In a world where our lives are intertwined with technology increasingly, what’s more important is the security of our applications. This is where application hardening comes in handy. But what exactly does it mean? Consider your favorite app as a superhero who is equipped with every necessary tool to kill off the villains, which in this context are cyber threats. This is what application hardening does. It fortifies your app against all potential cyber threats and vulnerabilities.
Have you ever thought about why some apps remain safe while others are attacked? Well, it is mostly due to poor security measures. Through this article, we will take you through the essentials of application hardening and some tips to enhance the security of your application.
Join us and read along to find out more about application hardening and transforming your apps.
What is application hardening?
Application hardening is a comprehensive process of enhancing and improving software application security in order to protect them against cyber threats and various other vulnerabilities. It is a crucial way to protect your software and data from sophisticated cyber threats that increase day by day.
How to enhance the security of your applications?
Here are some techniques to enhance the security of your application.
- Coding practices
The foundation of application hardening is secure coding. When you follow best practices during the development as well as while implementing secure coding practices, you will be able to prevent many common vulnerabilities before they become any issue.
Input validation, where you validate the user inputs to avoid injection attacks, output encoding to prevent XSS attacks or cross-site scripting, proper error handling or implementing handling that doesn’t reveal any sensitive information and least privilege principle where applications are run with minimum necessary permissions are some of the key practices.
- Authorisation and authentication
Proper authentication and authorisation mechanisms are crucial to prevent unauthorized access to your application and its data. MFA implementation for an extra layer of security beyond passwords, protocols like OpenID connect to secure authorization and authentication in web applications, enforcing complex passwords and password managers and implementing proper session handling with secure timeout and invalidation procedure are some of the implementation strategies.
- Data encryption
Encryption is a crucial step to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access tampering or both when it is being transmitted and when it is stored. Using TLS 1.3 or 1.2 for every communication, implementing AES-256 for data at rest, using proper management techniques like HSMs or Hardware Security Modules for key storage and implementing forward secrecy in TLS configurations are some of the best practices in data encryption.
- Robust logging and monitoring
Logging and monitoring comprehensively is essential to detect and respond to any security incidents promptly. This also plays a crucial role in the forensic analysis after an incident. Using a centralized logging system to aggregate logs from all the components of your application, implementing an SIEM solution to analyze security alerts in real-time, using machine learning-based tools to identify unusual patterns that indicate security breaches and ensuring that all logs are tamper proofs are some of the key components of robust logging and monitoring.
- Proper and regular security assessments
When you conduct proper and regular security assessments, you can identify and address the various vulnerabilities in your application. This is a proactive approach and it helps you to stay away from attackers. Vulnerability scanning by using automated tools to scan vulnerabilities, penetration testing where ethical hackers are engaged to simulate real-world attacks on your application, regular code reviews focusing on security aspects and performing threat modeling exercises to identify the potential risk in your application’s designs are some assessment types of security.
- Web application firewall implementation
WAF or Web Application Firewall acts as an additional layer of protection against common web-based attacks, hence covering your application. Bot protecting, DDoS mitigation, real-time monitoring and virtual patching are some of the benefits of implementing WAFs.
- Utilising RASP
RASP technology is integrated with your application to detect and prevent real-time attacks. This acts as an added layer of security and it operates within the application.
RASP works by monitoring application behaviour during execution, detecting deviations from expected behaviour and also taking immediate action to prevent all sorts of exploits like terminating user sessions or simply shutting the application. Always remember that while RASP is extremely powerful, it must be used in conjunction with other security measures and not as a standalone solution. It is even more effective when combined with proper input validation.
- Secure configuration management implementation
When you implement proper configuration management, you get to ensure that all the application components are configured securely. This reduces the attack surface.
Using tools like Puppet or Chef, implementing a change management process to detect changes in configuration, regular audits and updates of configuration and using version control are the best practices for this.
- Adopting DevSecOps approach
As you adopt security into your DevOps process, security is essentially considered at every stage of development.
Automating security by implementing them in your CI/CD pipeline, ongoing security monitoring and treating security configurations and policies are code are some ways to practice this.
- Cloud infrastructure hardening
Make sure you take the necessary steps to harden your cloud infrastructure, especially if your application is cloud-based. Such environments introduce unique challenges to security and they need to be addressed.
For this, make sure you use multi-factor authentication for cloud access. Implementing a strong identity and IAM policies, enabling cloud-native encryption and key management services, proper network segmentation implementation and security groups, etc are some reliable strategies.
Conclusion
To conclude, mastering the tricks of appsealing is your ticket to transforming your applications into secure strongholds. When you implement the above-discussed strategies, you are effectively safeguarding your guards against cyber threats. Remember, just like a superhero who needs his suit, your application needs protection to thrive. Have you taken the necessary steps to protect your apps? Because the digital landscape can be daunting but when you have the right tools and knowledge you can always stay one step ahead.
Ready to make your apps unbreakable? Get sealing today!