How to develop cloud applications based on Web application security experience

As more and more organizations look for applications that can be deployed in the cloud vendor environment, the need for sound security measures and technologies becomes critical. So how do you develop applications in a cloud environment to maximize security? Are these cloud applications different from internal applications? What changes are needed in the development lifecycle and Quality assurance (QA) processes? All of these issues need to be addressed before migrating applications to a public cloud environment.

In this article, we will provide some guidance on how to develop secure applications specifically for the cloud environment to protect against most common attacks today. We will also explore some of the control factors that need to be put in place to ensure the security of cloud-based applications during development and deployment.

How to safely develop cloud applications

Before the enterprise is committed to the cloud application development process, the security team of the enterprise should encourage the developer to carefully study the security development platform, the coded security options and the tools provided by the cloud provider. The typical representative of a service (PaaS) provider that uses coded security and security development measures is Salesforce.com's force.com, which has a wiki page that specifically describes the best practices for developer security and coding. Force.com's wiki page provides an overview of security at all stages of design, development, testing, and publishing, which is essentially a standard software development lifecycle (SDLC). Force.com also provides a number of best practices documentation that can help us guide the self-assessment tools for security decisions and specific tools for use at various stages of SDLC. Similarly, Microsoft has provided developers with a wealth of resources, such as the "Cloud base" video series.

Although there are so many resources available, no cloud vendor can provide all the resources and other program components to meet the needs of sound development of secure applications in the public cloud and mixed cloud environments. The successful development of secure cloud applications requires that we be able to address the various risks of cloud applications. Security development Responsibility people should consider that cloud applications are more open than standard internal applications. Why is that? First, cloud applications are typically hosted and kept in an environment independent of the enterprise's core IT assets, so the enterprise has little control over traditional applications. In addition, because most cloud applications are web-based, they are likely to face a variety of security threats, such as cross-site scripting, SQL injection, and directory traversal, that are not uniformly standard web applications.

The information security team should recommend that developers carefully review the top ten Web application attacks listed in the open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) and then develop and integrate mitigation methods for these attacks before publishing them to a cloud environment. Many Web applications are attacked because of a lack of input filtering, so developers should limit the data type, length, and format that the application can accept. Developers should also be careful to avoid exposing application programming interfaces (APIs) in cloud-based applications. Because API abuse has been listed as one of the major threats to cloud computing by the Cloud Security alliance.

Securing the security of cloud applications requires authentication and encryption measures

Because cloud applications are outside the scope of enterprise networks and monitoring capabilities, they require strong authentication and authorization control. Developers should ensure that the validation page or interface is fully responsive to all application content and functionality. Account hijacking is a common cloud security issue, so developers may need to implement a more restrictive authentication strategy than internal applications that take advantage of multifactor authentication and complex, lengthy password policies. Since cloud applications are likely to be hosted in a multi-tenant environment, using file and application-level encryption techniques can be a good idea. While it is difficult to anticipate a possible compromise from a malicious partner, you can use encryption technology and review the Library and other Third-party code components carefully.

The existing SDLC of the enterprise should also apply to the development and release of cloud applications. However, before you publish to the cloud platform, you should carefully consider the code test and perform the QA process. Given the inherent scalability of cloud assets, you should also test availability and performance to ensure appropriate stress testing.

Security development takes time

Typically, as companies migrate to the cloud faster and faster, there is a tendency for rapid development programs, such as agile companies. Unless an enterprise can devote the necessary time and resources to secure code at every stage of a development project, they want to ensure that the cloud application is secure. Obviously, there are a lot of problems to be solved when developing a secure cloud application, so speeding up this process only increases the risk of an application being vulnerable to attack.