Domain 8: Software Development Security Flashcards
Acceptance
A formal, structured handover of the finished software system to the customer organization; typically involves test, analysis, and assessment activities.
Accreditation (also Security Accreditation)
Formal declaration by a designated accrediting authority (DAA) that an information system is approved to operate at an acceptable level of risk, based on the implementation of an approved set of technical, managerial, and procedural safeguards.
ACID Test
Data integrity provided by means of enforcing atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability policies.
A.c.i.d tests integrity
Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs)
An agent or organization of agents that plans, organizes, and carries out a highly sophisticated attack against a target person, organization, or industry over a period of months or possibly even years (thus “persistent”). APTs usually have a strategic goal in mind, which requires many steps in a concerted attack plan to achieve. The term “APT” may refer to the organization conducting the attack, to specific steps in such an attack as observed by a target, or to the entire attack sequence. An APT usually involves a phased set of activities, each of which may use dozens of different attack vectors in sequence or in tandem.
Aggregation
The ability to combine nonsensitive data from separate sources to create sensitive information.
Blocked and Allowed Lists (software, identities, addresses)
Use of lists of blocked or allowed identities—whether as users, URLs, URIs, web addresses, IP addresses, geographic regions, hardware addresses, files, or program—as a means of controlling (prohibiting or permitting) their access, use, or attempt to load and execute. These systems also alert designated IT security personnel if the attempt involves a resource not on a pre-approved list. Stand-alone security tools and integrated systems that provide these capabilities are now starting to incorporate anti-malware processesas part of their offerings; similarly, anti-malware products have begun to incorporate these blocked/allowed list management and use capabilities. In this course, the term “blocked list” replaces “blacklist” and the term “allowed list” replaces “whitelist.”
Botnets
A network of automated systems or processes (robots, or for short, bots) performing a specific function together, usually malicious. Botnets have greatly magnified the power and speed of malicious operations because they all work together toward achieving a malicious goal, and they have allowed for tuning and directing of operations in a way that was not possible with malicious programs in the past.
Bots
An emerging and special class of mobile code. These employ limited machine learning capabilities to assist with user requests for help or assistance, automation of or assistance with workflows, data input quality validation, and other similar tasks.
Buffer Overflow
A source code vulnerability that allows attempts to access data locations outside of the storage space to be allocated to the buffer. It can be triggered by attempting to input data that is larger than the input buffer being used.
User input is not validated and not appropriate size, it overflows the data structure allowing malicious commands.
Bypass Attack
Users may attempt to bypass controls at the front end of the database application to access information.
Certification
The comprehensive technical security analysis of the system to ensure that it meets all applicable security requirements.
Citizen Programmers
Members of the organization who codify work-related knowledge, insights, and ideas into varying degrees of reusable software-like forms, often using extensibility features found in most commercial software apps. The ad hoc nature of these pieces of functionality is extremely difficult to manage, control, verify, or assess. In almost all cases, these are beyond the reach and visibility of the organization’s software quality, configuration management, or security assessment processes. Such “citizenprogramming” is often done with little regard to security requirements and can pose a significant risk to some organizations.
Code Protection or Logic Hiding
Prevents one software unit from reading or altering the source, intermediate, or executable code of another software unit.
Code Reuse
When programmers reuse, rather than reinvent, units of software (procedures or objects) that have already been demonstrated to be correct, complete, safe, and secure.
Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS)
Software elements, usually applications, that are provided as finished products not intended for alteration by the end user. Most COTS applications are available as host- based, endpoint-based, or platform-based services, and support user extensibility by means of non-programming tools, scripts, macros, and configuration parameters. COTS can also include firmware and hardware elements.
Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA)
A set of standards that addresses the need for interoperability between hardware and software products residing on different machines across a network. CORBA provides object location and use across a network.
An international standard for
distributed computing. CORBA enables code operating on a computer to locate resources
located elsewhere on the network.
Configuration Control (CC)
Process of controlling modifications to hardware, firmware, software, and documentation to protect the information system against improper modifications prior to, during, and after system implementation.
Configuration Management (CM)
A collection of activities focused on establishing and maintaining the integrity of information technology products and information systems, through control of processes for initializing, changing, and monitoring the configurations of those products and systems throughout the system development life cycle.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
Workflow automation processes and tools that attempt to reduce, if not eliminate, the need for manual communication and coordination between thesteps of a software development process.
Covert Channel or Covert Path
A communications pathway between two or more processes that transfers information in ways that violate some security policy or requirement. These can be created deliberately (wittingly) by the process designer(s), or unwittingly by the hostile process exploiting hitherto unrecognized exposures of information, resources, or other characteristics by the target system.
Data Contamination
Attackers can attempt to use malformed inputs—at the field, record, transaction, or file level—to disrupt the proper functioning of the system.
Data Lake
A data warehouse incorporating multiple types or streams of unstructured or semi-structured data.
Data Mining
An analysis and decision-making technique that relies on extracting deeper meanings from many different instances and types of data; often applied to data warehouse content.
Gather mining resources to make decision
Data Modeling
A design process that identifies all data elements the system will need to input, create, store, modify, output, and destroy during its operational use. Arguably, data modeling should be one of the first steps in systems analysis and design, regardless of whether procedural or OOP approaches will be used to implement it.
Data Protection or Data Hiding
Restricts or prevents one software unit from reading or altering the private data of another software unit.
Data Type Enforcement
How well (or how poorly) a language protects the programmer from trying to perform operations on dissimilar types of data, or in ways that would lead to erroneous results.
Data Warehouse
A collection of data sources such as separate internal databases to provide a broader base of information for analysis, trending, and reference. May also involve databases from outside of the organization, either by importing a copy or by reference.
Database Management System (DBMS)
Asuite of application programs that typically manage databases and their environments. The heart of the DBMS is the database engine, a core application that performs and manages the basic functions of create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) of data to and from the database, while also making data available for display or export to users, endpoints, and other systems. The DBMS provides the structure for the data and some type of language and architecture for accessing and manipulating the data. The main objective is to store data and allow users to interact with it, but in a secure way from a confidentiality, integrity, and availability perspective.
Database Model
The underlying software design concepts that a DBMS implements; it identifies the specific organization, structure, and architecture that the DBMS can provide to users as they build specific databases to meet business needs.
Data-Centric Threat Modeling
A methodology and framework for focusing on the authorized movement, locations, execution, input, and output of data within, from, and into a system. These correspond with the security concepts of protecting data in transit, at rest (or in storage), and in use, and it provides a focus for carrying out the security decisions already made as the organization classifies and categorizes its data.
Defensive Programming
The style of program design and coding that translates the business logic about acceptable and harmful input into code, which allows processing of acceptable inputs, but safely blocks attempts to input (or inject) harmful inputs. The lack of adequate defensive programming measures can result in an arbitrary code execution, a misdirection of the program to other resources or locations, or otherwise reveal more information useful to an attacker.
DevOps
A systems development approach based on lean and agile principles in which business owners and the development, operations, and quality assurance departments collaborate to deliver software in a continuous manner that enables the business to more quickly react to market opportunities and reduce the time to include customer feedback into products that need to be developed.
DevSecOps
Provides for a merger of phased review (as in the waterfall SDLC) with the DevOps method, to incorporate the needs for security, safety, resilience, or other emerging properties in the final system, at each turn of the cycle of development.
Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST)
Tools that execute the software unit, application, or system under test in ways that attempt to drive it to reveal a potentially exploitable vulnerability.
Emerging Properties
An alternate and perhaps more powerful way of looking at systems-level behavior characteristics such as safety and security. This perspective also helps provide a more testable, measurable answer to questions such as “How secure is our system?”
Encapsulation
Enforcement of data hiding and code hiding during all phases of software development and operational use. Bundling together data and methods is the process of encapsulation; its opposite process may be called unpacking or revealing. Also used to refer to taking any set of data and packaging it or hiding it in another data structure, as is common in network protocols and encryption.
Executable Code, Object Code
The binary representation of the machine language instruction set that the CPU and other hardware of the target computer directly execute.
Extensible Markup Language (XML)
A set of extensions to HTML that provide for data storage and transport in networked environments. XML is frequently used to interface web pages at the front end of a system (as they are displayed and used on client endpoint devices) with databases on back-end servers. XML is often embedded in the HTML files that make up the elements of web pages.
Functional Requirements
Describes a finite task or process the system must perform. These are often directly traceable to specific elements in the final system’s design and construction; formal configuration item audits should, for example, be able to identify a given unit of software with the specific functional requirements that dictated it be written and included into the product build.
Hierarchical Database Model
Database model in which data elements and records are arranged in parent-child structures such as trees.
Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V)
A comprehensive review, analysis, and test (software or hardware, or both) performed by an objective third party to confirm (i.e., verify) that the requirements are correctly defined, and to confirm (i.e., validate) that the system correctly implements the required functionality and security requirements.
Inheritance
Provides mechanisms by which objects that are members of a class (a higher- level grouping of like objects) can make use of specific characteristics of the class. Files in a read-only folder, for example, generally will also inherit the folder’s read-only attribute.
Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST)
Testing that combines or integrates SAST and DAST to improve testing and provide behavioral analysis capabilities to pinpoint the source of vulnerabilities.
Integrated Development Environments (IDEs)
A set of software applications, their control procedures, supporting databases, libraries, and tool sets that provide a programmer or a team of programmers what they need to specify designs; translate designs into source code; and then compile, test, and integrate that code into a finished software product. Many IDEs support multiple programming languages and facilitate their use on the same project.
Integrated Product Team (IPT)
A team of stakeholders and individuals who have various skills and work together to achieve a defined process or product.
Intermediate Code
Expressing a program’s required function in a form that is somewhere between human-readable source code and binary sets of values that can be loaded into memory and executed by a CPU. The most common use of intermediate code is to provide machine independence or portability for a program, such as Java does.
Knowledge Discovery in Database (KDD)
A mathematical, statistical, and visualization method of identifying valid and useful patterns in data.
Knowledge Management
The efficient and effective management of information and associated resources in an enterprise to drive business intelligence and decision-making. It may include workflow management, business process modeling, document management, databases and information systems, and knowledge-based systems.
Level of Abstraction
How close the description (in source code, design documents, or any other form) represents one-to-one the details of the underlying object, system, or component. Lower- level abstractions generally have far more fine- grain detail than higher level ones.
Living Off the Land Nonmalware-Based Ransom Attack
An attack on a system in which illicit access to a system is used to misuse systems capabilities in the pursuit of the attacker’s agenda. The attacker does not use malware in such attacks, hence, anti-malware defenses will not detect and prevent it.
Logic Bombs
Malware inserted into a program that will activate and perform functions that suit an attacker’s needs at some later date or when certain conditions are met.
Malformed Input Attack
Many of the common source code errors in software can lead to that software failing to correctly handle input data, singly or in combination, that exceeds logical range checks, is contradictory or inconsistent, or is unauthorized. This can result in an arbitrary code execution, a misdirection of the program to other resources or locations, or otherwise reveal additional information useful to an attacker.
Malware
A program that is inserted into a system, usually covertly, with the intent of compromising the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of the victim’s data, applications, or operating system or of otherwise annoying or disrupting the victim.
Markup Languages
Nonprogramming languages used to express formatting or arrangement of data on a page or screen. Markup languages are extensible, which allows users to define other operations to be performed. These extend the language into a programming language, such as the way that JavaScript extends HTML.
Memory or Object Reuse
All systems must allocate memory or other resources as objects to requesting processes, which involves one process reusing such resources after the first using process has finished with them. Any data remaining in the object when it is reused is a potential security violation (i.e., a data remanence issue).
Metadata
Information that describes the format or meaning of other data, which can be used to provide a systematic method for describing resources and improving the retrieval of information.
Mobile Code (Executable Content)
A file or a set of files sent by one system to one or more other target or client systems, which, when opened by software already installed on that client, will either control the execution of systems and applications software on that client or be directly executed by that client’s CPU.
Modified Prototype Model (MPM)
An approach to designing and building a system that starts by building a simplified version of the entire application; this is released for review, with the feedback from the stakeholders used to improve the design of a second, much better version. This is repeated until the owner and stakeholders are satisfied with the final product.
