Secure software development lifecycle is a process that secures the software from being attacked. It consists of various steps and it may include secure design, secure coding, secure testing, secure deployment, and secure maintenance. In this article, we will talk about what should be included in a secure development lifecycle so that you can have a better understanding of how to develop your product securely.

Secure design: secure design is the very first step that determines how secure your product will be. It means that you have to secure all possible attack vectors before moving forward, otherwise it would be pretty challenging to secure them during the implementation or testing phase.

Secure coding: secure coding helps developers follow secure development guidelines so they can develop software in a more secure way and avoid common mistakes which often lead to vulnerabilities later on.

The main goal of following these rules is avoiding different types of attacks such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, etc. Secure coding includes also ensuring code quality by writing unit tests for every piece of code written (unit testing) and making sure there are no memory leaks (memory checking).

Secure testing: this stage should help find any security bugs introduced by secure coding.

To perform this, there are different types of testing that should be performed:

Penetration Testing (pen testing) is the process in which pentesters try to find vulnerabilities on systems or networks by simulating malicious attacks. It can include finding passwords and data theft among other things.

Automated Testing; tools like OWASP ZAP help automate scanning web applications for security issues while also providing some guidance about how to resolve them. This allows developers to make sure there aren’t any security problems without having an expert test their code manually for every change they make, saving time and money.

Static Code Analysis; programs like FindBugs will check your source looking for possible bugs or mistakes that could cause security problems. This is helpful for catching things like null pointer exceptions or incorrect cryptographic usage, but it’s not infallible so some manual review is still necessary.

Dynamic Analysis; this will actually run your code to see how secure the application behaves in real life. These are usually tests designed by experts with a lot of experience writing secure software who have developed their own methodologies over time and testing procedures through trial and error coming up with what works best based on results they get from these types of tests.

In conclusion, a secure software development lifecycle should include secure coding, secure design, and security testing. To have a truly secure application you need all three processes working together in tandem. The developers can write code that seems safe on paper but actually has security flaws hidden inside it which will only be revealed by dynamic analysis tests conducted later down the line.