What is Application Security?

What is Application Security?

Application security (AppSec) is a critical part of cybersecurity that aims to protect software applications from vulnerabilities and threats. It involves implementing measures to prevent unauthorized access, data breaches, and other malicious activities. Application Security Testing (AST) is an important part of this process, ensuring that applications are thoroughly assessed for potential security flaws before deployment. In today's digital landscape, cloud computing and encryption play crucial roles in data protection, making application security more important than ever. Authorization mechanisms are also essential for verifying user identities and controlling access to sensitive information within applications.

Application security is paramount for several reasons:

Firstly, it protects sensitive data from being accessed or stolen by unauthorized users. Secondly, it ensures the integrity and reliability of applications, preventing them from being compromised or manipulated. Thirdly, it helps organizations comply with industry regulations and standards, avoiding costly legal and financial penalties.

What Features are Included in Application Security?

Different types of application security features include authentication, authorization, encryption, logging, and application security testing, and developers can also code applications to reduce security vulnerabilities.

• Authentication: Developers make code edits in the application to ensure that only authorized users can access the application. Authentication procedures ensure the true identity of the user. This can be accomplished by requiring the user to provide a username and password when logging into the application. Multi-factor authentication requires more than one form of authentication, which may include something you know (password), something you have (mobile device), and something you own (thumbprint or facial recognition).
• Authorization: Once a user is authenticated, the user can be authorized to access and use the application. The system can verify that the user has permission to access the application by comparing the user's identity to a list of authorized users. Authentication must occur prior to authorization so that the application matches only authenticated user credentials against the list of authorized users.
• Encryption: After a user is authenticated and using an application, other security measures can protect sensitive data from being seen or even used by cybercriminals. In cloud-based applications, traffic containing sensitive data travels between the end user and the cloud, so the traffic can be encrypted to ensure data security.
• Logging: If an application has a security breach that creates problems, logging can help determine who accessed the data and how. Application log files provide time-stamped records of what aspects of the application were accessed and who the accessors were.
• Application Security Testing: The procedures necessary to ensure that all of these security controls are working properly.

Cloud vs Web vs Mobile Application Security: What's the Difference?

All forms of application security have the same goal: to identify, mitigate, and prevent vulnerabilities. The difference between these forms is where, how, and when security tests, practices, and methodologies are performed.

• Mobile Application Security: Mobile Application Security focuses on the state of software security for mobile applications on various platforms such as Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. It covers applications running on cell phones and tablets and involves evaluating the security of an application in the context of the platform on which it is designed to run, the framework in which it is developed, and the intended users (e.g., employees versus end users). Mobile application security testing involves testing a mobile application in the same way that a malicious user would attempt to attack it. Effective security testing begins with understanding the purpose of the application and the types of data it handles. Based on this, a combination of static analysis, dynamic analysis, and penetration testing is used to identify vulnerabilities that would be missed if these techniques were not effectively combined.
• Cloud Application Security: Cloud application security is a system of policies, processes and controls that enable organizations to protect applications and data in collaborative cloud environments. Cloud security centers on key activities including identifying and managing access, data protection, infrastructure security, logging and monitoring, incident response, and vulnerability mitigation and configuration analysis.
• Web Application Security: Web application security is the ability of a web site to function as expected even if it is under attack. It involves designing a series of security controls into a web application to protect its assets from potentially malicious agents. Web applications, like all software, inevitably have flaws. Some of these flaws can constitute actual vulnerabilities that can be exploited, posing a risk to the organization. Web application security protects against such flaws. It involves utilizing secure development practices and implementing security measures throughout the software development lifecycle to ensure that design-level flaws and implementation-level errors are addressed.

What is Application Security Testing?

Application Security Testing (AST) is the process of making applications more resilient to security threats by identifying and remediating security vulnerabilities.

Originally, AST was a manual process. In modern, high-velocity development processes, AST must be automated. The increased modularity of enterprise software, numerous open source components, and a large number of known vulnerabilities and threat vectors all make automation essential. Most organizations use a combination of application security tools to conduct AST.

Here are key considerations before you can properly test applications for security vulnerabilities:

• Create a complete inventory of your applications.
• Understand the business use, impact and sensitivity of your applications.
• Determine which applications to test—start from public-facing systems like web and mobile applications.

What Are the Types of Application Security Testing?

Some of the most common types include:

• Dynamic application security testing (DAST): This automated application security test is best for internal-facing, low-risk applications that must comply with regulatory security assessments. For medium-risk applications and critical applications undergoing minor changes, using DAST with manual web security testing is the best solution to find common vulnerabilities.
• Static application security testing (SAST): This type of testing can be performed though automated and manual testing techniques. It identifies bugs without the need to execute applications in a production environment. It also enables developers to scan source code and systematically find and eliminate software security vulnerabilities.
• Penetration testing: This manual application security test is best for critical applications, especially those undergoing major changes. The assessment involves business logic and adversary-based testing to discover advanced attack scenarios.
• Software composition analysis (SCA): This type of analysis helps teams manage the security, quality, and license compliance risks that come from the use of open source and third-party code in applications and containers.
• Interactive application security testing (IAST): Interactive application security testing helps automate web security testing within DevOps pipelines​. IAST automatically retests identified vulnerabilities and validates whether they are real and can be exploited. It is more accurate than traditional dynamic testing and provides a real-time view of the top security vulnerabilities.

How to Conduct Application Security Testing?

Before successfully testing an application for security vulnerabilities, we must determine the following parameters:

• Authentication testing vs non-authentication testing: You can test the application from an outsider's perspective (black box approach). However, there is great value in performing authentication tests to discover security issues that affect authenticated users. This can help uncover vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and session manipulation.
• Which tools to use: Testing is best done with tools that can identify vulnerabilities in source code, tools that can test applications for security vulnerabilities at runtime, and network vulnerability scanners.
• Production vs staging testing: Testing in a production environment is important because it identifies security issues that are currently threatening the organization and its customers. However, production testing may impact performance. Testing in the staging phase is easier to implement and can fix vulnerabilities faster.
• Whether to disable security systems during testing: In most security tests, it's a good idea to disable firewalls, web application firewalls (WAFs), and intrusion prevention systems (IPSs), or at least whitelist the IPs of the test tools, which could otherwise interfere with the scan. However, in a full penetration test, tools should be left on with the goal of scanning applications while avoiding detection.
• When to test: It is often recommended to perform security testing during shutdown to avoid impacting the performance and reliability of production applications.
• What to report: Many security tools provide very detailed reports related to their specific test areas, but these reports are not available to non-security experts. Security teams should extract the most relevant insights from automated reports and present them to stakeholders in a meaningful way.
• Verification Testing: A critical part of security testing is verifying that the remediation was completed successfully. It's not enough for developers to simply say that the remediation has been fixed. You must rerun the test to ensure the vulnerability no longer exists or otherwise provide feedback to the developer.

Application security testing should be conducted at all stages of the software development lifecycle, including the requirements gathering, design, coding, testing and deployment phases. Conducting security testing early in the lifecycle helps to identify and resolve security issues more effectively and reduces the overall cost and risk of fixing vulnerabilities at a later stage.

Conclusion

Application security stands as a pivotal aspect of cybersecurity, dedicated to safeguarding software applications from vulnerabilities and threats. In today's digital landscape, where applications are increasingly reliant on cloud computing and encryption, the significance of robust application security cannot be overstated. Authorization mechanisms, authentication, encryption, logging, and Application Security Testing (AST) are all integral components of a comprehensive application security strategy.

When it comes to selecting a solution that addresses these challenges effectively, Tencent EdgeOne emerges as a standout option. EdgeOne is a powerful edge computing platform that integrates a wide range of security features. For example, EdgeOne offers a suite of security features, including DDoS Protection, Web Protection, and Bot Management. These features work together to protect applications from various types of attacks, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and unauthorized access attempts.

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