Secure design is a methodology for building computer applications or systems that prevents attackers from damaging or compromising the system. It involves validating user input, using secure communications, and limiting module privileges to prevent complete system compromise.
“Secure design” is a methodology for building computer applications or systems in which all aspects of the software are inherently developed in a way that makes it difficult or impossible for an attacker to damage, attack, or compromise the system. In many cases, secure-by-design software is designed from the outset to close even the smallest security holes in elementary functions and to use classic and reliable techniques during the coding phase to ensure that no defects are carried into a finished product. Some of the main areas that are at the heart of secure-by-design engineering are user or client input, secure communications, and basic validation to ensure certain types of attacks are made impossible. While no computer application is immune to all malicious attacks, a secure-by-design system has a distinct advantage over systems that use external security libraries or rely on the security of the surrounding environment, such as an operating system, because the design del software is built to prevent and contain exploitation attacks.
One of the most vulnerable areas of any computer application, due to its unpredictable nature, is user input. Input that is not validated, used without error checking, or blindly accepted from any source can use the internal workings of a system against itself to expose sensitive data or cause a system to crash. When an application is secure by design, user input is usually validated in some way, checked for malicious sequences, or even converted to a secure format so that it can be processed without worrying about unpredictable behavior that might result from the default processing of some character combinations.
The user input problem becomes more complex in a system that is secure by design when the software is a server that accepts input from a client across a network. Some attackers can intercept valid messages from a client to a server or spoof a client outright, so methods other than proprietary encryption are usually employed, because an attacker intercepting the messages could easily break the encryption. More effective security methods within a program’s design include limiting the information a client sends and limiting the ability of a server or module in what it can or cannot do itself.
By combining software modularity with the principle of least privilege, a secure-by-design system can prevent attackers from completely compromising a system by delegating tasks between modules that don’t necessarily have the ability to perform a single destructive action on their own. In this way, safeguards and security systems can be put in place that can allow a system to recover safely from an intrusion. This concept is difficult to incorporate into an application that does not use secure-by-design principles because it requires that the entire program architecture be oriented towards the goal of security.
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