Ultimate Beginner's Guide: How to Approach Product Security

Depiction of manual and automated capabilities to layer security into the product development lifecycle

Introduction

Modern software products encompass complex full service solutions. Product Security is a broad term that encompasses all security activities to take a product from ideation to deployment. This includes domains such as application security, infrastructure security, and DevOps.

Thanks to technological democratization and a global workforce, accessibility of product development has soared globally. Product security risks are exacerbated as operations traverse borders, confronting diverse regulatory landscapes and threat environments.

In this article, we will discuss a high-level overview of how to holistically address product security.

What is Product Security?

Product security is about securing the product throughout its entire life cycle from ideation to deployment. The ultimate aim is to understand how your product can be weaponized either against you or other people based on the features and functionality that you've built.

Why do organizations care?

Picture this: You’re building and growing a very successful business. You are the coveted solution to address major problems in your specific industry. The team has poured years of dedication and attention to detail to building up to this point. People begin to take notice and some curious users begin to poke around.

They identify and exploit critical business logic vulnerabilities, leaking the sensitive data of our trusted customers. Your organization falls victim to wide-spread software supply chain attacks, providing an immediate entry point to your production services, leading to the same outcome.

No matter the vector, the organization loses trust with customers and risks losing business to their competitors.

Without a product security strategy, the organization continues to fall behind evolving threats, making it difficult to focus on what matters most: delivering value to customers.

Layers: Defense-in-Depth

Product Security is addressed by layering defensive processes and capabilities throughout the product development lifecycle. By doing so effectively, the organization naturally adopts security-first culture as it becomes a natural part of doing work.

This means forging meaningful partnerships across all departments to deliver pragmatic guidance and building guardrails to make it easy to focus on solving customer pain points.

It is designed to support accelerated product development while maintaining the robustness and resiliency of software products from security threats for modern cloud native applications. The goals of each phase are defined as follows:

Design: Cross-department knowledge sharing to define security requirements and level of effort.
Develop: Autonomous vulnerability discovery and remediation during active development.
Build: Enforce software integrity and execution environment to support defense-in-depth
Test: Validate control requirements and remediate known security defects.
Deploy: Verify integrity of production environment and enforce secure defaults.
Monitor: Proactively maintain healthy production system conditions.

Manual vs. Automated Processes

Contrary to modern sentiment, not everything that can be automated should be automated. Manual processes serve as a key engagement point to share ideas and proliferate knowledge across different specialities.

For example, during the design phase, Security would share potential threats presented by a solution and control requirements for implementation. This would help to reduce the volume and severity of penetration test findings, shortening the time to deliver software that would otherwise require intensive code-level remediation.Manual processes should be enabled through autonomous tooling, organizational standards, and service templates to shorten the time to delivery and improve consistency regardless of individual staffing.

Conclusion

For software companies, the product is the business. Product security does not just secure your product, but to cement your business’ revenue. Its practices aims to accelerate revenue growth, sustain development velocity, and reduce long-term overhead cost.

In our future pieces, we will break down the various stages of the Product Security Lifecycle.