Secure by Design: App Security Essentials MTA
Threat modeling, secure coding, and deployment practices for web and mobile applications

About this book:

*Secure by Design: App Security Essentials* provides a comprehensive blueprint for embedding security into the entire lifecycle of web and mobile applications. The book moves beyond reactive patching, advocating for a "security-first" mindset where threat modeling, data classification, and architectural patterns like Zero Trust and defense-in-depth are integrated at the design phase. By establishing secure defaults and enforcing the principle of least privilege, developers can create resilient systems that minimize the attack surface before a single line of code is written.

The text provides a deep technical guide to core security pillars, including modern identity management (MFA, Passwordsless, and SSO), granular authorization models (RBAC and ABAC), and the rigorous handling of secrets and cryptographic keys. It offers a detailed "field guide" to the OWASP Top 10 risks, providing specific mitigations for injection, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), and Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF). Additionally, it addresses the nuances of mobile-specific security, such as hardware-backed storage (Secure Enclave/Keystore), certificate pinning, and protecting against reverse engineering through obfuscation and Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP).

The final section of the book focuses on the operational security of the modern software supply chain and deployment environments. It emphasizes the importance of securing CI/CD pipelines, verifying dependency integrity through Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs), and hardening cloud-native infrastructure like Kubernetes and containers. The book concludes by framing security as a continuous journey, where robust logging, proactive monitoring, and structured incident response protocols ensure that organizations can not only detect and contain breaches but also satisfy regulatory compliance while fostering a culture of continuous improvement.

What You'll Find Inside:

• Embed security into design with threat modeling, least privilege, defense-in-depth, and secure defaults to reduce attack surface early.
• Master modern authentication and authorization: passwordless flows, MFA, SSO, and fine-grained models like RBAC, ABAC, and ReBAC.
• Protect data throughout its lifecycle: encryption at rest and in transit, secrets management, privacy‑by‑design, and secure key handling.
• Defend against the most prevalent risks (OWASP Top 10) including injection, XSS, broken access control, SSRF, deserialization, and misconfiguration.
• Secure the entire software lifecycle: API security, supply chain transparency, hardened CI/CD pipelines, comprehensive testing, logging/monitoring, and resilient deployment across containers, Kubernetes, cloud, and mobile platforms.

Who's It For:

This book is for software engineers, architects, product leaders, DevOps engineers, and security practitioners who are responsible for building, deploying, or maintaining web and mobile applications. It provides actionable guidance for anyone who needs to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of user data and business operations, regardless of prior security expertise. Readers will gain a security‑by‑design mindset and practical patterns to ship resilient applications that meet both business and compliance requirements.