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Overview:
There are several Cyber Security requirements that should be considered before the development of any kind of application.
Organizations must ensure that any new software application project or changing any existing infrastructure or application is in adherence and compliance with the organization’s Cyber Security policy, standard operating procedures (SOPs), advisories and guidelines.
It will be useful for the organization to deliver high-quality, highly secure products. These cyber security requirements ensure that the application is maintained and meets the security standards of Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (CIA) and eventually protect applications from cyber attacks.
Cyber Security Prerequisities Needed for Application Development Project :
Below are some of the critical cyber security categories that need to be focused on:
2. Governance Risk and Compliance
1. Secure Development:
- Suitable secure development infrastructure for application development should be managed that shield the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC).
- For the production and testing of the application, a distinct environment should be established either physically or logically.
- Maintain all Application designs, source code, test strategies, specifications, reports, listings, and all necessary information in a controlled manner. If possible, utilize organization owned source code repositories.
- Prepare Application architecture in simple diagrams that include trust boundaries, subsystems and data flow. Also, ensure it should be validated and approved by the cyber security team.
- Copies of production data should not be used for testing unless the data has been sanitized or unless all personnel involved in testing is authorized access to the data.
- Application code must be tested using code analysis tool and validate for completeness. Allow code that completed the production acceptance testing into the production environment. And also, ensure the access to application source code is restricted to authorized individuals.
- Third-party owned application source code should be held in escrow based on the application criticality for the organization.
- Development of application must follow organization’s Application security guidelines.
- Implement security controls for input data validation, message integrity and output validation.
- From initial to deployment, Application should go through SSDLC (Secure Software Development Life Cycle) process that basically consists of below activities:
- Check all the possible security requirements.
- Integrate Threat Modeling procedure. Here STRIDE Methodology can be used.
- Software development technologies, tools and libraries must be trusted and licensed.
- Conducting periodic VAPT assessment and remediation.
- Conducting secure code reviews.
- Ensuring secure integration between software components.
- Conducting secure configuration review.
- Secure integration must be processed between software components.
- Ensure that third-party software, packages and libraries, or any components used by the application are not decreasing the overall application security posture.
- During the SDLC phase, the application development team should follow and fix all the security findings reported by the Cyber Security team as a part of operational security assessments and conduct retesting after remediation.
- DevSecOps model is strongly suggested in Application development which automates security at every phase of the SDLC.
2. Governance Risk and Compliance:
- Projects should ensure lawful and limited collection, use and processing of personal information in line with applicable privacy regulations and in compliance with the organization’s Data Privacy and Protection policy.
- Any changes in the applications, infrastructure, or provisioning of services must be performed in compliance with Change Management Policy to avoid the impact of any unauthorized modification or alteration.
- Personnel responsible for IT resources must be aware of the Cybersecurity policy and security practices.
- The Application must be integrated and adhere to Identify and Access Management solutions.
- The Application must integrate and adhere to SIEM solutions for Logging and Monitoring to enable timely detection and neutralization of threats.
- Password must be in compliance with Password Policy.
- If the application stores, creates or transmits confidential data, ensure that it is stored and transmitted in a secure manner.
- Cybersecurity requirements in regards to cloud services must be managed in adherence to the cloud legal and regulatory requirements and Cloud Security Policy.
3. Documentation:
- Every software application development lifecycle (SDLC) should incorporate adequate documentation that includes:
- Security requirements checklist
- S-SDLC framework
- Application Security guidelines
- Application security checklist
- Application Security policy
- Web application Security policy
- Vulnerability management policy
- DevSecOps framework
- Threat Modeling framework
- Application Architecture
- Application Design Documents
- Test Plan and Test Cases
- Operational and Administrative Manuals.
- End-user Manuals.
- System Changelogs.
- RAID (Risks, Assumptions, Issues and Dependencies) logs.
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