Best Cryptography Practices For Developers

Featuring at the second position on the revised OWASP Top 10 list for 2021, cryptography vulnerabilities have now been rechristened Cryptographic Failures to accurately define the primary cause of the problem rather than the symptom. With major businesses falling victim to ransomware, organizations can no longer cut corners with cryptography security. Managing encryption has gained functional centre stage just as other critical departments like logistics, marketing, or public relations. It must be remembered that for managing business risks, you must first manage software risks. To secure communication in transit and information at rest, messages are made indecipherable without a key using cryptography algorithms. These signature algorithms are used for cryptographic key generation, identity verification, digital signing, securing credit card transactions, and email.

To increase your cryptography security, here are some best practices:

Secure development cryptography

Protecting cryptographic assets should perhaps be the topmost priority of DevOps teams. Unfortunately, despite using cryptographic keys and certificates to protect data in transit and at rest, the security of the DevOps teams remains lax. A 2021 study by cybersecurity firm Venafi polled over 430 IT professionals in DevOps teams and found that organizations failed to enforce vital certificate security measures. The study stressed that the security of keys and certificates required more attention. When keys and certificates used by DevOps teams are not adequately protected, cybercriminals can exploit SSL/TLS keys and certificates to create their encrypted tunnels. Attackers who use misappropriated SSH keys to pivot inside the network misuse their privileged access, install malware, and exfiltrate bulk corporate data and IP while remaining undetected throughout the process.

Implement established cryptography

It’s not a good idea to unlock your own cryptography. Creating it can cause minor problems with monstrous consequences. When you make it, it can encrypt and decrypt for well-intentioned inputs but might fail completely for malicious inputs. Using prebuilt cryptographic primitives to build cryptographic protocols is the safest approach. By applying cryptographic methods, cryptographic protocols perform security functions by running sequences of cryptographic primitives. The function of cryptographic primitives - low-level cryptographic algorithms, is to carry out a specific task in a defined and highly reliable way. Cryptographic primitives are used by designers as the most basic building blocks when creating cryptographic systems.

Continuously encrypt

Encryption protects data at rest and in transit, as all development requires transmitting and storing sensitive data. An encrypted ciphertext is created from plain text by the process called encryption, which uses an algorithm and a key. If the same key is used repeatedly, a given algorithm will continually transform the exact plain text into the same ciphertext. An algorithm is considered safe when the attacker cannot determine the properties of the plain text or key when the ciphertext is given. The purpose of encryption is to make the data unreadable to anyone except the person who possesses the encryption key. In symmetric algorithms, both the encryption and the decryption keys are the same, and the decryption key can easily be derived from the encryption key or vice versa. In asymmetric algorithms, there are two keys: the private and the public key. While the public key can be published, the private key must remain secret.

Key management

Key management is essential to understanding cryptographic best practices. Developers protect and manage cryptographic keys by employing key management. The key management determines how developers exchange, generate, store, use and replace keys at the user level. Key servers, user procedures, and protocols using cryptographic protocol design are all parts of a key management system. Successful key management determines the security of a cryptographic system. It addresses four tasks: key lifecycle management, which includes generation, distribution, and destruction, key compromise, recovery and zeroization, key storage and key agreement.

Secure password storage

Passwords should not be accessible to hackers even if the database or application is compromised. Most modern languages and frameworks provide built-in functionality for storing passwords safely. Today, bots perform almost all brute force attacks, while in the days bygone, brute force attacks were done manually. Simply put, a brute force attack is when an attacker submits several passwords or passphrases simultaneously with the hope of identifying the right password. Often via security breaches or the dark web, attackers usually have a list of real user credentials. Bots systematically attack websites using these user credentials and identify the attacker when they gain access. The way around this is never to store passwords in plain text but to force passwords through an irreversible, one-way adaptive function with a strong work factor.

Cybalt’s application security services help mitigate the risks posed by unsecured applications by identifying vulnerabilities in your applications' security services code and architecture during the build as well as production stages. We also help with the remediation to avoid costly application security services incidents. Secure your applications at the coding level with Cybalt. Make them less vulnerable to cyber threats by controlling how the applications respond to unexpected inputs that exploit weaknesses. This gives your business more control over the outcome of unforeseen inputs, making you immune to any breaches.