SSDLC: Secure Software Development Lifecycle Guide

SSDLC is an acronym for secure software development lifecycle, a framework that focuses on improving security within your development pipeline. When your team faces late vulnerability discovery, compliance challenges, and time-consuming manual security testing, it is best to observe the SSDLC process. Through its methodology, you have the opportunity to improve your team's development workflow.

We'll explore SSDLC and examine how it requires strict management discipline that can support the product's security requirements as it advances through the process. We'll teach you its benefits and how its framework can lead your team toward a development process with improved security, compliance, and better outcomes.

Table of contents

• Why SSDLC is important for your team
• What is SSDLC?
• The 7 phases of SSDLC
• 6 tips for a successful SSDLC
• FAQ

SSDLC is a development framework that focuses on integrating security practices into each phase of the typical software development process. From when your team begins planning to code to ongoing maintenance, SSDLC aims to secure your software. The process identifies threats at each step of the SDLC for your team to address as quickly as possible.

As we explore each stage of SSDLC, you'll learn how to keep your team in closer compliance and mitigate security risks with greater engineering efficiency. Being aware of possible security threats along the way is the best way to minimize potential problems. But before we begin, you'll need to know the difference between SSDLC and the more typical SDLC framework.

SDLC stands for software development lifecycle and is a development workflow focused on the fundamental steps of software creation. Following SDLC best practices, developers can create software that better meets company and end-user needs while addressing planning, analysis, design, implementation, testing, and deployment. 

As mentioned previously, SSDLC adds "security" to SDLC and injects a focus on security at each stage to help decrease the risk of compliance issues and other risks.

SSDLC isn't a trend for software development teams to momentarily consider; it’s a serious upgrade to the traditional SDLC process. By learning to focus on security practices within each step of the development lifecycle, you can lead a more proactive approach that minimizes risk and creates a more stable customer experience. 

The process can also improve developer experience, reducing the need to return and spend time fixing previous deployments. Reduced technical debt and streamlined workflows can also create a more enjoyable experience for your team, leading to increased job satisfaction and an overall increase in developer productivity.

Following an SSDLC workflow can introduce several benefits to your team's process. Of course, security is the primary benefit, but it can also help increase compliance, reduce incident costs, and foster stronger customer trust.

• Enhanced security: With a proactive approach, SSDLC can help identify potential risks and encourage additional secure coding practices for development teams.
• Increased compliance: The SSDLC process provides a more structured, detailed approach to helping teams meet regulatory requirements.
• Reduced incident costs: By detecting issues earlier in the development process, your team can avoid expensive remediation efforts and minimize downtime.
• Stronger customer trust: Following SSDLC allows developers to demonstrate their commitment to end-user security, creating additional brand reputation and increasing customer satisfaction.

As we explore each phase of SSDLC, you'll quickly notice that we're following the same steps within a standard software development cycle. However, we'll explore how an added focus on security practices can strengthen your team's workflow for each step. These steps are the beginning of a secure, compliant software development cycle.

The software planning phase is the critical beginning for any development project; it enables your team to lay a knowledgeable foundation and better understand their software or service offering. During this phase, your team outlines objectives, defines the project's scope, and determines its feasibility. However, the security element of SSDLC takes planning further.

With a focus on security, developers and stakeholders also use this step to create threat models to help identify potential risks and vulnerabilities, including data breaches, service attacks, and other types of unauthorized access or unacceptable usage. Your team should also take the time to ensure the project aligns with current compliance requirements, such as GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI DSS.

The requirements and analysis phase has teams gather additional user requirements and experience data. By analyzing your target audience, your team can create a focused product offering that better addresses end-user needs. SSDLC ensures your team emphasizes security.

Through the analysis phase, your team should clearly define security requirements and note how they interact with user stories. For example, your users may need to create a password or use 2FA authentication to keep their accounts secure. It's a good idea to have your team create data flow diagrams to represent data moving within your system, and creating these diagrams and the threat models they represent in collaboration with your clients is key.

The design and prototyping phase is an exciting challenge for developers, enabling teams to dive into creating detailed software blueprints. Within a standard SDLC workflow, your team focuses on outlining software architecture and the user interface and defining data structures.

Development teams following an SSDLC pipeline emphasize secure architecture design more during this phase. Implement security controls, such as authentication and input validation, while defining secure coding standards for your development team. The latter can be as simple as building a system with the least privilege, granting users only necessary permissions.

When your team dives into the development phase in an SSDLC workflow, it becomes about more than writing and integrating code. An added priority is placed on secure coding practices, preventing vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, or other relevant project risks. Teams should regularly conduct peer code reviews to assist with such practices, identifying potential issues or gaps that could go overlooked.

One way companies can improve their development phase is to use analysis tools to oversee the process. For example, you might integrate input validation and sanitization routines to prevent injection attacks or use code quality tools. On a team level, you can rely on a solution such as Pluralsight Flow to see how developers collaborate and implement required solutions in real time.

In the testing phase, most teams in the SDLC workflow focus on security, identifying potential vulnerabilities within their product offering. But your team has been doing that from the beginning, thanks to their SSDLC approach, so what do they do now? They continue to test software and identify more potential security vulnerabilities and bugs. The job of a security-forward development team is never done, and now that threat models and how they're addressed are part of your customer acceptance criteria, the testing phase is how we generate evidence in support of our claims of correctness. 

In the testing phase, give your application or service a dose of the real world by performing detailed penetration tests and vulnerability scans. Your team has been working through various phases to eliminate security threats, and it's now time to test how well their hard work has paid off. Conducting these additional security tests can help to identify any issues that may have been overlooked.

You're approaching the finish line, but there is still more work to do in the deployment phase. Most teams know that deploying software is more complex than hitting a button and pushing something to production. However, teams might need to learn the added focus they should place on security during this sensitive phase. 

Your team should begin by reviewing their deployment configurations before pushing anything live. For example, ensure your operating system is adequately patched and has any unnecessary services disabled, and use software deployment tools to assist with the process. It can help to isolate critical systems and those with sensitive data on a separate network or subnet. 

Throughout the process, have your team develop and test an incident response plan for any security breaches, relying on monitoring to detect and respond to such incidents.

Once your software is out the door, your security measures aren't finished. In addition to providing ongoing support, addressing bugs, and introducing new features, your team must remain focused on security. Prepare your team to promptly apply any required security patches to address vulnerabilities and continuously monitor for new and evolving threats. Your team may also want to conduct regular security audits.

Another critical element of the maintenance phase is data disposal. Ensure your team correctly disposes of sensitive data when it's no longer needed. Or, if your team is upgrading hardware, follow a secure procedure for data erasure that follows any previously set compliance requirements.

Implementing a successful SSDLC process and improving your security posture takes effort from team leaders and members alike. It also takes time, requiring everyone to pitch in. Here are a few tips to help your team build a successful SSDLC development pipeline.

• Conduct regular security and penetration tests: Testing can help identify potential vulnerabilities before hackers exploit them. Consider automated scans and penetration testing.
• Establish a clear incident response plan: Create a plan in case of a security breach so your team knows what to do first. Be sure to communicate team roles and responsibilities.
• Foster a development culture focused on security: Creating a successful SSDLC workflow is about team culture. Discuss how security is a shared responsibility and provide regular training and recognition for developers.
• Implement secure deployment practices: Popular techniques for a more secure SSDLC include least privilege, change management, and secure configuration management practices.
• Promote ongoing learning and knowledge opportunities: Keep your team growing with security awareness training, conferences, workshops, and internal knowledge-sharing events.
• Train developers on secure coding practices: Start from the moment of code creation by enacting secure coding standards and guidelines followed by a detailed code review checklist.

If you still have questions about SSDLC, we have answers. We've been helping connect developers with knowledge for decades. Here are answers to the most frequently asked questions we receive about SSDLC practices.

An organization might require developers to follow an SSDLC process to help mitigate risk, ensure regulatory compliance, and improve overall security posture. Following an SSDLC workflow can also increase overall customer satisfaction by improving customer trust and reducing downtime due to the proactive mitigation of potential issues.

Yes! SSDLC is very widely used within the modern development world to help address constantly evolving threats. Teams that follow SSDLC workflows integrate security into every part of their development process, creating better developer and customer experiences while reducing costs for addressing security and compliance incidents.

Agile development is one of many SDLC methodologies that aim to help your team navigate the development process. The phases within the typical SDLC process are more akin to a linear development methodology, but you can still employ its overall principles within an Agile development environment. The same concepts apply to SSDLC, whose tenets focus on creating a more secure, compliant environment.

Building an SSDLC workflow within your team can be challenging, but its implementation can help your team deliver more reliable software and reduce security testing time. Use Pluralsight Flow's software engineering metrics analysis to understand your team's progress, gaining insight into changing cycle times, unplanned work, and overall impact.

Contact us and see how you can transform your team's practices.