Security By Design: What Is It and How to Do It Right?

Traditional security measures like vulnerability assessments and penetration testing are insufficient to boost your company’s overall security. It is time to put security-by-design, a novel concept, into practice. This approach helps developers and IT security staff to quickly discover and patch vulnerabilities. Let’s learn more about the concept, the best way to put it into practice, and its future in cyberspace.

Companies often expose themselves to risks while trying out new or advanced technologies. About 2,049 severe cyberattacks were detected last year, according to a 2022 Clusit reportOpens a new window on cybersecurity. This number is a 10% increase from the previous year. Cyberattacks increase both in quantity and “quality” each month: 79% of them had a significant impact, 32% were deemed “critical,” and 47% had “high” severity.

Software development is touching new heights every day and hackers likewise develop cutting-edge methods to breach cyberspace defenses. Thus, traditional approaches like Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Test are insufficient to increase the security of the cyber system. It is essential to use ground-breaking methods like “security-by-design,” which provides teams of developers with knowledge in operations and security to scan code at any moment for potential flaws.

See More: What Is Digital Forensics? Meaning, Importance, and Types

The Security-by-Design Approach

You may formally design your infrastructure and automate security measures using the security-by-design (SbD) approach. This procedure makes every stage of the IT administration process more secure. Additionally, the idea simply underlines that instead of spending time manually building, configuring, and patching each server, use your engineers’ skills and resources to create software that manages the security of your system around the clock.

Although this kind of system design is not brand-new, the popularity of public clouds has made SbD much easier to implement. Recently, the strategy has been extensively promoted and formalized for the cloud audience by Amazon Web Services. Other companies frequently promote similar or comparable concepts under Secure DevOps, Security Automation, Security-as-Code, or SecOps. As your environment gets more complicated, the practice becomes more crucial.

What exactly is security-by-design?

Rashid Ali, enterprise solutions manager at WALLIX, describes SbD in a nutshell. The security-by-design is about ensuring that systems and all their components are created from the very on-set with security in mind. It is about taking a proactive approach and integrating security from the very start. 

“With this approach, it means components and systems can all operate together, providing security and privacy.”

How to achieve security-by-design without a rookie mistake?

In software engineering, “secure by design” simply means that secure design patterns are followed when a new product is created, right from its conception – rather than relying on patches or other updates, Ali explains. “The same principles apply here, ensuring that safe and secure patterns are followed during the design so that we build and design products in the most secure way possible. 

“To unpack this a little bit more, secure-by-design coding is about designing and building products in a certain way, rather than making sure certain pieces of code are included and implemented. Security is always at the forefront, right from conception.”

To achieve SbD, keep in mind the following points:

• Build your network with tried-and-true technology as it’s critical to remain up to date on technology and library vulnerabilities and to apply patches timely.
• Raising awareness by informing developers on the necessities and frequent hazards to the software they create.
• Set maintainability standards and give methods to measure them since maintainable source code is necessary for security. 
• Go for automated verifications and perform manual inspections.
• Amplify to encompass privacy.

See More: The Five Steps Every Security Team Should Take to Protect Their Infrastructure from Cyberattacks

Best practices to implement security-by-design the right way

Ali thinks secure-by-design is not only about software but also about building systems the right way. “In today’s connected and digital world, IT can be complicated, and environments are often interconnected and built on top of other products, which can cause many challenges when it comes to security.” As a result, a secure-by-design approach is a necessary feature for today’s world. He thinks if the complete ecosystem was built this way, all interconnected components would have security built-in, reducing vulnerabilities and providing an added safety net and reassurance. 

“Security features should be designed into a system so that both human and software vulnerabilities are minimized. In addition, each component of a system should also be secured separately so that if a breach does occur, any damage is going to be limited, and it won’t impact and spread through the entire environment.”

Another best practice to implement is “applying the least privilege principle.” Users are only ever granted the minimum access they need to complete their tasks, ensuring that no user has complete blanket access across the environment. “This means that should a user’s credentials be compromised or a breach occurs, the access and data any cybercriminal can gain are going to be restricted.”

The future of security-by-design

Securing systems should never be considered a final accomplishment. “We are constantly innovating, leveraging technology in different ways and modernizing – so, in turn, this is going to bring new security risks as we move forward.” 

Ali shares that he would love to see more steps taken regarding password protection as part of this. “Security-by-design is about adding an extra layer of protection, and the same is true for passwords. So if we can start to see more implementation of strong password managers, alongside security-by-design approaches, then we will start to see greater layers of defense and protection put in place.” 

In addition, privileged access management (PAM) features can also complement a secure-by-design approach, protecting sensitive IT assets – especially if the PAM tools implemented have been built using secure-by-design principles.

Do you think security-by-design can improve your company’s security posture? Let us know on LinkedInOpens a new window , Facebook,Opens a new window and TwitterOpens a new window . We would love to hear from you!

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