Technology is considered to be an enabler and accelerator in application development – but only if implemented in the right way. Take for example the plan by the Democratic party in Iowa, earlier this year, to use a mobile application to calculate and display their caucus results. With the thought that technology could improve the speed of administration and governance, little did they expect anything to go wrong.
On the day of the results, the application failed, mainly attributed to issues in coding and reporting. The security of this application had been an issue from day one. By not disclosing the technical details of the application and with the idea of “security through obscurity,” it led to widespread apprehension and lowered public confidence. Ultimately the launch of the application was a failure and gave rise to one question, “Is this app secure?”
We have witnessed many data and security breaches in the last decade. Every minute of every day, there are data and security breaches taking place. According to researchers at the University of Maryland, there is a cyberattack every 39 seconds. Even big companies, from Yahoo, Facebook, Target to Home Depot have come under attack and this will continue. The only way to address this concern is to focus on security across the enterprise, built into systems, and throughout the entire application development lifecycle.
To build robust applications and address security risks, here are some of the aspects you need to consider when developing your application security strategies:
- Cover all web application security risks and vulnerabilities - Security threats evolve faster than anyone can keep up with. The challenge most enterprises face when implementing application security programs is that they don’t know where to begin. In most security breaches, attacks on applications are the most frequent. To cover all vulnerabilities and security risks of web applications a good place to start is by referring to vulnerabilities stated in the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), a community of security professionals and application developers. Application teams need to cover all security risks, beginning with addressing the OWASP Top 10 security risks which includes injection flaws, broken authentication and access control, data exposure, security misconfiguration, poorly configured XML processors, insecure deserialization, and insufficient logging and monitoring.
- Ensure server-side security across the application development lifecycle, not just on the browser-side - JavaScript is a common client-side web technology used to create most websites. Web pages are often vulnerable to hackers who can access and modify elements. When executing web applications in a browser-based JavaScript runtime environment, security is often beyond the control of website owners. By relying only on browser-side security alone, web applications can be vulnerable to security threats. Security must be ensured on the server-side, across the entire application development lifecycle.
- Take measures to protect API security - Most modern web applications use APIs from systems and services which include internal enterprise systems, Cloud SaaS APIs, partner APIs, and 3rd party product APIs. Today, almost all web applications tend to expose their own functionality to the external environment as a core set of APIs. When using external APIs, application teams need to ensure that they have proper security and protocols in place. When exposing their own APIs, they need to ensure they have multiple coarse-grained and fine-grained measures to protect application access needs.
- Use authentication and authorization measures to ensure application security - An important aspect of application security is authentication and authorization of what users can access within the application. Without these measures your application is open and vulnerable to threats. Your application must have role-based access control to prevent users from using those features they are not authorized to use. In addition, your application also needs to support standards-based authentication, it must be able to filter requests, provide anonymous usage securely and handle critical authentication failures with care. While it may not seem a risk to roll out applications without proper authentication, insufficient logging, and improper session control until your application is attacked or under threat.
- Integrate and automate application-level security features using low-code - While there are several security measures to consider, another way to address this concern is to automate security and have it inbuilt in the application development process. When speed is of the essence, you may think integrating security into your application development process may slow you down. Think again. Low-code platforms enable you to not only accelerate app development it also ensures you can integrate security features simultaneously.
What an ideal low-code application development platform promises, besides accelerated development, is built-in security. The platform ensures automation of application-level security features and provides XSS and CSRF configurations to protect security vulnerabilities. It ensures built-in encryption, robust authorization and authentication systems, and enterprise-grade traceability and auditability.
Today, everyone is concerned about security. Launching applications without integrating security features make them less credible. To keep up with enterprise demands while maintaining security guidelines, low-code platforms have proven to be an ideal solution. They have built-in, application-level security features and are designed keeping professional development needs in mind. You could launch as many applications as you want to, but sacrificing security for speed may put your mission-critical applications at risk and the trade-off may not be worth the effort required to mitigate these security threats.
About the Author: Mayur Shah is the Director of Platform Marketing & Management at WaveMaker. Shah is a software enterprise platform executive with 20-plus years of international product management and marketing experience. As Director of Platform Marketing at WaveMaker, Mayur's specialties include Platform Strategy, APIs, Security, Middleware, Cloud, Applications, and Developer Services. Mayur has held various positions across Silicon Valley Companies and APAC companies including Informatica, Cisco, BEA Systems and more.
