Secure Coding and Design Best Practices in Java

Learn secure coding by applying guidelines and best practices at every development stage to defend against security threats, protect data, and ensure only authorized users access sensitive information.

Define the course scope to code-level security in secure coding for Java, acknowledging multiple software layers while focusing on secure code and excluding infra and other security domains.

Targeting developers with solid coding maturity, this course teaches secure coding practices to ship secure production software in Java; not for beginners and focuses on the most critical vulnerabilities.

Learn secure design principles from Saltzer and Schroeder and embed security from the start of development, covering economy of mechanism, complete mediation, least privilege, open design, and compromise recording.

Apply the economy of design by using simple, minimal mechanisms and trusted libraries to reduce complexity, verify correctness, and minimize security vulnerabilities at the system's edges.

Configure defaults to deny access and require explicit permissions, ensuring safety during errors. Implement fail safe defaults by undoing changes and tightening access in files and networks.

Complete mediation ensures every access to a resource is checked for proper authorization through a trusted module or access control matrix, preventing direct access and unauthorized use.

Open design promotes transparency by ensuring security does not rely on secrecy; the design is open so the community can evaluate, test, and address flaws using well documented principles.

Apply the principle of least privilege by granting only the necessary access, such as read-only rights, and use access control mechanisms to reduce unauthorized access, data loss, and attacks.

Balance robust security with user-friendly design by keeping configurations intuitive, providing precise error messages, and supporting simple authentication like biometrics instead of onerous passwords.

Learn separation of privilege by dividing tasks and requiring multiple permissions, reducing risk of misuse; contrasts with least privilege and illustrates dual control with bank and defense system examples.

Minimize shared mechanisms to reduce attack paths by implementing them as user-centric libraries. Apply the least common mechanism principle with password management and cryptographic function separation to strengthen security.

Apply the work factor principle to weigh an attacker’s resources against the effort needed to bypass a security mechanism, illustrated by brute-force password calculations.

Understand the compromise recording principle, a warning-based concept paired with the work factor principle, focusing on recording breaches and trace evidence, as in a file cabinet example, to minimize damage.

Review core design principles such as economy of mechanism, failsafe defaults, complete mediation, open design, least privilege, and work factor to strengthen secure coding and design in Java.

Master ten secure coding topics to fortify web applications, from strong authentication and access control to secure configuration, encryption, trusted third-party components, input handling, comprehensive logging, and monitoring.

Learn strong authentication practices to prevent unauthorized access in web apps by using multi-factor authentication, avoiding weak passwords, and securing protocols and lockout mechanisms.

This lecture shows securing authentication by hashing passwords with a salt, retrieving the hashed password from the database, and validating with sha-256, and notes OAuth 2.0 as a practical approach.

Strengthen authentication by enforcing strong passwords and implementing mfa with sms, email verification, authenticator apps, or hardware tokens, plus https, ip rate limiting, and account lockout.

Explore how access control governs who can access what in software and why strong authorization matters. Learn models like role-based, attribute-based, and relationship-based access control, and common pitfalls.

Apply proper access control by validating the requester before querying the database, allowing admins or the profile owner to view data and rejecting unauthorized requests.

Identify secure configuration practices to strengthen a web application and prevent data breaches. Recognize misconfigurations like default settings and unnecessary services that widen the attack surface and risk unauthorized access.

Demonstrates secure file access in Java by implementing a file configuration checker that enforces owner-based permissions, and highlights broader hardening practices across cloud services and configuration management.

Protect sensitive data such as personal details, financial data, and user credentials by implementing encryption, strong password storage, data masking, and transport layer security.

Demonstrates sensitive data protection through secure authentication and configuration, showing password hashing with a strong algorithm, using a cat array for passwords, and securing file permissions.

Evaluate third-party components to avoid outdated, vulnerable, or malicious dependencies from untrusted sources, and keep dependencies up to date by reviewing dependency chains and insecure defaults.

Rely on trusted libraries and always use the latest stable version to prevent remote code execution from vulnerabilities like Log Forge with JNDI lookups.

Explore serialization and deserialization and their security implications, including insecure deserialization, injection risks, denial of service, and protecting sensitive data through proper validation and refactoring.

Demonstrate serialization and deserialization of a Java bean object using XML with an XML decoder. Learn the risks of untrusted XML data, and implement sanitization and validation before deserialization.

Learn how precise logging and real-time monitoring strengthen incident response and threat detection in secure Java coding, while avoiding incomplete, excessive, or missing log details.

Improve Java secure coding through precise logging and monitoring by capturing action, sender, receiver, and amount in transaction logs while avoiding sensitive data, enabling better incident response and anomaly detection.

Implement robust server side request validations to protect user data and application integrity by enforcing comprehensive input validation, data sanitization, and secure file upload checks against sql injection and xss.

Learn to protect against injection and inclusion vulnerabilities through server side request validations and input sanitization that safeguard data integrity, addressing SQL injection, command injection, and file inclusion.

Learn how SQL injection occurs when applications concatenate user input into queries, and refactor with prepared statements using placeholders and setString to safely fetch users by email.

Implement secure session management and protect configuration files, avoiding hardcoded secrets and encrypting critical values. Apply timely security patches, monitor advisories, and validate input to prevent unsafe text-to-code execution.

Explore the OWASP top ten web security risks and how to secure Java applications by addressing broken access control, injection attacks, insecure design, misconfiguration, and other critical vulnerabilities.

Demonstrates an owasp top 10 security demo using the juice shop, showing broken access control, insecure direct object references, sql injection, broken authentication, insecure configuration, and typosquatting.

Adopt a secure software development life cycle by integrating compliance, architecture reviews, secure coding, automated and manual static analysis, dynamic testing, and ongoing vulnerability checkups.

Highlight manual and automated code analysis to identify bugs, security vulnerabilities, and technical debt using static analysis tools like SonarQube and Fortify, with AI-assisted corrections.

Apply fixes to identified vulnerabilities after code analysis, implement secure coding practices, and improve design, then rerun analysis to verify resolution, guided by SonarQube and SonarLint recommendations.

Conduct regular vulnerability checkups and keep dependencies, patches, and advisories up to date. Use tools like OWASP dependency-check and OpenVAS, and collaborate with security experts for periodic trainings.

Embed security at every stage of the product development life cycle with secure software development practices, and perform code analysis and timely vulnerability checks for web applications.