Application security (AppSec) is defined by embedding and automating security across the software development lifecycle (SDLC). This can include development environments such as IDEs and CLIs where code is initially authored in addition to source code management tools (SCM) and CI/CD pipelines.
Sometimes development teams think of AppSec teams as gatekeepers and a hindrance to development goals for blocking builds, but this isn’t the full picture. After all, there’s way more to AppSec than gating vulnerabilities from reaching production. Instead, AppSec teams have an opportunity to empower developers to truly understand the impact of insecure code commits on the business and introduce security checks as a natural part of the development and code review process.
TL;DR: Whether you’re in the planning stages before coding, building, and pushing packages to a remote repository via CI/CD or spinning up ephemeral containers on the cloud, it’s essential to emphasize security as part of each commit, build, or deployment.
This article outlines guidelines and best practices for weaving security into every part of your development and DevOps workflows, focusing on practical techniques that are easy to adopt.
From scanning your code, open-source dependencies, container images, or infrastructure as code for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, or exposed secrets to ensuring secure authentication and authorization policies in your SCMs, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud environments, we’ll cover what you need to stay a step ahead of attackers without hampering your release cycles.
AppSec best practices
1. Shift left: Integrate security early in the SDLC
Traditionally, application security was considered the final hurdle before deploying to production. This approach led to last-minute firefighting when vulnerabilities were discovered too late in the lifecycle, often negatively impacting delivery and release cycles.
The shift left philosophy instead advocates for moving security practices as early as possible in the SDLC—into developers’ IDEs, CLIs, and pull request workflows—where the time cost to identify and fix issues is cheapest. More than anything, shifting left emphasizes security while writing code and reviewing pull requests (and even during the planning stages) so that it’s a part of the process since day one.
By integrating static application security testing (SAST) tools like Checkmarx, Cycode, or Jit or software composition analysis (SCA) tools like Wiz Code into your pull requests or CI workflows, you can catch vulnerabilities like hardcoded credentials or insecure validation during your development phase—much earlier than when your code reaches production servers.
SCA scans your applications' dependencies for known vulnerabilities. Automating SCA tools to monitor and flag vulnerable dependencies gives you visibility into the security of your supply chain. Wiz Code, for example, provides you with a security graph of all your dependencies, which it scans to provide you with detailed information about any vulnerabilities.
Figure 1 shows a Wiz Code scan of multiple repositories with their respective vulnerability scan findings. For example, the first repository has 827 critical, 57 high, and 12 medium vulnerabilities. With this information in hand, it becomes easier for engineers to start looking for potential fixes and respond to issues earlier when they’re easier and cheaper to fix.
2. Adopt secure coding practices
Secure coding practices require you to think like an attacker while you code: As the threat landscape gets more and more sophisticated, it’s not enough to just look for obvious mistakes as you work. That’s why secure coding practices involve making sure your application is resilient against today’s most common attack vectors like cross-site scripting and SQL injection.
One core practice is input validation. Effective input validation means you default to not trusting any external inputs, and validate each of them—no matter their origins. With input validation processes in place, you have peace of mind that inputs are validated, sanitized, or escaped before they interact with your application or database.
Likewise, output encoding is a technique in web development to prevent cross-site scripting. It helps convert potentially harmful user inputs and special characters (like <, >, &, etc.) into a safe format before rendering it on a webpage.
For instance, if a user enters <script>alert('XSS')</script>, without output encoding, this input might be executed as plain JavaScript in the browser, displaying an alert or, worse, allowing an attacker to execute malicious scripts. With output encoding, the input is rendered as `<script>alert('XSS')</script>`, so the browser displays it as text, and not as code.
Another important tip? Refrain from using hardcoded secrets, API keys, and passwords in your code. Instead, use environment variables or secrets management services like AWS Secrets Manager and HashiCorp Vault to manage and use sensitive information securely.
The Secure Coding Best Practices [Cheat Sheet]
With curated insights and easy-to-follow code snippets, this 11-page cheat sheet simplifies complex security concepts, empowering every developer to build secure, reliable applications.
Download cheat sheet
Building a habit of writing secure code might slow things down a bit initially, but it pays off massively in the long run. You avoid embarrassing security breaches, reduce technical debt, and ensure smoother deployments—all while keeping your codebase resilient to emerging threats. Tools like Wiz Code can additionally assist with detecting exposed secrets and suggesting remediation workflows, including developer ownership context if the secret is found in a running cloud environment.
3. Implement a strong authentication and authorization strategy
A tried-and-true authentication and authorization strategy is critical to control who and what can interact with your application and infrastructure. In modern architectures, where applications, external services, and users access different areas of your application, poorly implemented authorization strategies can lead to privilege escalation, unauthorized access, and data breaches. To avoid these issues, leverage the principle of least privilege (PoLP) and role-based access control (RBAC) to control how actors interact with your systems.
The principle of least privilege means you give the bare minimum permissions to your users, services, or applications. They should have only the permissions they need to perform their tasks—but nothing more. Instead of starting with a wide set of permissions, start with the minimal necessary permissions and add extra permissions iteratively. For example, a microservice responsible for reading data from a database shouldn’t have write permissions unless absolutely necessary.
Role-based access control (RBAC) takes PoLP to the next level by assigning pre-defined roles to your services or applications rather than managing permissions for each of them. In most cloud environments, RBAC is achieved by using and assigning individual access policies for each role, making it easier to manage permissions for multiple services and applications across environments.
4. Double-check for runtime vulnerabilities with DAST
For an additional layer of pre-deployment security, you can also use dynamic application security testing (DAST) during integration testing or staging. DAST tools simulate real-world attacks on your application as it’s running to find vulnerabilities like error handling, misconfigurations, or open endpoints that SAST cannot detect.
5. Emphasize data protection and encryption
All applications generate data, and with the rise of big data, data volumes can feel unmanageable. Users’ credentials, financial statements, and medical or personal data all come with unique baggage. And we all know that failing to protect sensitive information can devastate even the most established businesses (think data breaches, compliance issues, and loss of customer trust).
To protect your crown-jewel data, start small by encrypting your data at rest. In other words, as you store users’ sensitive information in a database, file system, or object storage, make sure encryption is enabled. Most modern cloud providers give you the ability to encrypt your data with a single click.
Next, whenever data moves between services, clients, and databases, ensure data in transit is also encrypted by using Transport Layer Security (TLS). This is especially critical for web traffic, API calls, and microservice communication. TLS ensures that even if someone intercepts the network traffic, the data is encrypted and unreadable.
CI/CD Pipeline Security Best Practices [Cheat Sheet]
In this 13 page cheat sheet we'll cover best practices in the following areas of the CI/CD pipeline: Infrastructure security, code security, secrets management, access and authentication, monitoring and response.
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6. Secure container images, IaC, and serverless components
Containers and serverless applications are both a boon and a challenge. While they provide agility, flexibility, and scalability, they also increase the attack surface, meaning they require careful attention.
Building secure images and containers is essential to maintaining the integrity and security of your applications in production. Start by building your images from a base image free from any vulnerabilities. Using minimal and trusted base images like Alpine or distroless images greatly minimizes the attack surface.
With the adoption of cloud computing, serverless architectures have abstracted away much of the infrastructure management; still, the developer is responsible for running secured serverless applications. AppSec teams must address unique challenges like code vulnerabilities, poor configuration management, and improper access control using standardized tools incorporated in the build pipelines. For instance, tools like Wiz Code can help you scan your IaC code for misconfigurations and validate several rules that help secure your serverless components on the cloud.
7. Strengthen your continuous monitoring and incident response
Security doesn’t stop after deploying your applications to production. In fact, that’s where a completely new set of challenges begins. Continuous monitoring of your live systems ensures that your applications and infrastructure are secure as they run and also helps detect potential threats in real time.
Invest in a security information and event management (SIEM) tool that helps aggregate logs and identifies unusual patterns or suspicious activities in your applications. Popular cloud-native services like AWS CloudTrail or Azure Monitor can track API calls, user actions, and changes to resources, while solutions like New Relic or Datadog provide more comprehensive monitoring across hybrid environments.
An Actionable Incident Response Plan Template
A quickstart guide to creating a robust incident response plan – designed specifically for companies with cloud-based deployments.
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Once you combine your SIEM information with an incident response strategy, you’ll be able to tackle the threats in production swiftly and effectively. Wiz CDR is a great solution that continuously monitors your cloud workloads for suspicious activity and collects intelligence from cloud providers to proactively detect and respond to unfolding threats.
8. Conduct regular security audits and penetration tests
No matter how secure your application might be, there’s always a chance that new vulnerabilities can creep in. Regular security audits and penetration testing are essential practices to ensure your security measures remain effective over time.
A security audit involves conducting a comprehensive analysis of your system, codebase, and infrastructure to check if everything adheres to security best practices and policies. Audits typically focus on identifying misconfigurations, outdated libraries, overly permissive access controls, and any vulnerabilities that may have been introduced over time.
A penetration test is a simulation of a real-world attack on your application, network, or infrastructure, probing for vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit. It’s not just about scanning for known issues—penetration testers think like attackers and look for creative ways to breach your system, escalate privileges, or exfiltrate data. Regular penetration testing helps uncover vulnerabilities that automated scanners might miss, such as logic flaws or business logic vulnerabilities.
Takeaway
Application security (AppSec) is not something that you can afford to add on at the end of your SDLC. It needs to be baked in every phase, from code commits to production deployments. By enforcing the steps discussed above like shifting security left, enforcing secure coding standards, and adopting authorization best practices, you can drastically improve the security posture of your application and reduce the risk of data breaches and vulnerabilities. Most importantly, AppSec empowers you to build resilient and trustworthy systems.
If you’re looking to simplify and automate your AppSec efforts, Wiz Code is here to help. Wiz Code is a comprehensive security platform built to integrate into your development workflows, providing real-time visibility into security risks at every layer—from code, OS dependencies, and secrets to containers, infrastructure as code, and the security posture of your VCS and CI/CD pipelines.
With its unified policy engine, Wiz Code enables you to enforce security policies consistently across your SDLC and running cloud environments, catching vulnerabilities and misconfigurations as early as the development phase and continuously monitoring them through production.
Wiz Code’s deep integration with CI/CD pipelines allows you to detect and prioritize critical issues before they reach production, while automated scanning, runtime insights, and contextual prioritization ensure your team cuts through the AppSec alert noise and focuses on the most impactful risks. By centralizing and consolidating your AppSec efforts, Wiz Code empowers developers to build secure applications and infrastructure at scale, maintaining speed through every sprint.
Ready to see how Wiz Code can strengthen your application security? Try Wiz Code to improve your application security posture today.
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