How to Secure Your Open Source: Best Practices for Application Security Testing

In the dynamic world of software development, the use of open-source components has become an integral part of the modern development ecosystem. The community improvements of open-source components facilitate faster development time and reduced cost, creating flexibility to grow and innovate faster. This convenience, however, comes with its own set of challenges, particularly around security.

As applications grow and open-source components become harder to monitor, ensuring the security in your applications becomes crucial to safeguarding your entire software ecosystem. According to HCLSoftware’s Global Technical Advisor for Application Security, Peter Lee, “The saying ‘it only takes one bad apple to spoil the whole barrel’ is why open source application security (OSA aka SCA) should be at the top of any organization's security program.”

"Modern Software Development is becoming increasingly fast and agile,” Lee says. “ Essentially Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) can write an entire web or mobile application for a developer. Open Source libraries will often be part of the code whether it is written by developers or Gen AI, therefore it is important to understand the risk of using a vulnerable open source package and where it resides in the code.”

Securing open-source applications requires a proactive and comprehensive approach. Here are some of the best practices in securing your open source.

Integrate Security Early in the Development Cycle

When discussing the importance of proactive security, it is critical to understand that internally adhering to secure coding practices is fundamental to preventing vulnerabilities.

Key practices include always validating and sanitizing user inputs to prevent injection attacks, implementing strong authentication and authorization mechanisms to control access to your application, avoiding the exposure of detailed error messages to users as they can provide valuable information to attackers, and using encryption to protect sensitive data both at rest and in transit.

Fostering a security-first culture within your development team is vital. Educate your team about the importance of security and provide training on secure coding practices and the use of security testing tools. Encourage collaboration between developers, security experts, and operations teams to ensure a holistic approach to security.

Conduct Regular Security Audits That Keep Dependencies Up-to-Date

Open source projects often rely on various third-party libraries and frameworks, so outdated dependencies are a common vector for security breaches. Ensure that you regularly update your open-source libraries and frameworks to the latest versions. These updates can often include security patches necessary for protecting sensitive data and maintaining user trust.

Keep in mind that even with robust internal security audits in place, new vulnerabilities and threats can emerge at any time. Automated tools can help by monitoring dependencies and notifying you of available updates.

Consistently Monitor and Respond to Security Threats

Manual code reviews and penetration testing are essential but can be time-consuming and prone to human error. A well-informed development team is your first line of defense against security threats, but automated security testing tools can complement these efforts by quickly identifying vulnerabilities. Continuously monitoring your application for security threats and having a response plan ready will elevate your security posture.

Security software like HCL AppScan provides a full suite of comprehensive application security testing including tools designed specifically to identify vulnerabilities in open source components. Software Composition Analysis (SCA) allows developers to evaluate the open-source packages incorporated in their projects directly from the IDE (Integrated Development Environment). When findings are correlated with those of other tools such as static, dynamic, and interactive analysis, teams gain a comprehensive view of risk levels and can better prioritize what to remediate first. All tools seamlessly integrate into the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and provide both continuous security testing and compliance validation so that organizations can maintain a consistent security posture.

Conclusion

It's a consistent effort to make sure you maintain robust security standards within your application. The goal is not just to find and fix vulnerabilities, but to build security into the very fabric of your development process. Trusted security posture management establishes a clear runway for your innovation to be the forefront of your priorities. Contact HCL AppScan to arrange a demo and see how we can help fortify your application security.