What should every programmer know about security

Question

I am an IT student and I am now in the 3rd year in university  Until now we ve been studing a lot of subjects related to computers in general  programming  algorithms  computer architecture  maths  etc    I am very sure that nobody can learn every thing about security but sure there is a  minimum  knowledge every programmer or IT student should know about it and my question is what is this minimum knowledge   Can you suggest some e-books or courses or anything can help to start with this road

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A good starter course might be the MIT course in Computer Networks and Security   One thing that I would suggest is to not forget about privacy   Privacy  in some senses  is really foundational to security and isn t often covered in technical courses on security   You might find some material on privacy in this course on Ethics and the Law as it relates to the internet

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Also be sure to check out the OWASP Top 10 List for a categorization of all the main attack vectors vulnerabilities   These things are fascinating to read about  Learning to think like an attacker will train you of what to think about as you re writing your own code

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when you are building any enterprise or any of your own software you should just think like a hacker as we know hackers are also not expert in all the things but when they find any vulnerability they start digging into it by gathering information about all the things and finally attack on our software so for preventing such attacks we should follow some well known rules like    always try to break your codes use cheatsheets  amp  google the things for more informations   be updated for security flaws in your programming field  and as mentioned above never trust in any type of user or automated inputs  use opensource applications their most security flaws are known and solved     you can find more security resource on the following links    owasp security CERT Security SANS Security netcraft SecuritySpace openwall PHP Sec thehackernews keep updating yourself    for more information google about your application vendor security flows

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Just wanted to share this for web developers   security-guide-for-developershttps   github com FallibleInc security-guide-for-developers

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Every programmer should know how to write exploit code   Without knowing how systems are exploited you are accidentally stopping vulnerabilities   Knowing how to patch code is absolutely meaningless unless you know how to test your patches    Security isn t just a bunch of thought experiments   you must be scientific and test your experiments

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Salt and hash your users  passwords  Never save them in plaintext in your database

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Principles to keep in mind if you want your applications to be secure     Never trust any input    Validate input  from all untrusted sources - use whitelists not blacklists Plan for security from the start - it s not something you can bolt on at the end  Keep it simple - complexity increases the likelihood of security holes Keep your attack surface to a minimum Make sure you fail securely Use defence in depth Adhere to the principle of least privilege   Use threat modelling Compartmentalize - so your system is not all or nothing  Hiding secrets is hard - and secrets hidden in code won t stay secret for long Don t write your own crypto Using crypto doesn t mean you re secure  attackers will look for a weaker link  Be aware of buffer overflows and how to protect against them   There are some excellent books and articles online about making your applications secure    Writing Secure Code 2nd Edition - I think every programmer should read this Building Secure Software  How to Avoid Security Problems the Right Way  Secure Programming Cookbook Exploiting Software Security Engineering - an excellent read Secure Programming for Linux and Unix HOWTO   Train your developers on application security best pratices   Codebashing  paid   Security Innovation paid   Security Compass  paid   OWASP WebGoat  free

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Rule  1 of security for programmers  Don t roll your own  Unless you are yourself a security expert and or cryptographer  always use a well-designed  well-tested  and mature security platform  framework  or library to do the work for you  These things have spent years being thought out  patched  updated  and examined by experts and hackers alike  You want to gain those advantages  not dismiss them by trying to reinvent the wheel   Now  that s not to say you don t need to learn anything about security  You certainly need to know enough to understand what you re doing and make sure you re using the tools correctly  However  if you ever find yourself about to start writing your own cryptography algorithm  authentication system  input sanitizer  etc  stop  take a step back  and remember rule  1

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The Web Security team at Mozilla put together a great guide  which we abide by in the development of our sites and services

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You should know about the three A s  Authentication  Authorization  Audit  Classical mistake is to authenticate a user  while not checking if user is authorized to perform some action  so a user may look at other users private photos  the mistake Diaspora did  Many  many more people forget about Audit  you need  in a secure system  to be able to tell who did what and when

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The importance of secure defaults in frameworks and APIs    Lots of early web frameworks didn t escape html by default in templates and had XSS problems because of this Lots of early web frameworks made it easier to concatenate SQL than to create parameterized queries leading to lots of SQL injection bugs  Some versions of Erlang  R13B  maybe others  don t verify ssl peer certificates by default and there are probably lots of erlang code that is susceptible to SSL MITM attacks Java s XSLT transformer by default allows execution of arbitrary java code  There has been many serious security bugs created by this  Java s XML parsing APIs by default allow the parsed document to read arbitrary files on the filesystem  More fun

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Why is is important  It is all about trade-offs  Cryptography is largely a distraction from security

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Remember that you  the programmer  has to secure all parts  but the attacker only has to succeed in finding one kink in your armour  Security is an example of  unknown unknowns   Sometimes you won t know what the possible security flaws are  until afterwards   The difference between a bug and a security hole depends on the intelligence of the attacker

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For general information on security  I highly recommend reading Bruce Schneier   He s got a website  his crypto-gram newsletter  several books  and has done lots of interviews     I would also get familiar with social engineering  and Kevin Mitnick    For a good  and pretty entertaining  book on how security plays out in the real world  I would recommend the excellent  although a bit dated   The Cuckoo s Egg  by Cliff Stoll

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I suggest reviewing CWE SANS TOP 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors   It was updated for 2010 with the promise of regular updates in the future   The 2009 revision is available as well  From http   cwe mitre org top25 index html  The 2010 CWE SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors is a list of the most widespread and critical programming errors that can lead to serious software vulnerabilities  They are often easy to find  and easy to exploit  They are dangerous because they will frequently allow attackers to completely take over the software  steal data  or prevent the software from working at all  The Top 25 list is a tool for education and awareness to help programmers to prevent the kinds of vulnerabilities that plague the software industry  by identifying and avoiding all-too-common mistakes that occur before software is even shipped  Software customers can use the same list to help them to ask for more secure software  Researchers in software security can use the Top 25 to focus on a narrow but important subset of all known security weaknesses  Finally  software managers and CIOs can use the Top 25 list as a measuring stick of progress in their efforts to secure their software

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Security is a process  not a product   Many seem to forget about this obvious matter of fact

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I would add the following     How digital signatures and digital certificates work What s sandboxing   Understand how different attack vectors work    Buffer overflows underflows etc on native code Social engineerring DNS spoofing Man-in-the middle CSRF XSS et al SQL injection Crypto attacks  ex  exploiting weak crypto algorithms such as DES  Program Framework errors  ex  github s latest security flaw    You can easily google for all of this  This will give you a good foundation  If you want to see web app vulnerabilities  there s a project called google gruyere that shows you how to exploit a working web app

[security] What should every programmer know about security?

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