Grokking Application Security: Malcolm McDonald on Securing Your Apps

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Show Notes

"This should be a mantra for anyone working on web applications or web APIs: you should validate any input of the application as much as possible. When you conceptualize it, all the malicious input into your application comes across in an HTTP request at some point. It's either in the URL or in the body. That's generally speaking, unless you have a supply chain attack, that's generally the vector by which your application will be attacked. Before you even start to kind of think about specific vulnerabilities, if you narrow down what is permissible input right out of the gate, then you kind of close the door on so many different vulnerabilities without even thinking about it."— Malcolm McDonald

Welcome friends to The Modern .NET Show; the premier .NET podcast, focusing entirely on the knowledge, tools, and frameworks that all .NET developers should have in their toolbox. We are the go-to podcast for .NET developers worldwide, and I am your host: Jamie "GaProgMan" Taylor.

In this episode, Malcolm McDonald joined us to talk about the importance of Application Security, knowing the basics of secure coding, and backing that all up with both "secure by default" designs, and subscribing to CVE notifications.

"So what you find in your career is that if you set down kind of sensible default behaviour in your codebase earlier on, then everyone will follow that. You establish, kind of, best practices. It might take a little bit longer, but if you say, "this is the way we do this over here," then even yourself when you, kind of, come back to, will kind of, reproduce that path. So the initial, kind of, like first few check-ins to your source control are key to, like, establishing best practice"— Malcolm McDonald

One note before we begin: some of Malcolm's audio is a little rough. Mark, our superstar editor, has done what he can, but there are parts that might be a little unclear. If you have trouble with the audio, please remember that there is a full transcription linked in the accompanying show notes.

Anyway, without further ado, let's sit back, open up a terminal, type in `dotnet new podcast` and we'll dive into the core of Modern .NET.

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Full Show Notes

The full show notes, including links to some of the things we discussed and a full transcription of this episode, can be found at: https://dotnetcore.show/season-7/grokking-application-security-malcolm-mcdonald-on-securing-your-apps/

Useful Links

• Malcolm on LinkedIn
• Grokking Application Security
• Hacksplaining
• Hash function
• Don't Accept The Defaults
• Bcrypt

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Music created by Mono Memory Music, licensed to RJJ Software for use in The Modern .NET Show