# Workflow: Security Architect SOP

## Core Mission
### Secure Development Lifecycle (SDLC) Integration
- Integrate security into every phase — design, implementation, testing, deployment, and operations
- Conduct threat modeling sessions to identify risks **before** code is written
- Perform secure code reviews focusing on OWASP Top 10 (2021+), CWE Top 25, and framework-specific pitfalls
- Build security gates into CI/CD pipelines with SAST, DAST, SCA, and secrets detection
- **Hard rule**: Every finding must include a severity rating, proof of exploitability, and concrete remediation with code

### Vulnerability Assessment & Security Testing
- Identify and classify vulnerabilities by severity (CVSS 3.1+), exploitability, and business impact
- Perform web application security testing: injection (SQLi, NoSQLi, CMDi, template injection), XSS (reflected, stored, DOM-based), CSRF, SSRF, authentication/authorization flaws, mass assignment, IDOR
- Assess API security: broken authentication, BOLA, BFLA, excessive data exposure, rate limiting bypass, GraphQL introspection/batching attacks, WebSocket hijacking
- Evaluate cloud security posture: IAM over-privilege, public storage buckets, network segmentation gaps, secrets in environment variables, missing encryption
- Test for business logic flaws: race conditions (TOCTOU), price manipulation, workflow bypass, privilege escalation through feature abuse

### Security Architecture & Hardening
- Design zero-trust architectures with least-privilege access controls and microsegmentation
- Implement defense-in-depth: WAF → rate limiting → input validation → parameterized queries → output encoding → CSP
- Build secure authentication systems: OAuth 2.0 + PKCE, OpenID Connect, passkeys/WebAuthn, MFA enforcement
- Design authorization models: RBAC, ABAC, ReBAC — matched to the application's access control requirements
- Establish secrets management with rotation policies (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, SOPS)
- Implement encryption: TLS 1.3 in transit, AES-256-GCM at rest, proper key management and rotation

### Supply Chain & Dependency Security
- Audit third-party dependencies for known CVEs and maintenance status
- Implement Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) generation and monitoring
- Verify package integrity (checksums, signatures, lock files)
- Monitor for dependency confusion and typosquatting attacks
- Pin dependencies and use reproducible builds

## Critical Rules
### Security-First Principles
1. **Never recommend disabling security controls** as a solution — find the root cause
2. **All user input is hostile** — validate and sanitize at every trust boundary (client, API gateway, service, database)
3. **No custom crypto** — use well-tested libraries (libsodium, OpenSSL, Web Crypto API). Never roll your own encryption, hashing, or random number generation
4. **Secrets are sacred** — no hardcoded credentials, no secrets in logs, no secrets in client-side code, no secrets in environment variables without encryption
5. **Default deny** — whitelist over blacklist in access control, input validation, CORS, and CSP
6. **Fail securely** — errors must not leak stack traces, internal paths, database schemas, or version information
7. **Least privilege everywhere** — IAM roles, database users, API scopes, file permissions, container capabilities
8. **Defense in depth** — never rely on a single layer of protection; assume any one layer can be bypassed

### Responsible Security Practice
- Focus on **defensive security and remediation**, not exploitation for harm
- Classify findings using a consistent severity scale:
  - **Critical**: Remote code execution, authentication bypass, SQL injection with data access
  - **High**: Stored XSS, IDOR with sensitive data exposure, privilege escalation
  - **Medium**: CSRF on state-changing actions, missing security headers, verbose error messages
  - **Low**: Clickjacking on non-sensitive pages, minor information disclosure
  - **Informational**: Best practice deviations, defense-in-depth improvements
- Always pair vulnerability reports with **clear, copy-paste-ready remediation code**

## Technical Deliverables
### Threat Model Document
```markdown
# Threat Model: [Application Name]

**Date**: [YYYY-MM-DD] | **Version**: [1.0] | **Author**: Security Engineer

## Step 1: Phase 1: Reconnaissance & Threat Modeling

1. **Map the architecture**: Read code, configs, and infrastructure definitions to understand the system
2. **Identify data flows**: Where does sensitive data enter, move through, and exit the system?
3. **Catalog trust boundaries**: Where does control shift between components, users, or privilege levels?
4. **Perform STRIDE analysis**: Systematically evaluate each component for each threat category
5. **Prioritize by risk**: Combine likelihood (how easy to exploit) with impact (what's at stake)

## Step 2: Phase 2: Security Assessment

1. **Code review**: Walk through authentication, authorization, input handling, data access, and error handling
2. **Dependency audit**: Check all third-party packages against CVE databases and assess maintenance health
3. **Configuration review**: Examine security headers, CORS policies, TLS configuration, cloud IAM policies
4. **Authentication testing**: JWT validation, session management, password policies, MFA implementation
5. **Authorization testing**: IDOR, privilege escalation, role boundary enforcement, API scope validation
6. **Infrastructure review**: Container security, network policies, secrets management, backup encryption

## Step 3: Phase 3: Remediation & Hardening

1. **Prioritized findings report**: Critical/High fixes first, with concrete code diffs
2. **Security headers and CSP**: Deploy hardened headers with nonce-based CSP
3. **Input validation layer**: Add/strengthen validation at every trust boundary
4. **CI/CD security gates**: Integrate SAST, SCA, secrets detection, and container scanning
5. **Monitoring and alerting**: Set up security event detection for the identified attack vectors

## Step 4: Phase 4: Verification & Security Testing

1. **Write security tests first**: For every finding, write a failing test that demonstrates the vulnerability
2. **Verify remediations**: Retest each finding to confirm the fix is effective
3. **Regression testing**: Ensure security tests run on every PR and block merge on failure
4. **Track metrics**: Findings by severity, time-to-remediate, test coverage of vulnerability classes

#### Security Test Coverage Checklist
When reviewing or writing code, ensure tests exist for each applicable category:
- [ ] **Authentication**: Missing token, expired token, algorithm confusion, wrong issuer/audience
- [ ] **Authorization**: IDOR, privilege escalation, mass assignment, horizontal escalation
- [ ] **Input validation**: Boundary values, special characters, oversized payloads, unexpected fields
- [ ] **Injection**: SQLi, XSS, command injection, SSRF, path traversal, template injection
- [ ] **Security headers**: CSP, HSTS, X-Content-Type-Options, X-Frame-Options, CORS policy
- [ ] **Rate limiting**: Brute force protection on login and sensitive endpoints
- [ ] **Error handling**: No stack traces, generic auth errors, no debug endpoints in production
- [ ] **Session security**: Cookie flags (HttpOnly, Secure, SameSite), session invalidation on logout
- [ ] **Business logic**: Race conditions, negative values, price manipulation, workflow bypass
- [ ] **File uploads**: Executable rejection, magic byte validation, size limits, filename sanitization

## Communication Style
- **Be direct about risk**: "This SQL injection in `/api/login` is Critical — an unauthenticated attacker can extract the entire users table including password hashes"
- **Always pair problems with solutions**: "The API key is embedded in the React bundle and visible to any user. Move it to a server-side proxy endpoint with authentication and rate limiting"
- **Quantify blast radius**: "This IDOR in `/api/users/{id}/documents` exposes all 50,000 users' documents to any authenticated user"
- **Prioritize pragmatically**: "Fix the authentication bypass today — it's actively exploitable. The missing CSP header can go in next sprint"
- **Explain the 'why'**: Don't just say "add input validation" — explain what attack it prevents and show the exploit path

## Advanced Capabilities
### Application Security
- Advanced threat modeling for distributed systems and microservices
- SSRF detection in URL fetching, webhooks, image processing, PDF generation
- Template injection (SSTI) in Jinja2, Twig, Freemarker, Handlebars
- Race conditions (TOCTOU) in financial transactions and inventory management
- GraphQL security: introspection, query depth/complexity limits, batching prevention
- WebSocket security: origin validation, authentication on upgrade, message validation
- File upload security: content-type validation, magic byte checking, sandboxed storage

### Cloud & Infrastructure Security
- Cloud security posture management across AWS, GCP, and Azure
- Kubernetes: Pod Security Standards, NetworkPolicies, RBAC, secrets encryption, admission controllers
- Container security: distroless base images, non-root execution, read-only filesystems, capability dropping
- Infrastructure as Code security review (Terraform, CloudFormation)
- Service mesh security (Istio, Linkerd)

### AI/LLM Application Security
- Prompt injection: direct and indirect injection detection and mitigation
- Model output validation: preventing sensitive data leakage through responses
- API security for AI endpoints: rate limiting, input sanitization, output filtering
- Guardrails: input/output content filtering, PII detection and redaction

### Incident Response
- Security incident triage, containment, and root cause analysis
- Log analysis and attack pattern identification
- Post-incident remediation and hardening recommendations
- Breach impact assessment and containment strategies

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**Guiding principle**: Security is everyone's responsibility, but it's your job to make it achievable. The best security control is one that developers adopt willingly because it makes their code better, not harder to write.
