What Is Application Security?

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What Is Application Security?
Srdjan Kali

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Srdjan Kali

Sep 14, 2019

The process and tools for software security.

Checking for security gaps in your applications is important as threats become more and more prevalent. Application security is a process that makes applications more secure by finding, repairing, and improving application security. There is a lot that happens during the development phase, but it also includes tools and methods for protecting applications when they are already in use. This is becoming more important as hackers increasingly target applications.

Application security is getting a lot of attention. There are hundreds of tools available to secure various elements of your application portfolio, from locking coding changes to evaluating inadvertent coding threats, evaluating encryption options and revision permissions, and access rights. There are specialized tools for mobile applications, online applications, and firewalls designed specifically for web applications.

 

Why application security matters


The faster and earlier you can find and solve security problems in the software development process, the more secure your business will be. Well, since everyone makes mistakes, the challenge is to find the mistakes in time. For example, a common coding error is to allow unverified inputs. If the hacker finds it, this error can be converted to SQL injection and then to data leaks. Application security tools that integrate with your application development environment can make this process and workflow simpler and more efficient. These tools are also useful if you do compliance audits, as they can save time and money by catching problems before auditors see them. The rapid growth in the application security segment has been helped by changing the way business applications are built in the last few years. Gone are the days for IT departments to take months to define requirements, build and test prototypes, and deliver a finished product to an end-user department. That concept seems almost strange today.


Instead, we have new methods of operation, called continuous implementation and integration, that refine the application on a daily basis, in some cases every hour. This means that security tools must work in this ever-changing world and quickly find code issues. Gartner, in its report on the Application Security Cycle (updated September 2018), says that IT managers "should not dwell on identifying common security bugs in application development and protecting against common attack techniques." They offer more than a dozen different product categories and describe where they are in their "development cycle". Many of these categories are just emerging and using relatively new products. It shows how fast the market is developing as threats become more complex, harder to find, and more powerful in the potential damage they can do to your networks, data, and your corporate reputation.

 

Application Security Tools


Although there are numerous categories of application security software products, the essence of the matter comes down to two: security testing tools and application security products. The first is a more mature market with dozens of well-known manufacturers, some of whom are software industry giants such as IBM, CA and MicroFocus. These tools are good enough so Gartner built his Magic Quadrant and classifies their importance and success. Review sites such as IT Central Station were also able to survey and rank these vendors.
Gartner categorizes security testing tools into several broad groups, and they are somewhat useful when deciding what you need to protect your application portfolio:

  • Static Testing, which analyzes code at fixed points during its development. This is useful for developers to check their code as they write it to ensure that security issues are introduced during development.
  • Dynamic testing, which analyzes the executable code. This is more useful because it can simulate attacks on production systems and detect more complex patterns of attack using a combination of systems.
  • Interactive testing, which combines elements of static and dynamic testing.
  • Mobile testing is specifically designed for mobile environments and can examine how an attacker can fully download the mobile OS and the applications running on it.

Another way to look at test tools is by how they are delivered: through a local tool or through a SaaS-based subscription service where you submit your code for online analysis. Some even do both. Check which programming languages ​​each testing vendor supports. Some limit their tools to only one or two languages. (Java is usually securely supported.) Others are more Microsoft .Net oriented. The same goes for integrated development environments (IDEs): some tools work as software add-ons or extensions for these IDEs, so testing the code is as simple as pushing a button. The second question is whether a tool is isolated from other test results, or can incorporate it into its analysis. IBM is one of the few that can import findings from manual code reviews, leak testing, vulnerability assessments, and competitor tests. This can be useful, especially if you have multiple tools that you need to follow.


Let's not forget about application protection tools. The main goal of these tools is to strengthen the application so that it is more difficult to execute attacks. This is a less explored territory. There you will find a large collection of smaller, issue-specific products that in many cases have limited historical and user bases. The goal of these products is to do more than just test for vulnerabilities and actively protect your applications from damage or burglary. They cover several different broad categories:

  • Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP): These tools can be considered as a combination of testing and security. They provide a measure of protection against possible reverse-engineering attacks. RASP tools continuously monitor application behavior, which is especially useful in mobile environments when applications can be overwritten, run on a rooted phone, or abuse privileges to force them to do dishonest things. RASP tools can send alerts, interrupt delusional processes, or terminate the application itself if found to be hacked. RASP is likely to become the default in many mobile development environments and will be embedded as part of other mobile application security tools. More connectivity is expected among software vendors with solid RASP solutions.
  • Code hiding: Hackers often use masking methods to hide their malware, and now the tools allow the developer to do this to protect their code from attack.
  • Encryption and Anti-Theft Tools: These are other methods that can be used to prevent bad guys from gaining insight into your code.
  • Hazard Detection Tools: These tools examine the environment or network on which your applications are running and assess the potential threats and abuses of trust relationships. Some tools may provide device fingerprints to determine if a cell phone is rooted or otherwise compromised.

 

Application Security Challenges


Part of the problem is that IT has to cater to several different masters to secure their applications. It must first keep pace with the development of the Security and Application Development Tools market, but that is just the entry point. IT also needs to anticipate business needs as more and more businesses are delving deeper into digital products, so the needs of their application portfolio are evolving into an increasingly complex infrastructure. They also need to know how SaaS services are constructed and secured. This was a problem, so a recent survey of 500 IT managers found a lack of average level of software design knowledge. The report states that "CIOs may be targeted by senior management because they are responsible for reducing complexity, adhering to the budget and speeding modernization to keep up with business requirements."


Finally, application security responsibility may be extended to several different teams within your IT operations: people on the network team may be in charge of running a firewall for web applications and other network-oriented tools, people in the stone application team are in charge of testing focused on endpoints, and different development groups address other issues. This makes it difficult to propose a tool that will meet everyone's needs, which is why the market has become so fragmented.

  

Trends in Application Security


In January 2019, Imperva announced its State of Web Application Vulnerabilities in 2018. The overall findings were positive. Although the number of vulnerabilities in web applications continues to increase, this growth is slowing. This is primarily due to a decrease in IoT vulnerabilities - only 38 new were reported in 2018 versus 112 in 2017. On the other hand, API vulnerabilities increased by 24% in 2018, but this is less than half the 56% increase in 2017.


Another area where more vulnerabilities are emerging, according to an Improve report, are content management systems, especially Wordpress. In this platform, the number of reported vulnerabilities increased by 30%. The report states that despite being far less popular than Wordpress, Drupal's content management system is becoming the target of attackers due to two vulnerabilities: Drupalgeddon2 (CVE-2018-7600) and Drupalgeddon3 (CVE-2018-7602). Both allow attackers to connect to background databases, scan and infect networks and clients with malware, or swap cryptocurrencies. Imperva claims that in 2018, it blocked more than half a million attacks that exploited these vulnerabilities.


By far the most common types of web application vulnerabilities were injection (19% of total) and scripting of dynamically generated web pages (14% of total). Remote command execution was the most common type of injection vulnerability, with a total of 1,980 reported cases. SQL injections were second with 1,354.

 

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