Application and Infrastructure Security

Security in modern software development is not a separate discipline imposed at the end of the delivery cycle—it’s an engineering constraint woven throughout design, development, deployment, and operations. This collection examines practical security practices that reduce risk without becoming paralyzing bureaucracy.

Foundational Security Practices

Secure Coding and Design begins with understanding common vulnerability categories and threat models relevant to your application. OWASP Top 10, injection attacks, authentication bypass, insecure deserialization, and information disclosure require continuous awareness and proactive mitigation.

Dependency Management and Supply Chain Security address one of the most critical attack vectors: compromised libraries and transitive dependencies. Practices include automated vulnerability scanning, dependency updates, license compliance, and integrity verification.

Secrets and Credential Management prevents the catastrophic mistake of embedding keys, passwords, and tokens in source code. Modern approaches use secret managers, identity providers, and ephemeral credentials that eliminate long-lived secrets entirely.

Infrastructure and Network Security protect systems through defense-in-depth: least-privilege network access, encryption in transit and at rest, identity-based authentication, and zero-trust principles applied to infrastructure access.

DevSecOps Integration

Articles in this section explore security practices that integrate smoothly into CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code workflows, and container ecosystems. Topics include automated scanning, policy-as-code for security rules, secure deployment pipelines, observability for security signals, and incident response automation.

The goal is security that enables shipping, not security that becomes the bottleneck. Effective security practices shift left into development, integrate into automation, and reduce manual security reviews to the decisions that actually matter.

Your Encryption Is Broken — .NET Data Protection Done Right

Every developer who has tried simple encryption with XOR and hardcoded keys eventually faces the audit that exposes their house of cards. I’ve watched production systems fail compliance assessments because someone believed base64 encoding was good enough or that compilation obscures secrets. The .NET Data Protection API exists precisely because Microsoft’s cryptography team spent years solving problems most developers don’t know they have. This isn’t about learning yet another library—it’s about understanding why professional implementations outperform clever hacks, and how Azure Key Vault integration transforms theoretical security into auditable compliance.

Your appsettings.json Is a Compliance Violation

Hardcoded secrets aren’t just bad practice—they’re ISO 27017 violations with real consequences: failed audits, denied insurance claims, contractual penalties. That connection string in your appsettings.Production.json? It represents a compliance gap your organization probably doesn’t even know exists. Azure Key Vault with Managed Identity isn’t an optional security enhancement—it’s the minimum viable implementation of standards you already claim to follow.

Audit Logging That Survives Your Next Security Incident

Your audit logs probably won’t survive a real security incident. Most implementations log too much, protect too little, and provide zero value when something breaks at 2 AM. Here’s how to fix that with structured logging that actually works.

Your [Authorize] Attribute Is Compliance Theater

Your [Authorize] attributes give you a false sense of security. ISO 27001 auditors see right through it.

I’ve reviewed dozens of ASP.NET Core apps that authenticate flawlessly — then scatter role strings across business logic, skip audit logs, and wonder why they fail compliance. Here’s the pattern that kills audits, and how to actually fix it.

Why ISO Standards Actually Matter for .NET Developers

Cloud-native .NET development has transformed ISO/IEC 27001, 27017, and 27701 from abstract compliance requirements into concrete daily coding decisions. This guide shows .NET developers how security standards directly map to Azure Key Vault integration, Azure AD authentication, and proper logging—with real code examples demonstrating compliant vs. non-compliant implementations.

Pod Identity & Access Control in AKS: What Actually Breaks

Traditional AKS authentication relied on service principals and mounted secrets. Workload Identity Federation eliminates credential lifecycle problems, but introduces new failure modes. This article covers the operational realities: where credentials still leak, how RBAC layers compound across Kubernetes and Azure, and validation patterns that prevent identity failures in production.