulnerabilities and minimize the application's attack surface.
Here's a breakdown of what that entails:
Secure Coding Practices: This is the foundation of application security hygiene. It involves writing code that avoids common security flaws, such as injection vulnerabilities, cross-site scripting, and buffer overflows. Developers should use secure coding guidelines and conduct regular code reviews.
Dependency Management: Applications often rely on external libraries and frameworks. Good hygiene means keeping these dependencies up-to-date, patching vulnerabilities promptly, and using dependency scanning tools to identify potential risks.
Input Validation and Sanitization: Applications should always validate and sanitize user-supplied input to prevent injection attacks and other input-based vulnerabilities. This practice ensures that the application processes only safe and expected data.
Authentication and Authorization: Robust authentication and authorization mechanisms are crucial. Hygiene in this area includes using strong authentication methods, implementing proper session management, and adhering to the principle of least privilege (granting users only the necessary permissions).
Configuration Management: Secure configuration is essential. This involves appropriately configuring application servers, databases, and other components, disabling unnecessary services, and using secure default settings.
Logging and Monitoring: Comprehensive logging and monitoring can help detect suspicious activity and security incidents. Hygiene includes logging relevant security events, monitoring application behavior, and regularly reviewing logs.
Patch Management: Promptly patching applications and related infrastructure is critical to addressing known vulnerabilities. Hygiene involves having a system for tracking vulnerabilities, prioritizing patches, and deploying them promptly.
Security Testing: Regular security testing, such as static analysis, dynamic analysis, and penetration testing, is essential for identifying vulnerabilities. Hygiene means integrating these tests into the development lifecycle and addressing the findings.
In essence, application security hygiene is about consistently applying best practices to minimize risk and ensure the ongoing security of applications.
ThreatNG can significantly aid in maintaining strong application security hygiene by providing external visibility, identifying vulnerabilities, and validating security controls.
ThreatNG's external discovery capability is the first step in assessing application security hygiene. ThreatNG identifies all externally accessible applications, including web applications, APIs, and mobile apps. This comprehensive discovery is crucial because poor hygiene in any of these applications can create security risks. ThreatNG's discovery process, which operates without connectors, accurately maps the organization's external attack surface, ensuring no application is overlooked.
ThreatNG's external assessment modules provide detailed insights into various aspects of application security hygiene:
Web Application Hijack Susceptibility: This assessment directly evaluates several aspects of web application security hygiene. ThreatNG analyzes web applications for vulnerabilities such as:
Input Validation: ThreatNG identifies vulnerabilities related to improper input validation, such as susceptibility to cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection.
Secure Configuration: ThreatNG assesses the presence of security headers (e.g., Content Security Policy, HTTP Strict Transport Security), which are essential for secure configuration.
Outdated Software: ThreatNG detects outdated software components with known vulnerabilities.
API Security: ThreatNG's assessments can also help evaluate API security hygiene. For example, the "Code Secret Exposure" module can identify exposed API keys in code repositories, which is a serious hygiene issue.
Mobile App Exposure: This assessment helps identify hygiene issues in mobile applications, such as:
Hardcoded Credentials: ThreatNG can find hardcoded API keys or other credentials within mobile apps.
Data Storage: ThreatNG's analysis can reveal insecure data storage practices within mobile apps.
ThreatNG's reporting capabilities provide valuable feedback on application security hygiene. The reports highlight specific vulnerabilities and weaknesses, enabling security teams to prioritize and address hygiene issues effectively. For example, reports can detail web applications with high XSS susceptibility or mobile apps with hardcoded credentials.
Application security hygiene is not a one-time effort; it requires continuous attention. ThreatNG's continuous monitoring helps organizations maintain good hygiene by:
Detecting Changes: ThreatNG monitors applications for changes that could introduce new vulnerabilities or hygiene issues.
Identifying New Vulnerabilities: ThreatNG's continuous monitoring helps identify new vulnerabilities that may arise due to updates or new threats.
ThreatNG's investigation modules provide tools for in-depth analysis of application security hygiene:
Domain Intelligence: This module provides detailed information about web applications and their configurations, aiding in investigating web application hygiene issues.
Sensitive Code Exposure: This module helps security teams investigate code security practices and identify exposed secrets, which are critical hygiene concerns.
Mobile Application Discovery: This module allows for a detailed analysis of mobile apps and their security characteristics.
ThreatNG's intelligence repositories provide context for application security hygiene findings. For example, information on known vulnerabilities helps security teams assess the risk associated with outdated software components.
Working with Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG's application security assessments can be integrated with other security tools to improve overall application security hygiene:
Vulnerability Management: ThreatNG's external assessments can complement internal vulnerability scans, providing a more complete picture of application vulnerabilities.
SIEM: ThreatNG's findings can be fed into a SIEM system to correlate external application security events with internal logs and alerts, enhancing threat detection and response.
Examples of ThreatNG Helping
ThreatNG identifies a web application vulnerable to XSS due to improper input validation, prompting developers to improve their coding practices.
ThreatNG detects outdated libraries in a web application, highlighting the need for better dependency management.
ThreatNG finds hardcoded credentials in a mobile app, leading to a review of secure coding practices for mobile development.
Examples of ThreatNG Working with Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG's vulnerability findings trigger automated patching workflows in a vulnerability management system.
ThreatNG's detection of suspicious application behavior is fed into a SIEM, which correlates it with other security events to identify a potential attack.
ThreatNG is a valuable tool for assessing and improving application security hygiene.
