Cyber security is the biggest challenge in present age of advanced technology. Highly sensitive and important data related to internal operations of an organization or secret information about the associated clients needs to be secured with smart technology.
Secure Software Development Lifecycle (secSDLC) is a process that provides security assurance to the existing System Development Life Cycle(SDLC). It includes a series of procedures implemented in SDLC to minimize the risk of cyber threats. As per data security standards (DSS) Software development processes require to be managed under the supervision of a formalized secSDLC in the fields where high security is required to protect the confidential data as in payment card industry(PCI).
secSDLC development guidance is helps the clients to mitigate risks and remove security flaws throughout the Secure Software Development Lifecycle process. The common vulnerabilities as listed within the Open Web Application Security
Project (OWASP) Top 10 are checked by secSDLC procedures.
The steps involved in secSDLC are as listed under:
-Planning and Requirement Analysis: Generally this phase is performed by senior executives and directors of the organisation. They create preliminary report on the basis of customer’s feedback, market analysis and conflictions in the current product or services. It needs to analyze, define and create a report of the problems related to existing software and ideas to make it better.
-Design: New features and functions are designed based on the requirements analyzed by the directors in first phase. It requires high skilled software designers and senior technical engineers in coordination with directors.
-Development: The design is to be implemented into reality by software developers, ensuring the security in written codes. Code reviews and secure coding guidelines screen the development process to justify the security.
-Verification: The developed applications are processed under series of testing processes to ensure that they justify original design and requirements. Automated tools like CI/CD pipelines are used to control verification.
-Maintenance and Implementation: With all the refined testing processes, sometimes there are chances of vulnerabilities after the release of application. These vulnerabilities in written codes by developers or from some outside inhibitor like any hacker, need to be patched by developers which may include rewriting the code. These type of risks are addressed and removed to make the final release of the new application.
secSDLC must be implemented on the initiation of a developmental process as it would be cost effective and efficient in checking any risks of cyber threats. It would be difficult to resolve the security risk in the middle of development process.
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