Why software 'security debt' is becoming a serious problem for developers
Why software 'security debt' is becoming a serious problem for developers
The majority of organizations have some level of software security debt, with experts warning firms to reassess how they maintain third party code
I worked for the state once and the number of times I had to put my foot down for security was appalling. We're talking like getting web services updated to use basic password auth could take months and I'd be pressured by management to ignore it because some asshat using the service doesn't want to update their 30 year old batch file to deal with auth. Other people would regularly push things that could easily expose thousands of people's identifying info just to get management off their backs. A couple projects I think I was specifically kept away from because they were "mission critical" and they didn't want me slowing it down with trivial stuff like not leaking unencrypted databases...
Very stark contrast to a typical day at my job.
“Looks like there's a broken link on this page. No problem, we can get that fixed up in a day or two after we tackle the 32 vulnerabilities that cropped up since the last time we changed that page."
That is something I just don't get. I'm a hobbyist turned pro turned hobbyist. The only people who I ever offered my services to were either after one of my very narrow specialties where I was actually an expert or literally could not afford a "real" programmer.
I never found proper security to have any impact on my productivity. Even going back to my peak years in the first decade of this century, there was so much easily accessible information, so many good tutorials, and so many good products that even my prototypes incorporated the basics:
- Encrypt the data at rest
- Encrypt the data in transit
- No shared accounts at any level of access
- Full logging of access and activity.
- Before rollout, back up and recovery procedures had to be demonstrated effective and fully documented.
Edited to add:
It's like safety in the workplace. If it's always an add-on, it will always be of limited effectiveness and reduce productivity. If it's built in to the process from the ground up, it's extremely effective and those doing things unsafely will be the productivity drain.
- Encrypt the data at rest
- Encrypt the data in transit
Did you remember to plan for a zero downtime encryption key rotation?
- No shared accounts at any level of access
Did you know when account passwords expire? Have you thought about password rotation?
- Full logging of access and activity.
That sounds like a good practice until you have 20 (or even 2000) backend server requests per end user operation.
All of those are taken from my experience.
Security is like an invasive medical procedure: it is very painful in the short term but prevents dire complications in the long term.