Avoiding disaster: The importance of application layer security
It isn’t a pleasant way of going about things, but in order to begin to understand the importance of application layer security, you need to consider the worst case scenario. This scenario would be waking up one morning to realize your company has leaked customer records including names, addresses and financial information, all available for purchase on the black market.
In order to fully understand the importance of application layer security, you need to consider just how commonplace this worst case scenario actually is. Data breaches happen to organizations of all sizes every day. If your organization hasn’t been on the receiving end of a serious security incident or a breach attempt, you’re either unimaginably lucky, or today is your first day as an organization. Welcome to the business world! After you’re done cutting the cake, you’re going to want to start looking into implementing application layer security.
Model behavior
The application layer is the seventh layer of the OSI model, the OSI model being a layered representation of the way networking and applications work across the Internet or even just your local network. The application layer is the “top” or seventh layer of the model. It’s this layer that represents your application and its code, and it’s this layer that interacts with the end user. As application security provider Checkmarx points out, security can and should be implemented on every layer of the OSI model, but since the application layer provides the easiest access for an attacker, securing the application layer is especially essential.
Old school application security
Security has always been important for web applications, but in the last few years its importance has increased exponentially. Hackers used to exploit vulnerabilities just to bring applications down or crash servers, but now there’s monetary gain to be had in exploiting an application. Where there’s money, there’s increased motivation, not to mention increased consequences for your brand.
Security efforts started with simple penetration testing and vulnerability tests. This was sufficient in the beginning, but now that hackers have access to many of the scripts and tools that the security experts have, this old school method of handling application layer security is fully outdated and no longer enough to ensure that the right methods are in place to protect your applications.
The security landscape continues to rapidly change not only as hackers find ways to uncover new vulnerabilities, but as new updates to the application can inadvertently place the application at risk when new code is introduced to the code base.
Getting some static
The excellent news here is that having improved application security doesn’t mean implementing onerous or more difficult processes. The latest and greatest tool in the application security game is static code analysis, or SCA, which actually runs in the background while developers are coding an application.
The advantage of SCA versus old-school penetration testing is that the entire process is automated and it works real-time while the coders are coding. If the SCA finds a vulnerability, the coder has a chance to fix it while he or she is working with the application code rather than going back to a module and fixing it after it’s been tested.
SCA speeds up coding time and testing, improving the entire process, especially in an agile coding environment. With big applications that host millions of lines of code, there are numerous opportunities to inadvertently introduce vulnerabilities. SCA helps to greatly eliminate those opportunities.
Planning ahead
By making application layer security a priority during development, you can save your organization all kinds of headache, heartache and irreparable brand damage. And by automating application layer security during development by using static code analysis, you can save your organization a lot of grumbling from your developers as well as your security people.