What is Application Security?
Application Security is the process of developing, adding, and testing features within the application to prevent security threats. It conducts application vulnerability assessment and covers vulnerabilities in Web Applications, Mobile Applications, and Application Programming Interfaces(APIs). The vulnerabilities can be found in either the authentication, or in the authorization of users, code, configurations, policies, or procedures of the application. Application security vulnerability assessment helps maintain the integrity of all data.
This helps us to identify:
- The organization’s critical assets
- Who the authorized users are, and what their level of access is
- Potential vulnerabilities and weaknesses in the data or code of the application.
Why do we need Application Security?
Every business should address application security risks. If left unchecked, it could lead to the compromise of sensitive information. The damage to data from breaches is generally high and in some cases it’s even permanent. Application security is one of the most important countering measures for data breaches. But the state of application security (specifically, mobile security) is constantly evolving with changes in technology, and more often than not, businesses struggle to keep up.
With companies now increasingly moving their apps and sites online, information security has become more critical while simultaneously increasing in its level of complexity. This means that in future, application security technology will become even more important for the security of business, the apps that run companies, and their information.
Another reason application security is important is because most of the applications are available over various networks and are integrated with the cloud, increasing the risk of security threats and breaches. Organizations should be ready to check security at the application level, rather than just focusing on the network level. This is mainly because hackers today are targeting apps a lot more frequently with their attacks. Application security testing can reveal weaknesses at the application level and proactively prevent getting attacked.
Best practices to keep applications secure:
Security measures such as authentication, authorization, encryption, logging, and application security testing guarantee an application’s security. App developers can also implement the best coding practices and minimize security vulnerabilities.
Authentication:
Whenever software developers build an application, they must ensure that only authorized users have access to it. One way to do this is by providing the user with a user name and a password while logging in to the application. Developers can also add multi-factor authentication, which requires more than one form of verification to successfully log in.
Authorization:
Once a user has been authenticated, the admin can authorize the user to access the application. By verifying a user’s identity against its database, the system can now validate if the user has access to the application.
Encryption:
Once the user starts using the application, other security measures such as data encryption can be taken to protect sensitive data. Data can be protected from cybercrime attacks, theft, unauthorized usage, or even from being seen.
In cloud-based applications, where traffic containing sensitive data travels between the end user and the cloud, the traffic needs to be encrypted.
Logging:
If at any point in time there is a security breach in an application, logging can identify who accessed the data, and how. Log files can provide a time-stamped record of which aspects of the application were accessed.
Application security testing:
This is a process that ensures that all of these security controls are working properly.
Benefits of Application Security Assessment:
CodeGlo’s team analyzes the security of your web applications, APIs, and mobile apps — especially those that are crucial to your company’s business. We discover and evaluate security vulnerabilities in applications that went unnoticed during development.
Our Application Security team evaluates your crucial apps by:
- Doing a full-review of applications.
- Identifying and evaluating the hosting platforms.
- Checking the configurations.
- Checking the secure transmission protocols and encryption if any.
- Testing/checking password policies.
- Checking for injection and denial of service vulnerabilities.
- Checking for compliance with security regulations and standards.
What We Do At CodeGlo:
As a team we make sure that there are no security vulnerabilities in a new or updated software version of the application. We perform a security audit to ensure that the application complies with the best industry practices and that it meets the security criteria. We also prepare reports and mitigation plans for any threats or vulnerabilities found.
CodeGlo’s security team offers a brief but insightful understanding of your applications’ security, and updates you with specific recommendations to strengthen the security of your applications. If you want a team that makes safety, efficiency, and design its three priorities when it comes to app development, look no further. We offer the best in the industry, as our enterprise scale clients would tell you.
About The Author
Richa Jindal
I juggle almost all the aspects of building products and executing projects every day, so I’m the go-to person when you don’t know who’s the go-to person.
