Introduction to Secure Coding and Common
Vulnerabilities
Introduction to Secure Coding:
Overview of the course and the
importance of secure coding.
The role of developers in
building secure applications.
Secure coding principles:
defense in depth, least privilege, fail securely.
Common Security Vulnerabilities:
Overview of the OWASP Top 10
security vulnerabilities:
Injection flaws (SQL, command,
etc.)
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
Cross-Site Request Forgery
(CSRF)
Broken authentication and
session management
Case studies of real-world
attacks stemming from these vulnerabilities.
SQL Injection and Mitigation:
Understanding how SQL
injection attacks work.
How to prevent SQL injection:
Parameterized queries, prepared statements, ORM frameworks.
Hands-on lab
Hands-on Exercises
Securing Web Applications and Authentication
Mechanisms
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and Prevention:
Overview of XSS attacks and
their types: Stored, reflected, and DOM-based.
Best practices for preventing
XSS: Contextual encoding, input validation, and content security policies
(CSP).
Hands-on lab: Identifying and
mitigating XSS vulnerabilities in web applications.
Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) Prevention:
Understanding CSRF attacks and
their impact on web applications.
How to prevent CSRF: Anti-CSRF
tokens, SameSite cookies.
Hands-on exercise: Fixing CSRF
vulnerabilities in a sample application.
Authentication and Session Management:
Principles of secure
authentication and session management.
Secure password storage
(hashing and salting), multi-factor authentication (MFA).
Session fixation and session
hijacking: Mitigation strategies.
Hands-on lab: Implementing
secure session management in web applications.
Secure Cryptography:
Importance of cryptography in
secure coding.
Common cryptographic
techniques: AES, RSA, hashing algorithms (SHA-256).
Best practices for using
cryptographic functions: Secure key storage, encryption at rest and in transit.
Hands-on exercises
Secure Coding Practices and Code Review
Input Validation and Output Encoding:
Importance of input validation
and output encoding for security.
Whitelisting vs blacklisting
input validation.
Output encoding techniques to
prevent XSS and injection attacks.
Hands-on exercise: Securing
inputs and outputs in code.
Secure File Handling and Path Traversal:
Understanding file handling
vulnerabilities: Path traversal and unrestricted file upload.
Best practices for secure file
handling and validating file types.
Hands-on exercise: Securing
file upload functionality in web applications.
Code Review for Security:
Principles of secure code
review: Tools and techniques for identifying vulnerabilities.
Static code analysis and
dynamic application security testing (DAST) tools.
How to incorporate security
into the code review process.
Hands-on lab: Conducting a
secure code review for a sample application.
Secure Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC):
Integrating security into the
SDLC: Planning, coding, testing, and deployment phases.
Role of security testing:
Static analysis, dynamic analysis, penetration testing.
Continuous security testing
with DevSecOps practices.
Hands-on Exercises
