What is Agile Security?
Simply put, agile security is a methodology for incorporating security practices into an agile software development process, often referred to as DevSecOps or SecDevOps. The idea behind this approach is to ensure that security procedures are an inherent aspect throughout the software development lifecycle, not just during security testing.
When organizations embrace agile security, they significantly minimize the risk of security breaches, as well as costly subsequent security issue fixes by identifying and addressing security vulnerabilities earlier.
The value of combining agile and security philosophy is that it works well in a fast-paced digital environment, where software development teams are tasked with quickly delivering products and new features to the market. And agile security shows excellent results here. By integrating security practices through an agile development environment and DevOps methodologies, companies are able to prevent bottlenecks and delays, due to the fact that agile development incorporates security into every phase of the software development lifecycle, preventing many security risks.
Core Principles of Agile Security
Security in agile software development includes several key strategies and principles that are essential when it comes to improving security and streamlining the development pipeline:
Collaboration
Agile security is largely built around cooperation and clear communication between security and development teams. While traditional security approaches often lead to isolation between employees, agile methodologies promote collaboration amongst cross-functional teams, which leads to shared responsibility when it comes to security processes.
Continuous Testing
In secure software development, security testing is an ongoing process that spans the entire development lifecycle. Organizations often use automated security tools for static and dynamic analysis. This way, they integrate security into the development pipeline, allowing them to quickly find and fix vulnerabilities.
Risk Prioritization
Risk management is key in cybersecurity. Agile teams use risk-based prioritization of security concerns. This works in such a way that the most critical vulnerabilities are fixed first, instead of spreading efforts to resolve everything simultaneously. This approach allows for more efficient use of available security resources.
Flexibility & Adaptability
Agile security is among the best options when we need to respond to new threats quickly. Due to its features, the agile development process is extremely flexible, which allows for the timely implementation of necessary changes. Additionally, this approach ensures alignment of development processes and goals.
Learning & Improvement
The agile approach enhances security awareness, as it is a mindset that encourages ongoing learning and development. Combined with expanded collaboration, teams can share information and improve security operations, thereby enabling developers to build secure software.
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How Jappware Embeds Security in Agile Workflows
Sprint Planning and Backlog Grooming
In our agile development, we combine different methods to ensure application security. These are both sprint planning and backlog grooming. The first approach is a focused and time-boxed event that occurs at the start of each new sprint to set clear, prioritized goals for a short development cycle. Backlog grooming is a continuous process of reviewing, updating, and tidying up the product backlog to align the team with current priorities and facilitate efficient sprint planning. This combination provides a comprehensive approach to the development process.
Development and Coding Practices
An agile security approach is about embedding security into every stage. It covers several aspects in modern software development, from conducting source code review with a focus on security, implementing automated security testing in the CI/CD pipeline, and using Static Application Security Testing (SAST) to applying secure coding principles (such as input data validation and proper authentication), regularly updating dependencies, and threat modeling at the sprint planning stage. Our developers and security experts follow DevSecOps principles to ensure continuous integration of security controls, allowing us to identify and eliminate vulnerabilities at an early stage of development.
CI/CD and Automated Security Validation
We integrate automated security checks at every stage of deployment. Thus, CI/CD pipelines include SAST (Static Application Security Testing), DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing), SCA (Software Composition Analysis), and container security scanning. At the same time, the use of security gates allows blocking deployment in case of critical vulnerabilities, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is scanned for misconfiguration. Another important aspect is automated compliance checks to ensure compliance with standards. We perform security testing in parallel with functional tests. This approach allows us to minimize the cycle time. And the results are integrated with bug tracking systems to automatically create security tasks for developers.
Deployment with Secure Defaults
This is one of the key features in agile security. Secure-by-Default configuration minimizes the attack surface during deployment. This includes disabling unused services and applying the least privilege principle for access, as well as using strong encryption by default, secure network policies, and automated security hardening scripts.
Finally, Infrastructure as Code provides consistent, secure configurations while fail-secure mechanisms guarantee security in case of configuration errors.
Post-Deployment Monitoring and Review
Successful implementation and deployment is only part of the way—it is essential to ensure continuous improvement. We provide security monitoring through real-time threat detection, log analysis, and vulnerability scanning. In addition, security teams monitor metrics to track incidents and the performance of security controls. The use of automated alerting further enhances protection through quick notifications of suspicious activity. Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) for protection during application execution, regular security reviews to address security risks, and compliance with industry security standards are also among the security measures we apply.
Benefits of Agile Security in Practice
Agile security offers a number of valuable advantages that make this development approach one of the best solutions:
Advanced Threat Detection
Agile security easily outperforms traditional security practices by meeting modern security needs when new threats constantly emerge. The agile approach focuses on catching threats speedily. This is achieved through comprehensive security measures that identify vulnerabilities and address them. Response speed is among the key advantages of agile security, enabling the prevention of potential breaches and the protection of sensitive data.
Enhanced Collaboration
Teamwork is another value of agile security. This enables teams to improve the work dynamic among everyone involved in the project (development, operations, and security departments). Thus, security becomes everyone's job and integrates into the workflow culture.
Scalability
Agile application security is effective when it comes to growth and scaling. Agile procedures have an innate design that grows with the company, allowing for security changes and improvements to be made as needed.
Constant Enhancement
Since agile security is a continuous process that works through all your projects, teams can receive regular reviews and feedback, thereby improving security by taking into account the experience of other teams and past projects.
Challenges in Implementing Agile Security and Their Considerations
While in the traditional approach, security teams often conduct testing at the end of the development cycle, the agile approach implements security at the initial stage to identify vulnerabilities in advance. This allows you to reduce risks and avoid costly fixes in the future. At the same time, agile workflow methods also have some security challenges and concerns that should be taken into account:
Limited Visibility & Control
Since many modern applications are often built on third-party code and libraries, as well as other open-source components to speed up processes, security risks may arise. That is, you can create a secure application, but a third-party library may contain a vulnerability that might become a potential entry point for attackers. Agile security methodology often encourages developers to use libraries and third-party components to meet project demands, which complicates tracking each dependency to ensure their security.
Fragmented Ownership
In a traditional development environment, security teams conduct audits and testing from time to time. When we talk about agile environments where cross-functional teams share responsibilities, security ownership can become unclear. Also, communication problems may arise with multiple stakeholders involved in the project. This leads to security issues, since such fragmentation requires a cultural shift where everyone takes ownership of security.
Regular Code Changes
An agile approach means constantly pushing new code to repositories. Because of this, each change can lead to potential vulnerabilities. High velocity of changes increases the chances of security issues, especially if the team does not embed security within each step of the pipeline. Thus, this problem can lead to deploying vulnerable code to production, which can cause breaches and data leaks in the future.
Speed Over Security
Since among the main benefits of an agile environment are speed and flexibility, development teams can sometimes put these aspects above security, especially in cases of tight sprint deadlines. Because of this, developers can bypass security checks or avoid them, viewing them as bottlenecks. Sacrificing security to gain speed can be detrimental to the application’s overall security posture.
Developer Adoption & Engagement
Agile workflows involve multiple developers working on the same codebase simultaneously. If an organization fails to ensure that all team members follow standardized secure coding practices, problems can arise, especially as the team scales. Inconsistent practices as well as ignoring secure coding guidelines often lead to vulnerabilities, including improper data handling, lack of input validation, and insecure authentication processes.
Agile Security Best Practices
Agile security brings together a variety of practices to mitigate challenges and meet security needs, helping to identify and resolve vulnerabilities. Among the most effective practices when it comes to agile application security are:
Security as Code
Automating security checks within the CI/CD pipeline is one of the best solutions for ensuring security, as it allows for multiple tests and deployments to be run simultaneously. Following the Security as Code principle, a team can integrate security controls directly into the development pipeline, thus ensuring that code changes take into account potential vulnerabilities, and most importantly, do this even before the production stage. The Security as Code approach includes methods such as Static Application Security Testing (SAST) and Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST), which can be automated to scan each build for vulnerabilities.
Security Debt
When we talk about agile methodology, it is worth noting the concept of security debt, around which prioritization is built. This concept implies that each security story is assigned a value, and the tasks left undone are an accumulated debt. The value is usually assigned around the potential ROI, giving a better understanding of which tasks can be handled at the lowest cost during development, comparing this with possible costs for fixes in the future. In addition, prioritization contains a full examination of the system’s nature and the possible areas for attacks. After prioritization, the process of assigning related tasks to the individual team members occurs. This approach allows for better distribution of roles to cover various areas and strengthen agile security processes.
Threat Modeling & Risk-Based Testing
Threat modeling and risk-based testing are among the key aspects of secure development. During threat modeling, teams identify and assess potential risks at the design stage, which allows them to anticipate threats before writing code. At the same time, risk-based testing is about prioritizing security alerts based on the likelihood and severity of specific vulnerabilities. In this case, teams prioritize and then address those threats that pose the greatest risks. Tools such as guided remediation can help make this process faster.
Security Shifting
Shifting security left in agile development means both performing security checks earlier and embedding security thinking into the earliest stages. By incorporating security into user stories and acceptance criteria, we can ensure that security requirements are addressed from the start. At the same time, using a robust application security platform allows the use of testing tools such as SAST to shift left on application vulnerabilities and source code errors at the earliest stage and shift everywhere throughout the entire development cycle, from code-to-cloud.
Continuous Monitoring
Real-time threat detection and continuous monitoring are among the factors that make secure agile environments more effective than traditional security assessments and audits when code is deployed to production far more frequently. The agile approach emphasizes real-time threat detection to identify and address vulnerabilities, as well as continuous application monitoring to notice unusual activity, such as unauthorized access attempts or unusual data flows. This enables security teams to quickly respond and resolve threats, preventing costly fixes after a product is released.
Developers Encouragement
An agile philosophy is a great way to foster a culture of security awareness, largely due to its collaborative nature and individual responsibility for security among team members. Developers' encouragement leads to a thriving DevSecOps culture, so security becomes part of everyday work for all developers, which also ensures better communication between employees regarding practices, compliance, security guidelines, and other crucial aspects of DevSecOps.
Key Principles Behind Jappware’s Agile Security
At Jappware, we pay special attention to the principles of DevSecOps, among which it is worth noting the Security by Design approach. This means that security requirements are included from the very beginning of development, which allows us to significantly minimize the risk of critical vulnerabilities appearing after the product is released.
Additionally, our developers implement automated security testing in CI/CD pipelines, conduct regular code reviews with a focus on vulnerabilities, and apply static code analysis (SAST) and dynamic testing (DAST) to improve the security of the code and application.
Making security a key factor, we follow the principles of shared responsibility between the development and security teams, continuous vulnerability monitoring, a risk-based approach to threat prioritization, and a fail-fast mentality for rapid issue detection, as well as threat modeling at the beginning of sprints. This approach helps us quickly deliver a product without sacrificing its security in order to meet deadlines.
Summary
Agile security is formed through a combination of technologies, methodology, and team skills. At Jappware, we integrate security into agile development with built-in testing tools, CI/CD protection, and unified dashboards.
Using robust platforms provides developers with everything they need for high-speed development within a secure continuous delivery pipeline. At the same time, automated SAST and DAST tests, as well as the SCA system for working with open-source components, form a trusted DevSecOps environment between teams.
An agile culture is the best solution when it comes to delivering innovations without compromising on security and compliance. By creating a secure development ecosystem where security is ensured at all stages, from writing the first line of code to deploying to the cloud, organizations receive their product faster, without the risk of fines and loss of reputation due to critical vulnerabilities.
