Five Imperatives to Reduce Your Application Attack Surface

Today, more than ever, software and applications are the cornerstones of business operations. From internal resources to delivering excellent user experiences, all businesses rely on apps. Given the speed of business, it’s no wonder that software development has had to accelerate to keep pace with business needs. As such, developers have adjusted their development processes to optimize building and deploying applications. The result: heavy reliance on third-party elements (e.g., open-source code and libraries, APIs, version control systems, and more) and “expedited” testing that leaves visibility gaps when it comes to identifying software vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.

Managing the application attack surface has therefore become an imperative businesses can’t ignore. Doing so requires more than old-school tools, manual processes, and guessing games when it comes to application vulnerability management.

AppSec and DevOps teams need to be empowered with the tools and processes to identify, map, assess, and reduce application attack surfaces across the entire software development lifecycle. But here’s the tricky part: No tool or process can add friction while these things are happening. While security teams are careful “checkers,” developers are backed by the business to go-go-go. 

Though we’re not advocating for speed over security, security must move at the pace of development, not the other way around.

Here are five steps teams can take to achieve application attack surface reduction while facilitating rapid software deployment:

1. Identify and Understand the Entire App Attack Surface

Attack surface management starts with knowing all the elements used to build software. Beyond the basics — i.e., what’s in your codebase — developers and AppSec teams need a comprehensive, real-time inventory of the entire software ecosystem, from code and dependencies to APIs, configurations, and developer behaviors.

At OX, we call that the Pipeline Bill of Materials (PBOM). The PBOM is a dynamic record of all components used to build software — a signed ledger of each pipeline build used to track the entire software lifecycle, including all version lineage, security tool results, build hashes, and more.     

What this means is that AppSec and development teams can more easily:

• Map relationships and changes over time.
• Identify risk-prone components and their owners.
• Prioritize vulnerabilities based on business and security impact.

2. Enrich Data with Contextualized Insights

For far too long, AppSec has operated in siloes. Over the years, the commercial AppSec tools market has grown from simple code analysis point products to full platforms that can identify material code changes, dependencies, and reuse; cloud and container misconfigurations; data and secrets exposure; and transitive vulnerabilities. 

While some point products (or “best-of-breed” tools) are still useful and relevant, stitching them together without a normalization, deduplication, and correlation engine will only increase false positives, unprioritized alerts, and frustration for anyone trying to de-risk applications before they reach runtime.  

If you’re reading this blog post, you’ve undoubtedly noticed the emergence of application security posture management (ASPM). As defined by Gartner:

“Application security posture management (ASPM) tools continuously manage application risk through collection, analysis and prioritization of security issues from across the software life cycle. They ingest data from multiple sources, maintain an inventory of all software within an organization, correlate and analyze findings for easier interpretation, triage and remediation. They enable the enforcement of security policies and facilitate the remediation of security issues while offering a comprehensive view of risk across applications.”

But the one thing missing from this definition, and which indisputably improves organizations’ abilities to manage the application attack surface is context. Without context, AppSec and DevOps teams can’t even begin to understand if the alerts and information they’re getting from their AppSec tools are accurate to their software and networking environments. Context should be multifaceted and aggregated from a wide variety of sources. Beyond that, however, “context” means understanding environmental factors (like reachability, exploitability, and business impact), as well as the organization’s ability to triage and remediate findings. Only with context can businesses start to shrink their attack surface.

3. Prioritize Vulnerabilities to Slow Attack Surface Sprawl

More tools, more software, and more people working to build, test, and deploy applications all add up to an increased attack surface — all the little nooks and crannies attackers can use to initiate a compromise. And be sure that attackers are focused on software supply chains and the software development lifecycle; its complexity almost guarantees that blind spots will exist and critical vulnerabilities will remain. 

Developers, in particular, struggle with vulnerability prioritization. Many AppSec tools produce an overabundance of alerts — almost like a badge of honor. However, “more” doesn’t equal “better.” And it certainly doesn’t equate to efficacy or risk reduction. What developers need and want are tools that fit into their processes and help them understand which vulnerabilities are critical. They need clear guidance for responding to the highest-criticality issues. 

AppSec teams, too, are drowning in alerts, up to 97% of which are irrelevant to the organization or would have little impact if exploited. 

Rather than relying on tools that produce a ton of alerts, AppSec and Dev teams should deploy active ASPM solutions that can help them prioritize vulnerabilities to decrease the attack surface. This means using a contextual approach that provides:

• Full contextual visibility for the entire software supply chain, correlating vulnerabilities across code, pipelines, and runtime environments.
• Business impact assessments that answer questions such as
  • Is this vulnerability in a high business impact (HBI) application?
  • Does it affect sensitive data or critical workflows?
  • What is the potential blast radius if exploited?
• Exploitability analysis of factors such as deployment status, internet exposure, known exploits, and ease of remediation
• Dynamic risk scoring, where vulnerabilities are ranked based on technical severity and contextual factors, helping response teams focus on the most critical risks first. 
• Automated remediation workflows that help route high-priority issues to the right teams and/or allow for automated or semi-automated fixes.

4. Embed Security in Software Design 

“Shift left” has become a cybersecurity buzzword. The premise is sound, but in practice, it’s very hard to achieve, especially when it comes to building and deploying applications. 

Developers, already stretched thin to deliver on tight deadlines, often lack the specialized knowledge or time to manage the complexities of AppSec. Further, when security tools are integrated into IDEs without thoughtful planning, developers are overwhelmed by a flood of false positives. This constant barrage of inaccurate or irrelevant alerts erodes their trust in the tools and disrupts productivity as they spend hours triaging issues that aren’t actionable. 

Meanwhile, security teams lose visibility into the process, making it difficult to monitor risk holistically, prioritize vulnerabilities based on real impact, and ensure the most critical issues are resolved first.

What most AppSec and development teams are hungry for is a strategic approach that embeds security into the software development lifecycle from the start, without raising too many roadblocks. The key to this is incorporating actionable insights early in the design process, allowing teams to flag risky features and automate security assessments like threat models and code reviews — before development begins.

5. Empower Developers with Risk-Based Guardrails

A developer-friendly approach to application attack surface management enables teams to embed secure coding practices seamlessly into their workflows. Automated, context-aware feedback on every commit allows developers to move quickly while maintaining strong security standards.

Streamlined security throughout the entire software development lifecycle is necessary to promote a risk-based approach. This means providing developers and AppSec teams alike with:

• Real-time visibility into all the components within the supply chain, how they interact, and exactly where the vulnerabilities are.
• Clear and actionable insights, including the reasons why an issue is tagged as critical and must be addressed immediately.
• Automated security testing and fixes for common/simple issues that enable developers to work faster and avoid the rework that results from vulnerabilities found late in the development process.
  

Key Takeaways

To reduce the application attack surface, organizations need a strategic approach to application development and software supply chain security. Piecemeal solutions of the past just don’t cut it anymore. Nor do tools that produce an overwhelming number of uncontextualized alerts that are impossible to quantify. Developers and AppSec professionals are eager for approaches and tools that can help them hone in on the most critical issues and solve problems without major disruptions or delays.

As such, organizations should seek processes and platforms that provide:

1. Comprehensive visibility of all components used in the software supply chain.
2. Contextualized risk profiles that eliminate silos and enable smarter decisions.
3. Policies and automation reduce complexity and control sprawl.
4. Prioritized remediation that helps focus efforts on the highest-impact risks.
5. Embedded security in the design and development phases to enable sustained protection at scale.

Ready to see OX in action? Schedule a demo today and discover how Active ASPM can reduce your application attack surface while accelerating your security strategy.