Securing web applications

Mukesh Singh

Securing web applications

COURTESY :- vrindawan.in

Wikipedia

Information security, sometimes shortened to InfoSec, is the practice of protecting information by mitigating information risks. It is part of information risk management. It typically involves preventing or reducing the probability of unauthorized/inappropriate access to data, or the unlawful use, disclosure, disruption, deletion, corruption, modification, inspection, recording, or devaluation of information. It also involves actions intended to reduce the adverse impacts of such incidents. Protected information may take any form, e.g. electronic or physical, tangible (e.g. paperwork) or intangible (e.g. knowledge). Information security’s primary focus is the balanced protection of the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data (also known as the CIA triad) while maintaining a focus on efficient policy implementation, all without hampering organization productivity. This is largely achieved through a structured risk management process that involves:

Application security - Wikipedia

  • identifying information and related assets, plus potential threats, vulnerabilities, and impacts;
  • evaluating the risks
  • deciding how to address or treat the risks i.e. to avoid, mitigate, share or accept them
  • where risk mitigation is required, selecting or designing appropriate security controls and implementing them
  • monitoring the activities, making adjustments as necessary to address any issues, changes and improvement opportunities

To standardize this discipline, academics and professionals collaborate to offer guidance, policies, and industry standards on password, antivirus software, firewall, encryption software, legal liability, security awareness and training, and so forth. This standardization may be further driven by a wide variety of laws and regulations that affect how data is accessed, processed, stored, transferred and destroyed. However, the implementation of any standards and guidance within an entity may have limited effect if a culture of continual improvement isn’t adopted.

Various definitions of information security are suggested below, summarized from different sources:

  1. “Preservation of confidentiality, integrity and availability of information. Note: In addition, other properties, such as authenticity, accountability, non-repudiation and reliability can also be involved.” (ISO/IEC 27000:2009)
  2. “The protection of information and information systems from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, or destruction in order to provide confidentiality, integrity, and availability.” (CNSS, 2010)
  3. “Ensures that only authorized users (confidentiality) have access to accurate and complete information (integrity) when required (availability).” (ISACA, 2008)
  4. “Information Security is the process of protecting the intellectual property of an organisation.” (Pipkin, 2000)
  5. “…information security is a risk management discipline, whose job is to manage the cost of information risk to the business.” (McDermott and Geer, 2001)
  6. “A well-informed sense of assurance that information risks and controls are in balance.” (Anderson, J., 2003)
  7. “Information security is the protection of information and minimizes the risk of exposing information to unauthorized parties.” (Venter and Eloff, 2003)
  8. “Information Security is a multidisciplinary area of study and professional activity which is concerned with the development and implementation of security mechanisms of all available types (technical, organizational, human-oriented and legal) in order to keep information in all its locations (within and outside the organization’s perimeter) and, consequently, information systems, where information is created, processed, stored, transmitted and destroyed, free from threats. Threats to information and information systems may be categorized and a corresponding security goal may be defined for each category of threats. A set of security goals, identified as a result of a threat analysis, should be revised periodically to ensure its adequacy and conformance with the evolving environment. The currently relevant set of security goals may include: confidentiality, integrity, availability, privacy, authenticity & trustworthiness, non-repudiation, accountability and auditability.” (Cherdantseva and Hilton, 2013)
  9. Information and information resource security using telecommunication system or devices means protecting information, information systems or books from unauthorized access, damage, theft, or destruction (Kurose and Ross, 2010).                                                                                        Application security (short AppSec) includes all tasks that introduce a secure software development life cycle to development teams. Its final goal is to improve security practices and, through that, to find, fix and preferably prevent security issues within applications. It encompasses the whole application life cycle from requirements analysis, design, implementation, verification as well as maintenance.                                                                       Design review. Before code is written the application’s architecture and design can be reviewed for security problems. A common technique in this phase is the creation of a threat model.                                                                      White box security review, or code review. This is a security engineer deeply understanding the application through manually reviewing the source code and noticing security flaws. Through comprehension of the application, vulnerabilities unique to the application can be found.                                       Black box security audit. This is only through the use of an application testing it for security vulnerabilities, no source code is required.
    • Automated Tooling. Many security tools can be automated through inclusion into the development or testing environment. Examples of those are automated DAST/SAST tools that are integrated into code editor or CI/CD platforms.
    • Coordinated vulnerability platforms. These are hacker-powered application security solutions offered by many websites and software developers by which individuals can receive recognition and compensation for reporting bugs.Different approaches will find different subsets of the security vulnerabilities lurking in an application and are most effective at different times in the software lifecycle. They each represent different tradeoffs of time, effort, cost and vulnerabilities found.

    Web application security is a branch of information security that deals specifically with the security of websites, web applications, and web services. At a high level, web application security draws on the principles of application security but applies them specifically to the internet and web systems.

     

    Web application - WikipediaWeb Application Security Tools are specialized tools for working with HTTP traffic, e.g., Web application firewalls.

    The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) provides free and open resources. It is led by a non-profit called The OWASP Foundation. The OWASP Top 10 – 2017 results from recent research based on comprehensive data compiled from over 40 partner organizations. This data revealed approximately 2.3 million vulnerabilities across over 50,000 applications. According to the OWASP Top 10 – 2021, the ten most critical web application security risks include:

    1. Broken access control
    2. Cryptographic Failures
    3. Injection
    4. Insecure Design
    5. Security Misconfiguration
    6. Vulnerable and Outdated Components
    7. Identification and Authentification Failures
    8. Software and Data Integrity Failures
    9. Security Logging and Monitoring Failures*
    10. Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF)*