Tips for developing secure custom software

Security is a decisive factor in custom software development. Depending on the individual software, sensitive data, such as customer data, may be processed. This is, of course, strictly confidential and must be protected from access by third parties. We would like to show you how you can make your custom software secure with the help of a few tips. Unfortunately, security vulnerabilities occur again and again and this must be avoided.

Reading time 4 min

1. What does a custom software attack look like?
2. Planning secure custom software development
3. General principles that can prevent security vulnerabilities
4. The development phases of secure software
5. Testing security
6. Conclusion

What does a custom software attack look like?

Vulnerabilities of various kinds are often the reason for easy access by hackers. Cyber criminals can access customer data, modify it or use it for other purposes. In the worst cases, a hacker can destroy the IT infrastructure of the entire software. The main aim of custom software development should therefore be to prevent hacker attacks in the first place. In the following sections, we explain step by step how you can proceed.

Planning secure custom software development

Before you start developing custom software, you can start thinking about security. Think about which security guidelines are important to you for your software and how you can test that they are adhered to. To do this, you can think hypothetically about what an attack on your software might look like. The next step is to draw up a concept for the measures that could be used to prevent this hacker attack. You or your software developers will consider and implement these measures later.

General principles that can prevent security vulnerabilities

• Minimum principle
• Incorporating additional checks
• Security levels

In addition to the individual problems that you should consider in terms of security for your custom software, there are general principles that can prevent unauthorized access.

One of these methods is the "least privilege" principle. This simply means that you only assign individual users of your custom software the authorizations that are required so that a hacker of the user account does not automatically gain access to all functions and data.

You should also monitor every access. This means that you should install checks that go through every user access and check whether there is authorization for it. In principle, this is also about the minimum principle, but you also build in checks that really check whether the authorizations work.

For more protection against hackers, it is also worth adding security layers. This prevents the so-called single point of failure. Single point of failure means a failure of a technical function that leads to the entire system failing. If you install different levels, at most one level is always affected by the failure. Fixing the problem is then much easier.

Of course, all your security precautions should not mean that user-friendliness suffers. Of course, the security of your custom software is very important, but the user and the user application must be the focus of any software. So always check whether the security measures can be reconciled with user-friendliness.

The development phase of secure software

Once you have thought about how you can ensure the security of your individual software, it's time to implement or program it. You or the software developers should keep the following aspects in mind when programming to ensure security:

• The authentication
• Validating the data, i.e. input and output
• Error handling
• Data security
• Access control
• And session management
• commercetools
• plentymarkets
• SAP Commerce Cloud
• OXID

Test security

The next step is to test the individual software extensively. Developers usually carry out a subsequent test phase anyway. The security aspect should therefore be checked in particular. Go through the possible hacker attacks that you considered in the first step and find out whether your software can be hacked or not. Depending on this, changes may need to be made or you may find that everything works as you imagined.

You can also seek external help if you want to have the security of your custom software checked. There are plenty of service providers who deal with IT security on a daily basis and can help you protect your software from hackers.

Conclusion

Developing secure software is not that easy, but it is super important. If you follow our tips, you will definitely be on the right path to secure custom software. If you don't know exactly how to implement the tips or you need more information about custom software development and automating your business processes, please get in touch with us. We are happy to help you with the individual development of your software - we look forward to hearing from you!