Secure Development: Crafting Compliant Software by Design with SD Elements

Secure coding is the practice of preventing security vulnerabilities in written code by writing code that follows strict principles. These principles govern coding techniques, practices, and the decision-making process of developers writing the code.

Security by Design starts with secure development requirements.

 

Secure development requirements are measures that must be implemented to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of software systems. Creating security requirements in the design phase of the SDLC, well before coding begins. This helps development, security, and operations build secure code before testing begins.

 

Secure development requirements identify threats to an application. While there are some best practices like input validation that are common to all development projects, others will be dependent on the technology stack, and applicable regulatory, customer, or internal requirements for each project. These can include threats inherent to the development language, software frameworks, and common attack patterns as well as threats for specific deployment environments such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

SD Elements is a developer-centric platform for automating secure development requirements and building secure and compliant software by design. Based on a brief survey, SD Elements identifies applicable regulatory standards and threats to an applications technology stack and deployment environment. It then translates those threats into actionable security controls and assigns them to development, QA, security, and operations through the teams’ existing systems such as Jira.

There are a few main secure development benefits that fuel our customers to use SD Elements, namely:

 

Speed to Market
Improve the speed of development by automatically identifying relevant risks and controls in minutes, and assigning easy-to-understand tasks to DevOps teams right in their issue tracking tools with SD Elements.

 

Software Security
Significantly reduce risks by automating your processes with SD Elements. It also improves your security posture, and can eliminate more than 92% of vulnerabilities.

 

Scalability
Scale the implementation of secure coding and deployment standards across your entire portfolio by enabling a self-service approach to security. This will also help in improving collaboration and reducing friction between DevOps and security teams.

 

Consistency
Ensure consistency in identifying security requirements, and boost productivity by automating security guidance and creating actionable tasks for DevOps teams.

 

Traceability
Easily trace the completion status of security activities at any time in the software development life cycle, and instantly gain insights into your risk and compliance posture.