Mastering the Security Code Review

Balance security, usability, and complexity while protecting the CIA triad—confidentiality, integrity, and availability—through an efficient secure code review process that guards against disclosure, alteration, and destruction.

Mastering the security code review teaches how to manage residual risk after vulnerabilities are found and fixed, using strategies to mitigate, avoid, transfer, or accept risk with documented decisions.

Approach secure code reviews with the right attitude, seeing comments as opportunities to improve security and keep the code reliable, while collaborating with reviewers to strengthen the software.

Learn how to conduct a thoughtful security code review with constructive, respectful feedback that prioritizes critical issues, offers remediation steps, and fosters open, collaborative learning.

Approach security code reviews across four maturity levels—from ad hoc to team review—embedded in the SDLC, emphasizing iterative reviews and producing artifacts appropriate to each level.

Define the scope and requirements, align with security standards, then perform a tool-assisted manual security code review to identify vulnerabilities, document findings, collaborate with developers, and implement remediation and retest.

Integrate secure code review into the SDLC to improve application quality and defend against vulnerabilities. Leverage both waterfall and agile cycles with development sprints and deployment reviews for broad coverage.

Leverage a vulnerability list, such as the OWASP top ten, to guide security code reviews by familiarizing with items, assessing implications, and prioritizing risks through a customizable process.

Decompose the data flow diagram to scope your security code review. Map components to the source code and assess data sensitivity, risk, and required protections.

Threat modeling identifies system components, applies stride categories to threats, analyzes scenarios, prioritizes risks, and implements mitigations, then translates outputs into focused security code review tasks.

Monitor security code review metrics, including coverage, velocity, defect density, time to fix, false positives, critical issues, reviewer effectiveness, and open versus closed issues.

Explore templates for checklists, reports, and metrics to tailor your security code review process. Adapt the embedded starting-point resources—checklist, code review report, and metrics report—to fit your organization's needs.

Explore common software vulnerabilities and use an evolving security code review checklist to guide deep dives, mitigation, and adaptation to new threats.

Audit authorization and session management by enforcing least privilege roles (standard, power, admin), per-request authorization checks, secure server-side sessions with strong session ids, timeouts, and safe failure handling.

Learn how cookies can introduce vulnerabilities, inventory them, and apply http only and secure settings, encrypt sensitive data, and validate session state in code reviews.

Validate all inputs through a whitelist approach in the security code review, sanitize data, and enforce server-side validation to prevent injection attacks and backdoors.

Master the security code review with robust error handling. Trap exceptions, avoid revealing raw errors, log with size and rate limits, and audit create, update, delete events with timestamps.

Identify security anti-patterns in code reviews, where solutions look effective but weaken security posture. The lecture demonstrates how recurring problems trap developers and require human inspection to reveal them.

Learn to assess open source libraries through software composition analysis (SCA), build a software bill of materials (SBOM), and integrate SCA reports into secure code reviews to manage library risk.

Spot anti-patterns of using production data in lower environments and the security or legal risks, by checking for production connection strings, de-identification routines, and data import workflows.

Replace blacklists with allow lists to validate input during security code reviews, reducing risk from unknown threats and shrinking the tax surface for safer, more reliable apps.

Flag unsafe string concatenation as a security risk. Treat input as untrusted until validated, use whitelists, and consider context to prevent cross-site scripting and injections.

Plan for upgrades from the start to avoid unpatchable systems, emphasize backward compatibility and version management, and embrace modular design. Code to interfaces, maintain loose coupling.

Explore code crawling to scan source code for patterns signaling potential vulnerabilities, using manual or automated searches (grep, find string) and dotnet-based patterns as a language-agnostic starting point.

Inspect HTML tags and attributes to prevent cross-site scripting, validate data, and limit external content in frames, iframes, and embedded components during security code reviews.

Master the security code review by inspecting http requests, validating untrusted input, and enforcing minimum and maximum length checks and parameter whitelisting to prevent injections during code crawling.

Identify and apply proper encoding for HTML output with response.write, HttpUtility, HTML encode, and URL encode, and securely manage cookies using System.Net.Cookie, treating values as untrusted input.

Explore how .NET web server controls translate to HTML, and learn to identify input data entry points, sanitize and validate untrusted input, and encode output during secure code reviews.

Identify database connections and query patterns in your application to prevent SQL injection, avoid embedded credentials, and use typed parameters while avoiding exec statements.

Master the security-focused review of client-side JavaScript and its API calls. Identify keywords and browser concepts like Document Object Model, window, eval, and XML Http to secure risky code.

Perform SAST (static application security testing) to analyze source code for vulnerabilities, complementing manual code reviews and boosting secure coding practices through ongoing, white-box checks.

Explore common SAST tools across IDE integration, on-prem, and cloud deployments, highlighting real-time code scanning and pipeline-based scanning for balanced security coverage.

Discover how SAST supports secure code reviews across the SDLC, from in-IDE lightweight scanning to pipeline-based incremental and comprehensive scanning, with DAST and penetration testing at deployment.

Compare SAS tool coverage with secure code review by mapping the OWASP top ten to vulnerabilities, prioritizing injection and server-side request forgery, misconfigurations, and design-focused remediation.

Explore the additional content section that answers student questions, showcases demonstrations, and includes requests; discover new resources, code or cheat sheets, and occasional lessons, with updates to check back often.

Scan C-sharp code with a Windows batch script using find string to detect dangerous patterns like process.start and file.delete. Modify the folder path and patterns; run the batch and expand.