Overview
The threats faced by software today have never been greater. The proliferation of tools that can be used to break into software systems, mixed with the longtail of legacy infrastructure that was never designed with security in mind, has resulted in a tsunami of exploits and ransomware attacks. Consequently, security has become a primary concern for every software organisation, not some sticking plaster applied after the fact.
One of the most fundamental best practices in helping ensure our software applications stay safe is the concept of secure by design, where software is designed in such a way that it is inherently secure. This course provides engineers with that understanding, focusing on the patterns, idioms and practices that result in better more secure code.
Objectives
- Understand how to design software systems to protect against common attacks
- Build a catalogue of 'secure by design' architectural patterns and idioms
- Create a security-first mindset in your teams
- Learn how to 'security test' your software applications
- Recognise anti-patterns or approaches
Outline
Code Patterns
- Data Structures: immutability and managing state, avoiding shared mutable state, domain primitives, avoiding collections that can grow infinitely
- Contracts and Validation: escaping inputs, validation options built into commonly used frameworks
- Failure handling: avoid broadcasting sensitive info in logs, information exposure of system internals, passwords, exception safety, etc.
- Preventing common vulnerabilities: SQL / noSQL injection
Architectural Patterns
- Managing user data and logs
- Avoid logging PII
- Secrets management / vaults
- Circuit breakers, retries and timeouts
- Using Caches to enable graceful degradation
- Principle of least privilege
- Zero trust security
- CSRF tokens
- Protocols (REST, HTTPS, Binary)
- Avoiding defaults, e.g. commonly used headers that expose server information
Testing your Design
- How to validate that software is security.
- Boundary testing
- Input and validation testing
- Load testing
- Exploratory testing
- Automated security testing (Pipelines, security policy as code, SAST, DAST)
- Benefits of penetration testing
Requirements
This is a hands-on, 2-day course, attendees must be comfortable writing code in any high-level language such as Java, TypeScript, Kotlin, C#, etc. They should also have a good understanding of engineering best practices.
