By any standard, Microsoft Corporation is one of the world’s biggest producers of computer code. Even now, when desktop computing is on the decline and LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL Perl/PHP/Python)-based cloud computing is on the rise, 90 percent of the business still controls by the desktop market and manages thirty percent of its servers on the Internet, in addition to many more in private sector networks.
This has provided hackers with a significant attack surface to use by concentrating on Microsoft software since the late 1990s. And the business paid a steep price for that in the early 2000s. Microsoft software bugs like CodeRed, Nimda, and MyDoom shook the Internet and cost millions to people and businesses in recovery expenses.
CyberSecurity Development Lifecycle Replaces Software Development Lifecycle
In response to the risks, the business shut down its Windows division in February 2002. Regular planning and coding came to an end. Finding and fixing security flaws in the code base was the sole responsibility of every developer in the division.
The business instead introduced what it referred to as the “Security Development Lifecycle” in late 2003. To include cybersecurity issues into the development process itself rather than treating them as a collection of pricey afterthoughts, the two SDLs were easily integrated.
Additionally, Microsoft promoted the new SDL to customers and other developers in its ecosystem rather than only adopting it internally. Microsoft operating systems are still widely used today, but they no longer rank among the top three regarding security flaws discovered in the wild. The cybersecurity integration of effective experts into the SDL served as a role model for other programmers.
The SDL’s security considerations are still impacted by time and money.
Accidental features of how a program is executed, known as software security flaws or bugs, can be used to violate the program’s anticipated functionality and enable activities the user would not otherwise be able to control.
The fact that many of today’s powerful hacks are the consequence of nothing but avarice is a dirty little secret in the world of information security. Not the hackers’ avarice, while it undoubtedly plays a factor, but the developers’ greed, who cobbled together a jumble of barely functional code full of flaws and security holes that the hackers could readily attack.
For many independent programmers, security is a secondary concern. This makes sense, given that they are concerned with building software that supports the essential features they hope will bring their users delight and utility. This model has been around for as long as the Internet had when academic programmers wrote code to solve issues in a friendly environment without the need for security systems and with hostile or intentional action being nearly unheard of.
Companies are only willing to engage in cybersecurity initiatives. If they are pushed to do so adding effort to any step of the SDL is expensive. As long as businesses can get away with it, failing to put time and effort into security issues during the development process in favor of better profit margins is likely to persist. However, cybersecurity experts are fighting the current order.
Using the SDL to Increase Security
Even though this pattern is prevalent, there are significant counter-examples, many of which use the Software Development Lifecycle to their security benefit.
When the Space Shuttle was being developed at NASA in the 1970s, programmers were faced with a grim reality: they had to write the control code for a flying bomb that would take seven people into the harsh environment of space, where a glitch might be fatal.
In response, the team developed the strongest and most secure software development process in history. By 2011, the final three deployed versions of the program, each with roughly half a million lines of code, had seen no crashes and no errors other than one.
Although the $35 million budget NASA’s team had to work with was reasonable, it was not expensive to provide such protection. Today’s Internet is mainly supported by the free Unix system software OpenBSD, which unpaid developers exclusively create with strong cybersecurity areas of focus.
Only two remotely accessible security flaws have been discovered in the over 20 years that the operating system has been in use. The team achieves this through a fully transparent code base and regular cycles of monitoring and code review. A crucial stage of most SDL spiral models that other developers disregard.
Cybersecurity Professionals Play an Important Role in the SDL
Even though most cybersecurity professionals lack advanced programming skills, certain specialized information security careers require a strong coding background. Code is thoroughly examined by white hat hackers who are seeking weaknesses.
Application security experts collaborate with software development engineers to create more secure code. To test the software they are entrusted with assessing or installing, even regular security engineers and experts frequently need fundamental programming abilities.
The following factors will be considered:
- The use case for the application’s security needs
- The anticipated user base for the program
- The underlying programming languages and technology
- Access to data that will be passed through the application
- The operating system that the program will run on
Various programmers use different strategies while working with the SDL. With few opportunities to influence the product after deployment. A waterfall development strategy for certain businesses brings cybersecurity issues into play during the design and testing phases.
In other regions, adopting agile development approaches requires security concerns at practically every stage of the quickly iterative coding cycle, emphasizing speedy identification and remediation of vulnerabilities.
Discover dangers and find solutions.
The goal of a security developer is to identify new security dangers and solutions that will safeguard the company. Additionally, they will evaluate how well the application estate resists well-known threat vectors like malware.
This can entail developing security protocols that can be incorporated into already-used business-wide applications. Although developers like writing code, they also spend a lot of time debugging, repairing bugs, and troubleshooting. All of them aid programmers in creating new defenses against malware, spyware, and viruses.
