Secure Coding for Application Development

This course introduces the world of web application security using the OWASP framework, helping you understand how applications are attacked and how to defend them using secure coding and security best practices. You’ll begin by exploring how modern web applications are structured and how attackers identify and exploit vulnerabilities. The course familiarizes you with the OWASP Top 10 risk categories, common attack patterns, and real-world security challenges. From there, you’ll move into the practical side of security analysis, examining vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), authentication flaws, and misconfigurations. You’ll learn how these vulnerabilities arise and how they impact application behavior, data security, and user trust. You will also gain hands-on exposure to dynamic security testing using OWASP ZAP, enabling you to analyze running applications, intercept traffic, and identify vulnerabilities through automated and real-time testing. The course then shifts to mitigation and defense. You’ll learn how to apply secure coding practices, implement proper input validation and output handling, and strengthen authentication, session management, and configuration security to reduce risk. By the end of this course, you will be able to: • Explain the fundamentals of web application security and the OWASP risk model. • Analyze common vulnerabilities such as injection attacks, XSS, and authentication flaws. • Identify how attackers exploit application weaknesses and assess their impact. • Perform dynamic vulnerability analysis using OWASP ZAP. • Apply secure coding techniques to prevent common web vulnerabilities. • Implement configuration hardening and defensive security practices. • Evaluate application risks and recommend structured mitigation strategies. Designed for aspiring application security professionals, developers, cybersecurity learners, and IT practitioners, this course provides a practical foundation for understanding and securing modern web applications. To be successful in this course, learners should have a basic understanding of web technologies and programming concepts. Start your journey into application security and learn how to identify, analyze, test, and defend against real-world web threats.

This program equips software developers, DevOps engineers, security engineers, and IT professionals with the foundational knowledge and practical skills required to design, build, and maintain secure software systems in modern development environments. You will begin by exploring the principles of secure coding and the real-world impact of insecure software, examining how vulnerabilities arise and how attackers exploit weaknesses in application logic, input handling, and authentication flows. Through practical examples, you will learn to differentiate between secure and insecure coding patterns and understand how early design decisions influence application security outcomes. Building on this foundation, the course introduces secure development environments and essential security analysis techniques using Linux. You will work with command-line tools to navigate file systems, analyze logs, and identify security-relevant artifacts. Using Kali Linux and regular expressions, you will perform structured analysis of logs and code to detect anomalies and potential threats. You will also explore frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK to map application-level attacks and understand how vulnerabilities are exploited in real-world scenarios, enabling a deeper understanding of attacker behavior within software systems. Next, the curriculum focuses on implementing core secure coding controls within applications. You will learn how to validate inputs to prevent injection attacks, implement secure authentication and authorization mechanisms, manage sessions effectively, and protect identity flows. Through hands-on exercises, you will apply secure coding techniques to harden application components, reduce attack surfaces, and enforce robust access controls that align with modern security best practices. The course then advances into the Secure Software Development Lifecycle (SSDLC), where you will integrate security across all phases of development—from requirements and design to testing and deployment. You will explore how to embed security controls early through shift-left practices, apply basic threat modeling techniques to identify risks, and incorporate security testing approaches such as Static Application Security Testing (SAST) and Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST). You will also learn how to establish feedback loops that continuously improve code security and reduce vulnerabilities over time. Finally, the program introduces DevSecOps principles and security automation in modern CI/CD pipelines. You will learn how to integrate automated security checks into development workflows, enforce security gates, and manage dependency risks using Software Composition Analysis (SCA). Through practical scenarios, you will understand how security becomes a continuous, automated process that supports faster and safer software delivery. The course culminates in a comprehensive practice project where you will apply secure coding practices, SSDLC principles, and DevSecOps controls to design and evaluate a secure release workflow. By the end of this course, you will be able to: -Analyze the impact of insecure software and identify common vulnerability patterns in application code. -Apply secure coding practices to prevent injection attacks, enforce authentication, and manage sessions securely. -Use Linux-based tools and techniques to analyze logs, detect threats, and support secure development workflows. -Implement SSDLC practices by integrating security controls across development, testing, and release phases. -Apply threat modeling concepts to identify and mitigate risks early in the development lifecycle. -Use SAST and DAST techniques to detect vulnerabilities and improve application security. -Integrate automated security checks and dependency analysis within CI/CD pipelines using DevSecOps practices. -Design and evaluate secure software delivery workflows that align with modern security and compliance standards. This course is designed for: Software Developers and Application Engineers DevOps and Platform Engineers Security Engineers and Application Security Professionals IT Professionals and System Administrators Students and Early-Career Software and Security Practitioners