“Product security vs appsec – it’s becoming a common question in the world of product security 2024. This article looks at both terms, and puts product security vs application security head to head to understand the key differences between the terms, and what it means for your business. ”
We’ve heard a lot of questions lately around the idea of product security, from what is product security, to whether you can compare product security vs Appsec and get a clear winner. The truth is, that product security and application security are closely related, but they are not the same. Each one focuses on a different aspect of protecting hardware and software, and therefore you can’t pit them against one another and expect one or the other to come out on top. This article looks at product security vs application security in more detail so teams can truly understand the lingo.
What is Product Security?
Product security is the term used for the broad effort to protect a product – from the software elements of the product, to the hardware, firmware, supply chain, and networking.
Product security engineers look at the entire product in a holistic way to manage its security and compliance, from design and development, to deployment, maintenance, and decommissioning or sunsetting of a product at its end of life.
Let’s take an IoT device such as a smart meter. A product engineer would need to consider the security of the device itself, as well as the software, the cloud connectivity service, and its data. Product security teams could be tasked with jobs like updating devices remotely for patch management, protecting against DDoS attacks, or preventing device tampering. Another example would be the product security of a smartphone, where product security teams may need to source hardware components from trusted third parties or ensure firmware is tamper-resistant or secure against reverse engineering.
What is Application Security?
In contrast, application security focuses on protecting software applications by identifying and fixing code-based vulnerabilities. It aims to prevent attacks that can leverage weaknesses in code, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, buffer overflows, and other software-based threats.
AppSec developers will protect a wide range of software applications, for example using secure coding practices to protect a web-based eCommerce application from vulnerabilities, or using secure APIs and encrypting sensitive data for a banking app on mobile. Application security can often cover a broad remit of security tasks, including API security to ensure proper authentication is being used by third parties, or container security to monitor Docker environments.
Product Security vs Appsec
Product security and Application security are two different disciplines, but both are essential for your enterprise security strategy. One is not better or more important than the other — they simply have two separate roles. According to OWASP, “Application security focuses on code-level vulnerabilities, while product security addresses broader aspects like design flaws and supply chain risks.”
The key differences between the two types of security are to do with their focus. While product security is generally broader, covering the entire product lifecycle and additional components such as communication with additional systems and networking, application security zeroes in on the security of the application layer, managing the security of the codebase, the architecture and the runtime environment of the software.
Do Product Security and Application Security Work Together?
When a product is software-based, like a mobile app for example, application security often takes the lion’s share of the role of product security. For physical products such as connected machinery or manufacturing products, application security handles the software aspects, while product security steps in to manage hardware, networking and more.
Product security engineers and application security teams will often collaborate and work together as a team to ensure that a product has comprehensive security coverage across its entire lifecycle. Looking at the example of a manufacturing company that designs and manufactures robots for assembly lines, the product and the application security teams must work together because the robots rely on both hardware and software.
While the product security team is responsible for embedded aspects of the physical machines, such as firmware and communications, and need to consider where they securely source hardware elements from, the application security team is mainly focused on the software that controls the machines, securing the web-based control panel, and the APIs that interface with the robots. Together, the two teams ensure that the assembly line machines are secure and safe.
Checkmarx One: Application Security with the Product in Mind
Checkmarx One is a comprehensive application security platform that covers a large part of product security for today’s enterprises. It offers a full suite of enterprise AppSec solutions in a single, unified cloud-based platform. It includes tools to secure:
Code: Security should start from the first line of code, as early as possible in the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). From Static Application Security Testing (SAST) to identify vulnerabilities in custom source code to Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) to uncover flaws that can only be seen in production, Checkmarx One has you covered. This category also covers API security, mitigating API-specific risks, and uncovering shadow and zombie APIs that open your business up to unnecessary risk.
Supply chain: Applications are never a silo. Checkmarx One includes Software Composition Analysis to manage open source security and license-related risks, helps you catalog and track all software components with a comprehensive SBOM, and offers malicious package protection so that developers can use third party libraries and AI with greater freedom.
Cloud: Securing applications from code to cloud, Checkmarx One also includes container security to scan images and configurations and identify vulnerabilities both preproduction and runtime, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) security to scan for misconfigurations and compliance issues.
Together, Checkmarx One provides the fastest time to value for software-based product security, with custom scans performed in minutes, a consolidated simplified toolset that integrates into developer workflows and simplifies management, and support to implement a proven AppSec program methodology that shows results.
Looking to adopt an application security platform to cover product security needs for complex software-based products? Speak to us about scheduling a demo.