Paul McCarty

Founder of SecureStack

DevSecOps evangelist, entrepreneur, father of 3 and snowboarder

Forbes Top 20 Cyber Startups to Watch in 2021!

 Mentioned in KuppingerCole's Leadership Compass for Software Supply Chain Security!

You can think of the ISM as a single document that helps Australian businesses and government know how to address cybersecurity challenges.  In reality, the ISM is really a collection of different guideline documents that focus on specific areas of IT.  Some of the existing guidelines address things like system hardening, database management, network management, using cryptography, and many others.  These guideline documents as an aggregate can be thought of as “the ISM” and can be used to increase an organization’s cybersecurity maturity which benefits both the organization itself, but also Australian society.

What’s in the Guidelines for Secure Development section of the Australian ISM?

In December of 2021, the ACSC released the latest version of the ISM which for the first time included a Guideline for Secure Development.  This document lays out a framework for building and maintaining secure software development processes.  It is a total of 21 controls and is more prescriptive than what we typically see from other frameworks like APRA.

You can find the Guidelines for Secure Development here: https://www.cyber.gov.au/acsc/view-all-content/advice/guidelines-software-development

The format for this blog post

I wanted to write this blog post to help Australian orgs know about this new compliance requirement from the ACSC.  The new Guidelines for Secure Development document is split into two sections which we’ll address separately below.
Those two sections are:  Application development and web development.  

We’ll break both of those two sections down into their individual sub-sections and the controls that exist at each one of those stages. At the end, I talk about how you can assess and implement the controls in the ISM.

From this point on I’ll refer to the Guidelines for Secure Development as “GSD” for brevity’s sake.

Okay, let’s dig in!

Section 1: Application Development

This section of the GSD is applicable to all forms of software development including: client/server, web and mobile.  So special emphasis on this section should be placed on all assessments you make using the GSD.

Within this top level section there are 6 sub-sections:

• Development environments
• Secure software design
• Software bill of materials
• Secure programming practices
• Software testing
• Vulnerability disclosure program

Development, Testing, and Production Environments

Segregating development, testing, pre-production and production environments into discreet separate workspaces is one of the core security principles of secure software design.  This segmentation can limit accidental issues and malicious attacks from spreading from one environment to another.  Software engineers are limited to dev and testing environments so that bad code or third-party issues can’t be added to production directly.

Software Bill of Materials (SBOM)

This section only has one control and it’s all about SBOM.  SBOM stands for “Software Bill of Materials” and the reason that it’s so important is that it delivers something we never had had before:  a complete “recipe” of what is in an application.  An SBOM is a single source of truth for all software dependencies, frameworks, libraries, resources, and services that went into making a specific software solution.   Most definitions of SBOM agree on the above, but some go further and say that any known vulnerabilities and cloud-based services should also be included in the SBOM.  To me, this makes sense as an SBOM should be both an end-to-end description of the application, but also should list any deficiencies and liabilities.  If one of the components used to build an application has a known vulnerability, it should be codified in the SBOM.

Unfortunately, SBOM hasn’t delivered on its promise yet as very few organisations are actually creating SBOMs when they build software.  If you want to know more about SBOM please check out our blog post on them here:  https://securestack.com/sbom/

Even though there are only two controls here the description specifically calls out static analysis (SAST), dynamic analysis (DAST), web vulnerability scanning, and software composition (SCA) requirements.  It also calls out penetration testing and it also mentions “prior to their initial release and following any maintenance activities”.  To me, this sounds like automated tests during continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD). 

So that should really be 6 controls minimum.  I expect this to be fleshed out on the next version of the GSD.

Vulnerability Disclosure Program

There are actually four controls in this sub-section.  The first three are somewhat redundant switching the terms “policy”, “program” and “processes” which might confuse people.  Luckily the last control is straightforward and requires that orgs use a security.txt file to advertise their VDP information.

I think we can simplify this section in this way:

• Are security researchers able to come to your website and find how to contact you if they’ve found a security issue?
• Have you partnered with a platform to allow security researchers to bring security bugs they find to you?
• Do you have a set of documents that describe your security policies?  And can your employees find it?

Section 2: Web Application Development

This section of the GSD is applicable to applications available on the web that users interact with primarily via a web browser.  This section should be carefully following if you are building web apps.

Within this top level section there are 6 sub-sections:

• Open Web Application Security Project

• Web Application Frameworks

• Web Application Interactions

• Web Application Input Handling

• Web Application Output Encoding

• Web Browser-Based Security Controls

• Web Application Event Logging

Open Web Application Security Project

The OWASP is an organization that is trying to help encourage application security through its community and projects like Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) and the purposefully vulnerable Juice Shop project.

This section has only one control and it explicitly states that orgs should be following the Application Security Verification Standard (ASVS) when building web applications.

Web Application Interactions

This section has one control and it’s pretty specific:  All web application content is offered exclusively using HTTPS.  That sounds pretty straightforward, right?

Unfortunately, enforcing encrypted HTTP traffic is more complicated than many people think and require multiple controls and functions to be aligned.  Engineers need to make sure that HTTP is redirecting to HTTPS, that HSTS is enabled and that SSL/TLS is terminated in a secure environment.

I wrote a blog post about enforcing HTTPS which you can read here: https://securestack.com/enforce-https/

Web Application Output Encoding

This section has one control which is:  Output encoding is performed on all output produced by web applications.  This is a necessary requirement as the use of un-encoded data can cause serious issues as special characters can be interpreted incorrectly by the web application.

Web application event logging

The final sub-section has two controls associated with it.  The first says that all access attempts and errors need to be logged.  The second, stipulates that all logs are stored centrally in another location.

Unfortunately, we see less web server and application logging than we used to.  In the era of the public cloud, many engineering teams misinterpret logging functions like AWS’s Cloudwatch and Cloudtrail which log events at the cloud layer, and NOT at the application layer.  To be very clear:  Enabling Cloudwatch and Cloudtrail are NOT effective application logging solutions.

How do we assess and implement these controls?

Okay, so now that we’ve laid out all 16 controls in the new Guidelines for Secure Development document, where do we go from here?   Well, part of the challenge of this new ISM document is that it spans across the whole software development lifecycle (SDLC).  It talks about things the developer needs to do (local software testing) and it talks about segregating deployment environments.   It talks about things that happen at the beginning of the lifeycycle, and things that happen at the end of the lifecycle.  It talks about how to build your web applications and it talks about how your customers should be protected while using that application in a browser.

How can SecureStack help you assess your ISM compliance?

The SecureStack platform can help you assess and quantify your ISM GSD compliance with our SaaS platform.  We help you integrate your source code platform, CI/CD processes, build environments and your public cloud providers, and we do it all in less than 5 minutes.

Thanks right!  You can see assess your entire software development lifecycle in less than 5 minutes with SecureStack.  Check out the video to the left to see how!

Paul McCarty

Founder of SecureStack

DevSecOps evangelist, entrepreneur, father of 3 and snowboarder

Forbes Top 20 Cyber Startups to Watch in 2021!

 Mentioned in KuppingerCole's Leadership Compass for Software Supply Chain Security!

Are you sick of filling out security questionnaires to meet some compliance or audit objectives?  Most of the software engineers we talk to that have to fill these pesky forms out hate the process.  Many of them say to us that they really want something that could automate responses to security questionnaires.

I had to fill out my first security questionnaire back in 2002. The questionnaire came in the form of a large Excel spreadsheet and I remember looking at it and thinking at the time, “Man, that’s a LOT of questions!!” I wondered how they would know if I was telling the truth or not? I could just put anything down and how would they know if I was being honest? Would they come onsite and audit us?

Fast forward to 2022. We still use spreadsheets for our security questionnaires. They pretty much ask the same questions they did 20 years ago, and they are still being used by the same people. It is a hallmark of #infosec that you get told to fill out the questionnaire and it’s just something we all do.

Here’s the thing:  Security questionnaires aren’t that good at determining risk

• Security questionnaires are lengthy and take a long time to fill out. The industry doesn’t trust them very much but continues to use them for lack of anything better. Only 14% of organizations surveyed said they are highly confident that security questionnaires represent true security profiles.
• Finding the right people to talk to and getting responses from them is a real challenge.  This is especially true if you are trying to ascertain compliance around software development processes and you need to talk to software engineers.  Engineers are busy delivering software and often actively hostile to the audit or compliance processes.  Software engineers will sometimes not respond to queries which leaves the party responsible for collecting the data in a lurch.
• Questionnaires are usually not very accurate. The person filling it out usually doesn’t have the answers and often makes up answers or guesses, neither of which help. When asked, most risk professionals admit they have very little confidence in security questionnaires.
• Security questionnaires are a single point-in-time snapshot. Even if somehow, the original data captured in the questionnaire was accurate, they don’t get updated which means that you can’t really trust them for very long.

Developers are usually not aligned with security or compliance objectives

As mentioned above, security questionnaires aren’t great at determining risk in normal circumstances, but it’s even harder when you are trying to audit your software development processes.  Gathering data from software engineers can be really tough.  They are often resistant, and sometimes downright hostile to the idea that their development processes need to meet some compliance requirements.

Software engineers’ metric of success is not usually security or compliance-related.  Instead, it’s how fast they can deliver new features.  So, this explains in part why developers are often so against security teams asking them questions about their security protocols.  

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SecureStack automates responses to security questionnaires which saves your team time and money!

Paul McCarty

Founder of SecureStack

DevSecOps evangelist, entrepreneur, father of 3 and snowboarder

Forbes Top 20 Cyber Startups to Watch in 2021!

 Mentioned in KuppingerCole's Leadership Compass for Software Supply Chain Security!

The DevSecOps Playbook

SecureStack is committed to open-source projects, that’s the reason we recently open-sourced the “DevSecOps Playbook”.  This playbook, originally written by our CEO Paul McCarty, was an internal automation document that explained how to secure application environments.  Now, after a bit of a re-work, it’s a comprehensive step-by-step guide to implementing a DevSecOps practice for any organization.  So, we thought, why not share this with the world?!

Check out the GitHub project here: https://github.com/6mile/DevSecOps-Playbook

How to use this free open-source Playbook

The Playbook is 50 individual tasks that you can follow to help make your application environments materially better.  Each task has a Priority, which tells you what you should do first, as well as a Difficulty which tells you how hard that task is.  So your teams can start with all the priority 1 tasks and once they’ve crossed all those off the list, they can start with the priority 2 tasks.  It’s really that simple.

If you like the playbook, feel free to star it on GitHub, or fork it for internal use.  If you see something that needs adjusting or if the Playbook is missing something, please create a PR!  We want the Playbook to be a community document!  You can check out our community stargazers here.

If you have a compliance or audit requirement that you need to address, check out the last column in each controls row.  You will see there any mappings that our community has associated with that particular control.  Most tasks have been mapped to at least two frameworks, such as ISO27001, ISO27002, SOC2, CIS, APRA, NIST 800, Australian ISM/Essential 8, or PCI-DSS.

Accelerate your DevSecOps success with SecureStack

Because the Playbook started out as an internal piece of automation, it’s built right into the heart and soul of our solution.  The SecureStack platform will check your applications for all the controls listed on the DevSecOps Playbook and report back if it finds any missing.  Even better, our platform will help you understand how to address any gaps we find with our visibility and automation platform.   We give you real-time continuous compliance reporting on your applications, so you can meet ISO27001, ISO27002, SOC2, CIS, NIST 800, NIST SSDF, Australian ISM, or APRA requirements.  If you have a security questionnaire you need to fill out or are going through an audit and you’re being asked about how secure your software development processes are, then please reach out to us!

Paul McCarty

Founder of SecureStack

DevSecOps evangelist, entrepreneur, father of 3 and snowboarder

Forbes Top 20 Cyber Startups to Watch in 2021!

 Mentioned in KuppingerCole's Leadership Compass for Software Supply Chain Security!