Today’s modern applications are released at high velocity to adapt to changing markets, innovate for customers and grow more efficiently. As web application integration, deployment and delivery are continuous, the security threat also continuous. Attackers are always looking for new opportunities and continuously creating new security threats. Businesses focus more on building applications faster and depend on patchwork to handle security later in the fast development approach.
However, the application security of most organizations is mostly manual, error-prone, and time-consuming – increasing the privacy, compliance, and security risks.
Given the velocity of application development, they are facing challenges with the application security process to detect security weaknesses before products ever reach production.
Implementing continuous web application security enables the developers and IT security team to observe security, privacy, and compliance risks within the application while offering constant visibility into each build.
What is Continuous Web Application Security?
Continuous web application security breaks down the security process into certain verifications, which run accurately and continuously as part of the software development process. It enables the timely detection and response to new vulnerabilities and security attacks, which emerge in both 3rd party components and custom code. It empowers the security and development team to work together, allowing them to build secure apps and APIs reliably.
The ongoing challenge
Acknowledging the strategic benefits of digital applications, businesses have broadly adopted DevOps practices and an agile development approach to reach the market quickly. As development speed is key to success, most organizations are tempted to ignore security. However, a single security breach or one vulnerable line of code can devastate a business.
84% of security attacks concentrate on the application layer, and two key factors, which contribute to increased attack surface are:
1. Bringing Applications to Market Faster – Ignoring Security
Nonregulated organizations adopt a faster approach to application development while security by design is almost non-existent. The fast and risky approach achieves the goal of getting apps for clients faster, but puts the client’s data, an organization’s brand, and compliance at risk.
Image source: IBM
Every time application security is delayed, it becomes costly to fix it.
2. The inefficiency of traditional security analysis tools
The most common methods of tools used for identifying application vulnerabilities are SAST and DAST
- SAST – Static Application Security Testing performs automated scanning for finding vulnerabilities in source code
- DAST – Dynamic Application Security Testing detects run-time vulnerabilities
Both vulnerability hunting tools offer limited coverage and require considerable time to execute. Hence, they are not sufficient for modern application development, where each phase is specified by certain goals that must be achieved faster. For application security to thrive in the agile development approach, it must enhance itself to meet the priorities and demands of the process.
Many false positives that demand manual handling and retesting of identified vulnerabilities make it difficult for true automation with traditional security tools.
The Path Forward: Continuous Web Application Security
Only with the implementation of solutions, which support continuous application security, can an organization become truly agile. To benefit from continuous web application security, we need a solution that integrates with the existing security systems, which won’t devastate with false positives. Enabling continuous security as a part of an agile environment offers many benefits. Here are a few key benefits:
1. Continuous Threat Intelligence
Continuous web application security ensures the businesses are continuously aware of attack surfaces, vulnerabilities, and attackers, using real data about what an organization is experiencing. This involves deep dive into the application to understand the attack surface. This dive includes
- Cloud infrastructure misconfigurations
- Code components & technologies
- APIs & their configurations
- Existing security controls
2. Threat Hunting to Uncover Unknown Security Risks
Security experts actively search for novel risks and create custom code to monitor and protect against these threats continuously. They consistently concentrate on expanding code coverage, application coverage, and vulnerability coverage across the entire supply chain, including 3rd party products and software.
3. Continuous Security Integration
Integration of continuous security assessment scans the applications in the background and generates immediate alerts of any anomalous behavior between the organization’s security architecture. With continuous scanning, vulnerabilities across the organization portfolio can be fixed early.
4. Continuous Defense
Continuous web application security encourages organizations to establish a complete set of security defenses, including defense mechanisms like access control, session management, input validation, encryption, logging, and error handling.
Optimize your Application Security with Indusface WAS
The biggest challenge in automating web application vulnerability scanning is that every web application is different. The code, layout, and functionality — everything can be unique, making it difficult to design a scanner that can identify all potential vulnerabilities in each application. Additionally, web applications are constantly evolving; new features and functions are added, old ones are deprecated or changed. Any automated scanner would need to be continuously updated to stay effective.
Another challenge is that many companies do not want their web applications scanned for vulnerabilities. They may see it as a security breach or an invasion of privacy. This means that scanners need to be designed so that they do not cause any disruption or interference with the normal functioning of the website. These are the ideas behind the functioning of Indusface WAS (Web Application Scanner).
As everyone is shifting left for vulnerability scanning, WAS automates proactive security measures, making a difference in the SDLC. As per our estimations, continuous application scanning can cut down the cost to fix the security flaws.
This can be a competitive advantage of any business as it ensures fast and secure application development.
##
