Security

Information Security Aspects¶

Train employees
people are huge attack surface. make sure they have appropriate training.
Define Security Requirements
evalute the combination of security aspects and business requirements to decide what your security requirements will be.
Define Metrics & Compliance Reporting
figure out how to define priorities.
set up compliance rules around actions to take
e.g. all critical bugs must be fixed in 8 hours.
Perform Threat Modeling
brainstorming security problems, triaging, and plans
Microsoft follows their STRIDE process for this process.
Establish Design Requirements
how to deal with cryptography
how to deal with authentication
how to deal with authorization
how to deal with logging
Define and Use Cryptography Standards
pick a standard that meets your needs. choosing a weak standard will be catastrophic.
Manage the Security Risk of Using Third-Party Components
third party components are another attack surface. checks for vulnerabilities and keep things up to date.
Use Approved Tools
unapproved tools are an attack surface
Perform Static Analysis Security Testing (SAST)
linting for security problems
follow secure coding standards
security code review
Perform Dynamic Analysis Security Testing (DAST)
fuzz testing
Perform Penetration Testing
have third party testers try to break the system.
Establish a Standard Incident Response Process
emergency response plan.

Microsoft's own threat modeling process reviews several different threats.

(S)poofing, (T)ampering, (R)epudiation, (I)nformation Disclosure, (D)enial of Service, (E)levation of Privilege

Spoofing: trying to impersonate someone else. (attack on authentication)
Tampering: trying to change data (attack on integrity)
Repudiation: trying to deny that you did something (attack on non-repudiation)
Information Disclosure: trying to get information you shouldn't have (attack on confidentiality)
Denial of Service: trying to make a service unavailable (attack on availability)
Elevation of Privilege: trying to get access to something you shouldn't have (attack on authorization)

STRIDE threat modeling uses a five step process to discover threats,

Identify Security Objectives
brainstorm what you must protect, what you must comply with, what you must follow.
can think in lense of STRIDE, or in terms of the security aspects and how aspects of your application may be vulnerable to attacks from them.
Create data flow diagram
consider how data moves through your system
model as a flowchart
to be used as a tool to find possible threat vectors
Identify threats
make a list of threats
Annotate threats
organize threats with STRIDE category and mitigation strategy per threat.
Rate threats
determine how to rank what you should work on
could use high, medium, low
could use DREAD

A rating system for 5 different aspects of a threat and a value of high, medium, or low.

Minimize Attack Surface
anything that an attacker can interface with
Establish secure defaults
ensure that defaults are provided and are a secure choice
Least Privilege
users should only have the minimum privileges necessary to do their job
Defense in Depth
provide multiple layers of security
Fail Securely
on failure, don't reveal anything more than necessary. give as little as possible.
Separation of Duties
use roles to split up user groups for different types of authorizations
Avoid Security by Obscurity
just hiding something won't stop someone from finding it.
Keep Security Simple
a complicated security architecture is easy to introduce bugs into
Fix root causes
research and fix issues at the root to ensure a proper fix