By Mr. Filip Cotfas, Channel Manager, CoSoSys
If source code gets leaked or stolen, it can cause massive damage to your organization. It’s not just about financial losses – it can also decrease customers’ trust and negatively impact your reputation. That’s why source code security should be among your priorities if it isn’t already.
With the rise of data protection regulations and the increasing fines, companies worldwide focus more on cybersecurity, especially on the safety and privacy of sensitive customer data such as Personally Identifiable Information (PII). However, an efficient data security strategy should also cover intellectual property (IP) and the protection of trade secrets. Depending on the sector, IP can mean different things. For software and technology companies, IP often takes the form of proprietary source code.
Although the use of open-source components is booming, every organization that relies on source code for its operation also has some IP within its code that should be protected.
This can be a newly developed algorithm related to payment processing or fraud detection and other business-critical elements that run digitally. If the core value of your business lies in this intellectual property, securing it is paramount to ensure the success, health, and ultimately the future of your business.
Why do you need source code protection?
In the past few years, efforts to compromise devices, apps, and software have surged as the rewards can be highly valuable. Source code plays a critical role in building applications, making it crucial proprietary information. Still, it is often left out of security considerations.
Your source code can contain secrets, such as API or encryption keys, OAuth tokens, passwords, and more. It is also common for PII to coexist with source code. Without protection, these are available to all repository contributors meaning that they can clone, copy, and distribute them.
Dealing with most security issues linked to source code can feel like a race against time; however, companies cannot rely on outdated measures and methods, as these often do not offer much security
Many organizations continue to neglect source code protection. Source code theft is a problem for any company that develops its own software products, regardless of whether it is a startup, an SMB, or an enterprise
Organizations must protect their valuable source code from various security risks, including outsider and insider threats. If it gets leaked or stolen, source code may not only give your competitors a leading edge in the development of new products, causing financial damage to your business, but hackers can also use it to exploit vulnerabilities. Besides competitive and financial damage, it can even ruin your company if it falls into the wrong hands.
Source code security is vital to the health of your organization, especially if you balance the potential risks and business impacts that security vulnerabilities can have.
How to secure source code?
Your source code can be best protected by taking a layered approach. This is necessary to prevent its loss, which can cause reputational damage and loss of competitive advantage to your company, but it can come with regulatory fines too. What’s more, insecure source code can compromise other sensitive data.
Let’s check what you can do to protect your source code efficiently
- Create a source code protection policy
Set up a source code protection policy by defining a set of rules, requirements, and procedures for handling and protecting code. This policy will help safeguard software and devices from threats such as reverse engineering and code tampering. It should also cover source code development processes and personnel involved in code development.
Include secure access and use of source code repositories such as Git and Apache Subversion, encryption protocols, application hardening, shielding processes, and in-app protection methods.
Your source code protection policy should also involve documentation and training on secure coding practices and the incorporation of secure development methodologies into the software development lifecycle (SDLC).
- Prevent the use of insecure source code
Use source code security analysis tools, such as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), to detect security flaws and other issues during development.
Static code analyzers scan source code and related dependencies (frameworks and libraries) for specific vulnerabilities as well as for compliance with coding standards. These tools reduce security risks in applications by finding vulnerabilities earlier in the SDLC and providing real-time feedback to development teams on issues.
SAST tools, however, cannot identify vulnerabilities outside the code, such as those defects that might be found in third-party interfaces. For this, you’ll need Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) tools that can detect a wide range of vulnerabilities, including the ones from the OWASP Top Ten. Examples include cross-site scripting (XSS), injection errors like SQL injection, path traversal, and insecure server configuration
- Access control
Define who’s allowed to access source code, codebase, and source code repositories. There’s little to no reason that anyone other than hands-on employees work with your source code, but even for those that do, set up two-factor authentication. In this way, you can ensure that no suspicious characters find their way into your source code. Through authentication and authorization, access control policies ensure that users are who they say they are and that they have appropriate access to company data.
- Use encryption and monitoring
Make sure you can encrypt sensitive data both in transit and at rest. It’s also important to monitor your data at all times and be alerted when any suspicious activity comes to light. In this way, you can be ready to act swiftly, whether it is about tracking, limiting, or reversing the damage. You can also prevent it before any actual harm happens.
- Deploy network security tools
Implementing network security solutions such as firewalls, Virtual Private Networks (VPN), anti-virus, and anti-malware software count as basic protection. These solutions safeguard your source code from external exploits of hackers and ensure secure data sharing between employees and data sources.
- Don’t forget about endpoint security
Secure your endpoints or entry points of end-user devices such as desktops and laptops from risky activities and malicious attacks with endpoint security software. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions can efficiently prevent your source code from leaving the endpoint and stop source code exfiltration.
These tools can protect sensitive information both in physical and virtual environments, regardless of the endpoint’s physical location and whether it’s connected to the internet or not.
- Pay attention to patents & copyright
Make sure that all your concepts and inventions related to software are protected by copyright law and necessary patents. A major difference between these two is that while patents protect the idea, copyright safeguards the written code. As software-related inventions are increasingly popular, you should treat this proprietary information just like other intellectual property.
