10 most significant software security design flaws

The IEEE Center for Secure Design, a cybersecurity initiative focused on the identification of software design flaws, released a report based on real-world data collected and analyzed by experts at the world’s leading technology companies.

In 2014, the IEEE Computer Society, the leading association for computing professionals, launched a cybersecurity initiative with the aim of expanding its ongoing involvement in cybersecurity. As part of that initiative, the IEEE Center for Secure Design (CSD) was formed, which welcomed experts from a diverse group of organizations to discuss software security design flaws that they had identified in their own internal design reviews.

What resulted was a list of the top ten most significant software security design flaws and the design techniques to avoid them. Practical advice ranges from encouraging the correct use of applied cryptography to validating each individual bit of data.

Proper security design has been the Achilles’ heel of security engineering for decades, mostly because it is difficult and requires deep expertise. More than just identifying implementation bugs, the IEEE CSD directly addresses today’s most vexing security problem — security design.

“The Center for Secure Design will play a key role in refocusing software security on some of the most challenging open design problems in security,” said Neil Daswani of the security engineering team at Twitter. “By putting focus on security design and not just focusing on implementation bugs in code, the CSD does even the most advanced companies in the space a huge service.”

“Bugs and flaws are two very different types of security defects,” said Gary McGraw, CTO at Cigital. “We believe there has been quite a bit more focus on common bugs than there has been on secure design and the avoidance of flaws, which is worrying since design flaws account for 50% of software security issues. The IEEE Center for Secure Design allows us a chance to refocus, to gather real data, and to share our results with the world at large.”

The following list of recommendations was born to help developers avoid the top security design flaws:

• Earn or give, but never assume, trust
• Use an authentication mechanism that cannot be bypassed or tampered with
• Authorize after you authenticate
• Strictly separate data and control instructions, and never process control instructions received from untrusted sources
• Define an approach that ensures all data are explicitly validated
• Use cryptography correctly
• Identify sensitive data and how they should be handled
• Always consider the users
• Understand how integrating external components changes your attack surface
• Be flexible when considering future changes to objects and actors.