4 Proven Ways to Incorporate Security into Agile Software Development Methodologies for UK Businesses
The intention of this blog is to guide you through to ensuring yourself that security threats are being handled on Agile projects. In this post, you can also closely observe how to seal security in Agile software development and be aware of how to practice and process to obtain it. It will also provide you with an idea of what to look for and request when working with a new team.
The blog will also cover:
- What do the Agile principles and practices imply for security?
- How do we build security capability in Agile teams?
- How do we integrate security into the Agile development process?
- What are the solid ways to incorporate security into agile software development methodologies?
Who is this guide for?
The guide is for anyone who is sponsoring, backing, or guiding Agile software projects. It is intended for project managers, sponsors, product owners, agile coaches, and scrum masters. It’s also for developers. Because security in Agile is project-, team- and technology-stack-specific, the guide is what you do, not how you do it.
The secret to security in Agile software development
The secret to security in Agile software development is to have an empowered team that can integrate security into their practices, processes, and pipelines.
You can achieve this by building a team culture of security and incorporating security into your software development lifecycle.
“It’s about embedding security throughout the entire process,” says Boost’s Innovation Lead Andy Gray.
Understanding security in Agile software development
The main concept of Agile from a security perspective is that you are delivering good, user-quality software in small packages. You deliver a little more good stuff with each iteration based on what you know you learned in the previous one. The process of delivering these good things to your users live on a regular basis is continuous delivery. Your continuous delivery pipeline is the manual and automatic steps that you execute each time.
Information security is what you do to reduce the risk that your people, systems, or data are exploited in a way that causes physical, financial, or reputational damage. Because Agile is a loop, you have to incorporate mechanisms for reducing risk into each loop and into your pipeline. As described in the Agile principles, this is part of maintaining technical excellence.
How does Agile help achieve security?
Agile development makes risk visible. It is simpler to test software that works than to evaluate risk in written specs or incomplete work.
Apart from this, Agile teams care about the smallest valuable change. These minor changes make it easier to measure risks. As a rule, 10 times more code is 100 times more complicated. And since you evaluate risk frequently, you improve at it.
Moreover, you don’t create anything you don’t require. So you don’t need to commit to unused features or functionality.
In Agile, you give developers the freedom to fix problems on their own. This gives you engaged teams. It allows you to leverage their knowledge to develop security solutions appropriate for your particular systems and circumstances.
In addition, continuous delivery allows you to implement quick changes when new vulnerabilities appear. Therefore, we can say that security in Agile is all about embracing change and making change safe. Now, software development services in the UK have started to actively embrace these steps to stay secure and competitive.
Risk and Agile security
Security risks are generally encapsulated by the acronym CIA:
- Confidentiality — the right people view the right information
- Integrity — the right things occur to the information
- Availability — the right people can access the information when it’s needed
Risk management is an exercise in prioritization. You need to determine what controls decrease both the occurrence and the magnitude of a security problem most effectively. You do so with the realization that you can never bring the risk to zero.
Product managers in Agile establish priorities, and that is a major control lever for security risk.
A good place to start when prioritizing security risks is to look at the top 10 most severe risks listed by The Open Web Application Security Project (you can browse and learn more about it if required). They are derived from statistics of what has led to most security breaches.
To control risk, you must know about it. You must know about your possible threats and the individuals behind them. You must know about your exposure so that you can spend effort, so what’s the attack potential, and what if there is an attack carried out?
Identifying threats
You can begin with agile security, knowing your threats inside out and outside in.
Attack surface mapping enables you to map your threat exposure inside out. Threat modeling enables you to grasp your threats outside in. And threat intelligence enables you to keep up to date with what is currently occurring.
Attack surface mapping
The normal method of finding your internal threats is to map your attack surface. Where might attackers be able to enter? This is usually broken into three components:
- Network — how the software is accessible to the outside world
- Application — the software
- Human — the humans who develop, execute, maintain, and utilize the software
Threat modelling
A threat model depicts your software system. This picture shows its structure, the threats it faces, controls for these threats, and how you’ll know these controls are working. Commonly, this is a flow diagram that shows:
- How each component of your system differs from the others
- How data flows, with sensitive data flagged
- How you’ll check and control these data flows
When we’re doing threat modelling at Boost, we’ve gone for Microsoft’s STRIDE approach. This gives an organized way to learn more about attackers. It categorizes threats and their corresponding solutions as follows:
- Spoofing
- Tampering
- Repudiation
- Disclosure of Information (data leak or privacy breach)
- Denial of service
- Elevation of privilege
A whiteboard session run with the developers is effective. It creates a common understanding of the threat model and captures the value of each person’s thinking. And the whiteboard leaves the information right there in your work area.
Because Agile teams deliver regularly, your attack surface is in a state of constant flux. What that implies is that you need to find a useful and efficient way of keeping your threat model up to date. Prioritizing changes most likely to have security implications is the trick.
Threat intelligence
Threats evolve day by day, so you have to stay current on what is new today. In security, you have to collect threat intelligence.
Your team can review plenty of sources of threat intelligence. You can focus on sources relevant to your stack of technologies in particular, and sources that offer general threat overviews.
Also, your own monitoring and alarms inform you what is happening in your system at the moment. You can base priorities on this information.
Integrating security into Agile teams and processes
Consider how a team is enabled to include security in Agile development. How do you build your security capability and practices?
Security capability:
- Security culture
- Training
- External reviews and advice
Security practices:
- Project initiation
- Architecture
- Requirements specification
- Iteration planning
- Coding
- Code review
- Testing
- Operations and infrastructure
- Security incident preparation
- Managing vulnerabilities
Now, let’s jump into the four proven ways to integrate security into agile software development methodologies to get more clarity.
1. Embed Security Early with Threat Modeling & Security Requirements
What to do:
- Add security requirements to your acceptance criteria and user stories.
- Conduct threat modeling during sprint planning to forecast potential vulnerabilities prior to coding.
How and why it works:
By “shifting left” and thinking about security during the requirements stage, you make design and implementation security-centric from the start. This reduces expensive fixes down the line and guarantees adherence to UK legislation like GDPR and the NCSC guidance.
2. Integrate Continuous Security Testing into Your CI/CD Pipeline
What to do:
- Start security test automation with Static Application Security Testing (SAST) and Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) tools in your build stage.
- Implement Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST) tools in sprints to identify defects in real-time.
How it works:
Automated testing identifies vulnerabilities early, lowers the risk of introducing new security defects, and keeps development flowing at high speed with high-security levels intact. The continuous feedback loop is necessary for agile teams and fulfills the UK business need for sound risk management.
3. Foster a DevSecOps Culture & Enable Security Champions
What to do:
- Create “Security Champions” within your agile teams to act as a bridge between security professionals and developers.
- Regular security training and mandate it for collaboration among your DevOps and security teams.
Why it works:
Putting in place security champions assists in the development of mutual ownership of security culture within the team. In addition to enhancing overall security awareness, it facilitates agile teams in responding quickly to new threats as well as continuing to be in compliance with regional cyber security mandates.
Today, almost every IIoT platform has also started to incorporate such built-in security measures within Agile workflows. This helps greatly in ensuring seamless protection against evolving cyber threats these days.
4. Adopt a “Secure by Design” Strategy through Automated Controls
What to do:
- Adopt secure coding techniques and practices in your development life cycle.
- Implement security best practices throughout the entire SDLC with automated tools and governance processes (such as Microsoft’s Security Development Lifecycle).
Why it works:
“Secure by design” is a term that means your apps are designed with security in mind at every level. With standardized security processes and automated controls, UK businesses can create systems that fend off attacks while they innovate and deliver fast.
Conclusion
Integration of security in Agile development is not a one-off activity but an ongoing, changing commitment. By incorporating security from the initial phase of the cycle, incorporating testing automation into the CI/CD pipeline, creating a DevSecOps culture of collaboration, and embracing a “secure by design” approach, UK organizations can develop secure software that conforms to strict regulatory requirements and consumer expectations.
This hybrid approach allows organizations to identify and remediate vulnerabilities before they become major problems, minimizing both the risk and the cost of remediation. Also, through continuous training and identification of security champions, everyone’s job is security throughout the development cycle. The outcome is not only more rapid and quality software releases but also greater user and stakeholder trust, a vital ingredient in today’s high-speed, competitive, and fast-changing threat environment.
By constantly evolving these practices, organizations can grow up to new threats while remaining agile, with security at the forefront of every step of software development.
Author Bio
Vishnu Narayan works as a content writer for ThinkPalm Technologies. He is an enthusiastic writer, a tech enthusiast, and an avid reader who tries to travel the world with a heart that yearns to see more sunsets than Netflix!
