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Recommendations for securing a development lifecycle

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Applies to this Power Platform Well-Architected Security checklist recommendation:

SE:02 Maintain a secure development lifecycle by using a hardened, mostly automated, and auditable software supply chain. Incorporate a secure design by using threat modeling to safeguard against security-defeating implementations.

This guide describes the recommendations for securing your code and development environment by applying security best practices throughout the development cycle.

At the core of a workload are the components that implement the business logic. These components can be a mix of low-code elements like canvas apps and flows, and code-first elements like plugins. All components that make up your workload must be free of security defects to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Securing the infrastructure plane with identity and networking controls is important, but it's not enough. Prevent poor implementation of Power Platform workloads and compromised activities in those workloads to strengthen your overall security posture. The process of integrating security into your development lifecycle is essentially a hardening process. Just like resource hardening, tightening up code development is also context-agnostic. The focus is on enhancing security, not on the functional requirements of the application.

Definitions

Term Definition
Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) A set of practices provided by Microsoft that supports security assurance and compliance requirements.
Software development lifecycle (SDLC) A multistage, systematic process for developing software systems.

Key design strategies

Security measures should be integrated at multiple points into your existing Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) to ensure:

  • Design choices don't lead to security gaps.
  • Low-code and code-first components as well as configuration don't create vulnerabilities because of exploitable implementation and improper coding practices.
  • Low-code and code-first components and deployment processes aren't tampered with.
  • Vulnerabilities revealed through incidents are mitigated.
  • Compliance requirements aren't compromised or reduced.
  • Audit logging is implemented in all environments.

The following sections provide security strategies for the commonly practiced phases of SDLC.

Requirements phase

The goal of the requirements phase is to gather and analyze the functional and nonfunctional requirements for a workload or a new feature of a workload. This phase is important because it facilitates the creation of guardrails that are tailored to the objectives of the workload. Protecting the data and integrity of your workload should be a core requirement throughout every phase of the development lifecycle.

For example, consider a workload where users will enter and modify data within an application. The security design choices should cover assurances for the user's interaction with the data, like authenticating and authorizing the user identity, and allowing only permitted actions on the data. Nonfunctional requirements cover availability, usability, and maintainability. Security choices should include segmentation boundaries, firewall ingress and egress, and other cross-cutting security concerns.

All these decisions should lead to a good definition of the security posture of the workload. Document the security requirements in an agreed-upon specification and reflect them in the backlog. The document should explicitly state the security investments and the tradeoffs and risks that the business is willing to take on if the investments aren't approved by business stakeholders. For example, you might document the need to use an IP firewall in Power Platform environments to protect your organizational data by restricting to Dataverse access to only allowed IP locations. If business stakeholders aren't willing to bear the extra cost of using a solution like Managed Environments, they must be ready to accept the risk of organizational resources being accessed from public locations, such as a coffee shop. As another example, imagine that your application must connect to a third-party data source. Power Platform might have a ready-made connector for this, but it may not support the authentication requirements approved by your security teams. In this case, your security stakeholders may be willing to accept the risk of using an unapproved authentication method. Alternatively, you might explore using a custom connector, while weighing the benefits of increased development time and potential project delay.

Security requirement gathering is a critical part of this phase. Without this effort, the design and implementation phases will be based on unstated choices, which can lead to security gaps or changing requirements that will increase development time. You might need to change the implementation later to accommodate security, which can be expensive.

Design phase

During this phase, the security requirements are converted to technical requirements. In your technical specification, document all design decisions to prevent ambiguity during implementation. Here are some typical tasks:

  • Define the security dimension of the architecture. Overlay the architecture with security controls. For example, controls that are practical on the network isolation boundaries, the types of identities and authentication methods needed for the components of the workload, and the type of encryption methods to use.

  • Evaluate platform-provided affordances. It's important to understand the division of responsibility between you and Power Platform. Avoid overlap or duplication with Power Platform native security controls. You'll get better security coverage and be able to reallocate development resources to the needs of the application.

    For example, instead of creating custom logic that reactively identifies and alerts on unapproved usage patterns in apps and flows, use Data Loss Prevention policies to categorize how connectors can be used.

    Choose only trusted reference implementations, templates, code components, scripts, and libraries. Your design should also specify secure version control. Application dependencies should be sourced from trusted parties. Third-party vendors should be able to meet your security requirements and share their responsible disclosure plan. Any security incident should be promptly reported so that you can take necessary actions. Also, certain libraries or reference implementations might be prohibited by your organization. For example, even if it's secure and free from vulnerabilities, it might still be disallowed because it uses features not yet approved by your organization, licensing restrictions, or the support model of the reference implementation.

    To ensure that this guidance is followed, maintain a list of approved and/or unapproved frameworks, libraries, and vendors, and ensure your makers are familiar with this list. When possible, place guardrails in the development pipelines to support the list. As much as possible, automate the use of tools to scan dependencies for vulnerabilities.

  • Store application secrets securely. Securely implement the use of application secrets and pre-shared keys that your application uses. Credentials and application secrets should never be stored in the source code of the workload (app or flow). Use external resources like Azure Key Vault to ensure that, if your source code becomes available to a potential attacker, no further access can be obtained.

  • Connect to your data securely. Make use of the strong security features that Microsoft Dataverse offers to safeguard your data, such as role-based and column-level security. For other data sources, use connectors that have secure authentication methods. Avoid queries that store username and password in plain text. Avoid HTTP for creating custom connectors.

  • Define how end users will interact with the workload and data. Consider if users will have direct access to the data, what level of access they require, and from where they'll access the data. Think about how applications will be shared with end users. Make sure that only those who need access to the app and data will have access. Avoid complex security models that encourage workarounds to avoid security blockers.

  • Avoid hard coding. Avoid hard-coding of URLs and keys. For example, avoid hard-coding in a Power Automate HTTP action the URL or key to the backend service. Instead use a custom connector or use an environment variable for the URL, and Azure Key Vault for the API key.

  • Define test plans. Define clear test cases for security requirements. Evaluate whether you can automate those tests in your pipelines. If your team has processes for manual testing, include security requirements for those tests.

Note

Perform threat modeling during this phase. Threat modeling can confirm that design choices are aligned with security requirements and expose gaps that you should mitigate. If your workload handles highly sensitive data, invest in security experts who can help you conduct threat modelling.

The initial threat modeling exercise should occur during the design phase when the software's architecture and high-level design are being defined. Doing it during that phase helps you to identify potential security issues before they're incorporated into the system's structure. However, this exercise isn't a one-time activity. It's a continuous process that should continue throughout the software's evolution.

For more information, see Recommendations on threat analysis.

Development and testing phase

During this phase, the goal is to prevent security defects and tampering in code, build, and deployment pipelines.

Be well-trained in secure code practices

The development team should have training in secure coding practices. For example, developers should be familiar with security concepts in Microsoft Dataverse to implement a least-privilege security model, content security policies for model-driven apps to restrict embedding to trusted domains, and connector/on-premise gateway authentication methods.

Developers should be required to complete this training before they start working on Power Platform workloads.

Perform internal peer code reviews to promote continuous learning.

Use code analysis tools

Solution Checker should be used for Power Platform resources, and source code of any traditional code could be checked for potential security flaws, including the presence of credentials in code. Identify possible instances of credential and secret exposure in source code and configuration files. This is a good time to review how connection credentials will be handled in production.

Perform fuzz testing

Use malformed and unexpected data to check for vulnerabilities and validate error handling, particularly important with solutions that include Power Pages.

Write just enough code

When you reduce your code footprint, you also reduce the chances of security defects. Reuse code and libraries that are already in use and have been through security validations instead of duplicating code. Open-source software detection and checking of version, vulnerability, and legal obligations. There is a growing amount of open-source Power Platform resources so this should not be overlooked. When possible, this should be discussed during the design phase to avoid last-minute issues.

Protect developer environments

Developer workstations need to be protected with strong network and identity controls to prevent exposure. Make sure security updates are applied diligently.

The source code repository must be safeguarded as well. Grant access to code repositories on a need-to-know basis and reduce exposure of vulnerabilities as much as possible to avoid attacks. Have a thorough process to review code for security vulnerabilities. Use security groups for that purpose, and implement an approval process that's based on business justifications.

Secure code deployments

It's not enough just to secure code. If it runs in exploitable pipelines, all security efforts are futile and incomplete. Build and release environments must also be protected because you want to prevent bad actors from running malicious code in your pipeline.

Maintain an up-to-date inventory of every component that's integrated into your application

Every new component that's integrated into an application increases the attack surface. To ensure proper accountability and alerting when new components are added or updated, you should have an inventory of these components. On a regular basis, check that your manifest matches what's in your build process. Doing so helps ensure that no new components that contain back doors or other malware are added unexpectedly.

We recommend using Pipelines for Power Platform for your deployments. Extend pipelines using GitHub Actions. If you use GitHub workflows, prefer Microsoft-authored tasks. Also, validate tasks because they run in the security context of your pipeline.

Explore the use of service principals for deployment.

Production phase

The production phase presents the last responsible opportunity to fix security gaps. Keep a record of the golden image that's released in production.

Keep versioned artifacts

Keep a catalog of all deployed assets and their versions. This information is useful during incident triage, when you're mitigating issues, and when you're getting the system back to working state. Versioned assets can also be compared against published Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) notices. You should use automation to perform these comparisons.

Emergency fixes

Your automated pipeline design should have the flexibility to support both regular and emergency deployments. This flexibility is important to support rapid and responsible security fixes.

A release is typically associated with multiple approval gates. Consider creating an emergency process to accelerate security fixes. The process might involve communication among teams. The pipeline should allow for quick roll-forward and rollback deployments that address security fixes, critical bugs, and code updates that occur outside of the regular deployment lifecycle.

Note

Always prioritize security fixes over convenience. A security fix shouldn't introduce a regression or bug. If you want to accelerate the fix through an emergency pipeline, carefully consider which automated tests can be bypassed. Evaluate the value of each test against the execution time. For example, unit tests usually complete quickly. Integration or end-to-end tests can run for a long time.

Keep different environments separate

Production data shouldn't be used in lower environments** because those environments might not have the strict security controls that production has. Avoid connecting from a non-production application to a production database, and avoid connecting non-production components to production networks.

Use progressive exposure

Use progressive exposure to release features to a subset of users based on chosen criteria. If there are issues, the impact is minimized to those users. This approach is a common risk mitigation strategy because it reduces surface area. As the feature matures and you have more confidence in security assurances, you can gradually release it to a broader set of users.

Maintenance phase

The goal of this phase is to make sure security posture doesn't decay over time. SDLC is an ongoing agile process. Concepts covered in the preceding phases apply to this phase because requirements change over time.

Continuous improvement. Continuously assess and improve the security of the software development process by taking into account code reviews, feedback, lessons learned, and evolving threats, as well as new features made available by Power Platform.

Decommission legacy assets that are stale or no longer in use. Doing so reduces the surface area of the application.

Maintenance also includes incident fixes. If issues are found in production, they need to be promptly integrated back into the process so that they don't recur.

Continuously improve your secure coding practices to keep up with the threat landscape.

SDL in Microsoft Power Platform

Power Platform is built on a culture and methodology of secure design. Both culture and methodology are constantly reinforced through Microsoft's industry-leading Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) and Threat Modeling practices.

The Threat Modeling review process ensures that threats are identified during the design phase, mitigated, and validated to make sure they've been mitigated.

Threat Modeling also accounts for all changes to services that are already live through continuous regular reviews. Relying on the STRIDE model helps to address the most common issues with insecure design.

Microsoft's SDL is equivalent to the OWASP Software Assurance Maturity Model (SAMM). Both are built on the premise that secure design is integral to web application security. For more information, see OWASP Top 10 Risks: Mitigations in Power Platform.

Power Platform facilitation

Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) recommends secure practices that you can apply to your development lifecycle. For more information, see Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle.

Defender for DevOps and the SAST (Static Application Security Testing) tools are included as part of GitHub Advanced Security and Azure DevOps. These tools can help you track a security score for your organization.

With the solution checker feature, you can perform a rich static analysis check on your solutions against a set of best practice rules and quickly identify these problematic patterns. See Use solution checker to validate your solutions.

See also

Security checklist

Refer to the complete set of recommendations.

Security checklist