How code security/scan plays a vital role in a software product maturity model
All code and software contain bugs. While some of these bugs will only impact the application’s functionality or are inconsequential altogether, others could potentially impact its security.
Identifying and remedying these security vulnerabilities is critical to ensure they are not exploited. Code scanning is a tool that can help you to do this.
There are several types of code methodologies that you can use to determine vulnerabilities within an application prior to it reaching production. This will lower the risk of security errors, as well as the difficulty and expense of remediating them.
With that being said, continue reading to discover everything you need to know about code security, and why it plays such a vital role in a software product maturity model.
Businesses are recognizing the importance of product maturity models
When you are evaluating a product, there are lots of factors you can focus on, such as revenue, customer count, and support interactions. However, more and more businesses are realizing that they need to assess how a product is being managed as well. That’s where software product maturity models come into place.
A software maturity model is a benchmark you can use to assess an IT landscape, whether it is in regard to technology, process, people, or all three.
You can determine any gaps between your software’s current state and future state, so you know what path to take to create an improved landscape.
A software product maturity model enables you to determine weaknesses, strengths, threats, and opportunities. Security is one of the most critical elements that requires evaluation, and that is where code security best practices come in.
Application Security Maturity (ASM) models
An ASM model helps businesses understand where they are regarding their overall software security efforts.
You will need to assess the following areas for both breadth and depth of application:
- Application-layer security mitigation
- Web security vulnerability scanning
- Test automation
- Defect management
- Source code scanning
- Version control
When it comes to source code scanning, you will assess whether source code scanning tools are used, and if so, whether there are security code scanning tools in place. You also need to evaluate how and where the source code tools are utilized.
Implementing a security maturity model
Irrespective of the nature of your business, a cybersecurity assessment is critical. There are four checks we recommend carrying out to evaluate your security maturity levels:
- Specify all your processes, for example, business auditing, document management, design, system processes, and evolution.
- Address strategic management. This involves a group of processes such as coordinating physical and IT security, resources allocated for information security, strategic vision, and the stakeholder’s report.
- Assess tactical management, which involves security awareness, security personnel selection and training, insurance management, service-level management, and background checks.
- Evaluate operational management processes. Examples include forensics, compliance probing, information quality, access control, change control, security measures, environment patching, and inventory management.
These processes will govern the degree of security maturity at your business. You need to accomplish this before security standards for your product can be enforced. Controls must be specified at each level.
There are several terminologies that state maturity levels as defined in frameworks and organizations. However, most frameworks use the following levels of maturity:
Why is code security important?
You only need to look at the number of data breaches that have happened in recent times to see why code security is so critical for your software products.
Secure coding is one of the most vital elements in the lifecycle of your software, and you need to ensure you have secure, robust coding procedures and policies in place.
In a lot of cases, security events that are deemed “minuscule” tend to be the ones that lead to both reputational and/or financial damages. For example, an untested computer program or poorly written code could result in a buffer overflow incident or a logic bomb, therefore, compromising, the availability of essential corporate assets, integrity, and confidentiality.
How code security plays a vital role in a software product maturity model
Any type of software can have vulnerabilities, irrespective of its deployment location or how it is implemented. Comprehensive vulnerability management demands the capability to perform code scanning in a number of different deployment environments. Examples include the following:
- Kubernetes
- Serverless applications
- Cloud environments
- Private and public code repositories
The effectiveness of a code scan also depends on the information available to the code scanning tool.
DAST and SAST tools will largely scan for types of attacks and code security vulnerabilities that are known, meaning that false negative detections can happen if you run them in incomplete or outdated rulesets. This means your application is going to be vulnerable to exploitation.
Because of this, you need to make sure that code scanning tools should be integrated into your business’s security infrastructure or be capable of making the most of threat intelligence feeds.
Code scanning and vulnerability detection methodologies
Security teams and developers have a varied number of options available to them when carrying out code scanning.
Some of the chief vulnerability detection methodologies are as follows:
Source Composition Analysis
Most applications depend on a variety of external dependencies and libraries. Source Composition Analysis, often shortened to SCA, identifies the dependencies an application has, assessing them for known vulnerabilities that could impact the security of the application.
Interactive Analysis
Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST) utilizes instrumentation to gain visibility into the execution state, outputs, and inputs of your software. During runtime, this visibility enables it to determine any anomalous behavior that would indicate that novel or known vulnerabilities in the application have been exploited.
Dynamic Analysis
Often shortened to DAST, Dynamic Application Security Testing uses a library of known attacks and a fuzzing tool to find any vulnerabilities that are running in your software. By subjecting the application to malicious or unusual inputs, and then observing the responses, you can find vulnerabilities in the application by using DAST.
Static Analysis
Finally, we have Static Application Security Testing (SAST) which is performed on your software’s source code. It will detect any vulnerabilities within your program by creating a model of its execution state and then applying rules based upon the code patterns that create common vulnerabilities, for example, the utilization of untrusted user input as an input to an SQL query.
Getting your software product maturity model right
As you can see, code security plays a critical role when it comes to putting together an effective software product maturity model.
Some other elements that need to be covered in a successful software product maturity model include technology change management, process change management, quantitative process management, and software quality management.
From providing outstanding customer support to ensuring your software adapts to suit new devices, it is about covering all bases to ensure your software product continues to thrive.
Uptrend labs can help you navigate the complex field of code scanning
Uptrend Labs, has the technical expertise, frameworks, and depth of understanding to guide you effectively through product maturity modeling, including dealing with all security issues you may face.
Our team has many years of field experience to draw on, and we have helped many businesses to thrive, from Fortune 500 organizations to private equity firms. Our Technical Due Diligence can ensure enterprise value does not diminish in your business.
We can evaluate all tech risks and recommend areas of improvement in terms of software code quality, compliance with privacy laws, application security, and much more. Please do not hesitate to contact our team today.