Secure software development: industrial practice - a review

Abstract

The current state of application assets with respect to their development, functionality, scalability, user friendliness, and compatibility with legacy systems has witnessed an unprecedented degree of positive improvements. This induced increase in productivity and value has been a product of the technological innovations within and around the software development landscape. Owing to specific software development practices including software reusability, Object Oriented Programming (OOP), encapsulation, and portability, all sectors of the economy have come to embrace software products that have helped to drive business transactions. Nonetheless, the proliferation of software which has driven up the velocity, veracity and volume of data associated with transactions has become a goldmine for grabs. Hackers and adversaries alike have thus capitalized on this development to exploit the potential threats and vulnerabilities associated with software products. Insecure software is global issue, and one that impacts individuals, organizations and governments. Data loss is both a security and privacy issue, with compliance, regulatory and legal concerns, and bad actors are relentless in their efforts to steal, deface, alter/manipulate, destroy, and compromise software systems. Organizations should therefore embrace secure code principles, threat modeling, and institute a Secure Software Development Lifecycle (SSDLC) practice that will aid the embedment of security into the development phase, to contain the risks, threats, and vulnerabilities that are inherent in software development. This paper demonstrates an effort to provide and arm organizations with the necessary tools, processes, and mechanisms that can be leveraged to combat cyber-threats and enforce Information Assurance (IA) within and around enterprise application assets. Beginning with an overview of the contemporary software development practices witnessed in diverse organizations, including financial, energy, aviation, commerce, nuclear, defense, and several other Critical Infrastructure (CI) organizations, the tenets of a composite, structured and robust. SSDLC has been presented to promote a defense-in-depth security for enterprise organizations.