Principles

July 12, 2008 in Principles
Tags: Principle

What’s an application security principle?

Application security principles are collections of desirable application properties, behaviors, designs and implementation practices that attempt to reduce the likelihood of threat realization and impact should that threat be realized. Security principles are language independent, architecturally neutral primitives that can be leveraged within most software development methodologies to design and construct applications.

Principles are important because they help us make security decisions in new situations with the same basic ideas. By considering each of these principles, we can derive security requirements, make architecture and implementation decisions, and identify possible weaknesses in systems.

The important thing to remember is that in order to be useful, principles must be evaluated, interpreted, and applied to address a specific problem. Although principles can serve as general guidelines, simply telling a software developer that their software must “fail securely” or that they should do “defense in depth” won’t mean that much.

Some proven application security principles

• Apply defense in depth (complete mediation)
• Use a positive security model (fail safe defaults)(minimize attack surface)
• Fail securely
• Run with least privilege
• Avoid security by obscurity (open design)
• Keep security simple (verifiable)(economy of mechanism)
• Detect intrusions (compromise recording)
• Don’t trust infrastructure
• Don’t trust services
• Establish secure defaults (psychological acceptability)

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