Managing application security risks in today’s accelerated development process is difficult. Here’s what you can do about it.
It’s been twenty-five years since Microsoft engineers first coined the term “cross-site scripting” (XSS). Since then, the vulnerability has featured consistently in the OWASP Top 10 of security risks in web applications. It’s in “good” company: all three of the most prevalent software supply chain vulnerabilities today have been around for decades:
- Command injection (15.4% of applications)
- Sensitive data in log files (12.4% of applications)
- Cross-site scripting (XSS – 11.4% of applications)
If we’re so familiar with these (and other) security threats, why are they still an issue?
Despite widespread awareness, software vulnerabilities, particularly in web applications, are being introduced in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) all the time. Why? Because managing application security in today’s accelerated application development process is challenging: modern software applications are often complex, with many interconnected components and dependencies – it can be all too easy for vulnerabilities to slip through the cracks or be introduced through recycles or third-party code.
No one wants to miss any potential security threats, but when security teams are already wading through false positives and 100,000+ alerts, security monitoring can become overwhelming, fast.
The good news: Modern application security software is here to help.
What is application security?
Application security – a.k.a. “AppSec” – includes the practices, application security testing tools, continuous monitoring, and other security measures used by teams to protect software applications from vulnerabilities. This is all in service of reducing organizations’ overall attack surfaces. Whereas traditional cybersecurity measures focus on endpoint, network, identity, data, application layer, and cloud security, application security teams zone in on software development, the entire end-to-end process of building software and applications, including their environments and the development-focused tools, used to build applications that are more resistant to attack or exploitation.
AppSec covers web application security, mobile application security, cloud-native application security, API security, various types of application security testing tools like SAST and DAST, configuration management, API security, source code review, software composition analysis (SCA), and more. AppSec has become a core aspect of the “shift-left” movement, embedding security and secure coding practices into the software development process, and integrating with CI/CD pipelines to make “secure by design” a reality.
Some of the components of an application security program include:
- Enabling secure coding practices
- Vulnerability management and assessment
- Threat modeling
- Continuous monitoring and testing
The importance of AppSec is underlined by the fact that — as explained earlier — security threats arising from software vulnerabilities have increased exponentially in recent years. Why? Because businesses of all kinds are now developing applications in-house, often with little foundation in how to secure application development infrastructure. With the pressure to deploy software quickly, the lack of application security tools and solutions that fit seamlessly into development lifecycles, and the overabundance of non-business impacting alerts pushed onto developers’ dashboards (with a message to “fix everything”), developers are frustrated and prone to sidestepping security alerts that could impede deployment. While developers might not be prioritizing application security measures, cyber attackers are: application vulnerabilities are the most critical path to initiate a breach in 2024.
What does effective security look like in practice?
Attackers can exploit weaknesses in software to launch attacks using techniques such as SQL injection, XSS, broken access control (allowing unauthorized access to sensitive data or performing unauthorized actions), and exploitation of security misconfigurations. These Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs, recorded in the National Vulnerability Database) in software are expected to increase by 25% this year alone, reaching approximately 2900 new vulnerabilities per month. And that’s just one database. Every effective AppSec program draws vulnerability insights from multiple databases.
How does AppSec work?
Robust application security works by finding, fixing, and preventing the vulnerabilities listed above – from the software development phase through runtime. From planning to production, AppSec tools help security and development teams improve their overall application security posture. As we saw earlier, some of the key AppSec processes are:
- Threat modeling
- Security testing
- Vulnerability assessment
- Runtime protection
- Continuous monitoring and updating
It’s not all about the processes; there are secure coding standards and guidelines to help developers design and write more secure code, and prevent the introduction of vulnerabilities in the first place. Standards like CERT, CWE (Common Weakness Enumeration), and the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) all provide detailed guidance, recommendations, and frameworks to help developers eliminate errors and write more secure code. And while they’re doing that, some tools can augment the process.
Application security testing tools help teams analyze code and identify vulnerabilities before software is deployed, reducing the time and cost of remediation. Let’s take a look at some of the AppSec tools and what they do to enhance security posture.
Software Composition Analysis (SCA): SCA detects and manages potential security vulnerabilities and licensing issues across the open-source and third-party library chain. It scans code and analyzes the software components that form an application, identifying and managing vulnerabilities. The information gathered by SCA is used to create a software bill of materials (SBOM) that can be compared against databases of common vulnerabilities, such as the National Vulnerability Database.
Static Application Security Testing (SAST): SAST zones in on proprietary code, looking for vulnerabilities in code in its static state. It’s used in the earliest stages of development, where it analyzes code before an application is complete, identifying potential vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, XSS, or configuration errors. One of the key benefits of SAST is that it can analyze every line of source code in an application, making it truly comprehensive. On the downside, because it can deep dive into code, SAST can yield false positives and a lot of alerts, requiring human expertise to maximize the insights.
Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST): Also known as “outside in” security testing, DAST takes an attacker’s approach, simulating attacks on applications to expose any vulnerabilities. DAST is a useful tool for identifying gaps or unforeseen outcomes that could have a downstream effect on application security. It rounds out the capabilities of other testing tools by testing applications while they’re running, giving teams insight into how an application would behave under attack.
Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST): This tool essentially combines SAST and DAST, testing applications for vulnerability while they’re in use. It uses sensor modules to track application behavior while tests are running, sending alerts any time a vulnerability is detected. One of the difficulties with IAST is that it is programming-language dependent, meaning that some tools require a code change to work (or won’t work with your stack at all).
While SCA, SAST, DAST, and IAST, between them, can enable a holistic approach that integrates security into DevOps processes, they often lack sufficient context and data sharing to manage growing software supply chain risk. These silos can add to coverage and visibility gaps experienced by AppSec teams already managing multiple tools, alerts, and false positives. If you can’t remediate everything – and you can’t – what can you do?
Context is everything
As we’ve just seen, many application security teams are juggling multiple disparate application security testing (AST) tools, like SCA, SAST, DAST, and IAST. It’s hard enough that teams are already monitoring an average of 129 applications and over 118,000 alerts – finding and triaging vulnerabilities in a sea of noise, using tools that can’t (or won’t) “talk” to each other makes life even more difficult.
With so many tools in place, AppSec teams and engineers are forced to manually piece together data from disparate, fragmented solutions. And that’s just the beginning: data from those manual processes has to be enriched and correlated from third-party data resources, such as NVD, CISA KEV, and other vulnerability trackers. To add to the pressure, slow detection and remediation rates risk turning AppSec into a bottleneck in today’s accelerated software development lifecycle: as things stand, IDC research indicates that 50% of software developers are spending 19% of their time each week on security tasks. It’s clear that traditional approaches to AppSec no longer work.
What now? Time for the next phase in AppSec’s evolution: Application Security Posture Management.
ASPM: AppSec best practice in a single platform
Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) is a new approach, with its origins in Application Security Orchestration and Correlation (ASOC). It removes the historical silos and tool sprawl, unifying AST, software supply chain security (SSCS), and security posture management tools into a single management plane. Teams can use the platform to aggregate and correlate data from organizations’ source control, gaining deeper insights and context about applications and their environment.
This unified approach gives both software developers and security teams the ability to prioritize, track, and fix issues across the SDLC with greater accuracy. For example, ASPM helps AppSec teams not only to identify software libraries used in their code, but also to see code flaws, dependencies, and vulnerabilities. This approach expands the possibilities beyond simple identification and into comprehensive, risk-based management. The result: end-to-end visibility and traceability from code to cloud – driving successful apps, built securely.
ASPM takes AppSec to a new level, saving money, and offering additional benefits such as time saving through automated security, reduced manual effort, fewer errors, and less friction between development and security teams. ASPM solves many challenges traditional AppSec introduces. When deploying a modern application security tool, your team will be able to:
Mitigate AppSec tool sprawl: Unifying AST, SSCS, and posture management tools into one management plane.
Eliminate the silos between AppSec and DevOps teams: ASPM collects, correlates, and enriches data from multiple tools and sources, delivering a synthesized view of applications and their associated security state. The result: A consolidated approach that keeps AppSec and DevOps on the same page.
Enable risk-based prioritization and vulnerability management: ASPM’s approach to AppSec incorporates advanced risk calculations based on applications’ reachability, exploitability, and business impact, providing risk-based prioritization and the ability to meaningfully manage the application attack surface.
Integrate and automate: ASPM allows AppSec teams to integrate security checks directly into software development workflows, making automated monitoring and consistent policy enforcement easy — removing what traditionally has been a significant bottleneck for accelerated release times.
Securing your applications with OX Security
The OX Security Active ASPM platform breaks with tradition and takes application security to the next level, unifying security across the SDLC. No stitched-together patchworks of features and tools: OX is a tightly integrated set of capabilities that empowers development and AppSec teams to deliver secure applications at the scale and pace of today’s business environment.
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