Building Secure and Reliable Java Applications: Best Practices and Its Synergy With AI

Let’s say, you are a developer who relied on code scanning and testing to ensure the security of your developed software.

But with the widespread adoption of secure coding practices, you’re responsible for ensuring data protection, improved software quality, regulation compliance, and more. Now, you have to create software with a focus on preventing security vulnerabilities and minimizing potential malicious exploitation. These risks include injection attacks, cross-site scripting, authentication & authorization flaws, insecure session management, etc.

Here, choosing a secure programming language like Java could be your safest bet.

– According to the TIOBE Index, Java is used by over 90% of Fortune 500 companies globally.
– Java is also the 6th most used programming language by developers, globally.

In this blog post, we’ll deep dive into Java’s security features, its application with AI, best practices for writing secure Java codes, and why it is being used for building AI solutions.

Let’s get started, shall we?

Features That Make Java a Secure Programming Language

1. Automatic Memory Management: Java’s garbage collection feature ensures the development of robust and clean code by automatically removing unnecessary objects. Also, this feature enhances code security through improved software testing and by preventing memory leaks. As a result, it mitigates potential vulnerabilities.

2. Strong Data Typing: Strong data typing in Java ensures that variables are explicitly declared with specific data types. This promotes type safety, prevents unexpected data conversions, enhances code reliability, and helps catch errors at compile-time rather than runtime.

3. Bytecode Verification: Java’s bytecode verification checks the validity and safety of the bytecode or instruction set, before execution. This verification process includes checks for type safety, operand stack management, control flow integrity, and other security-related aspects. If any bytecode fails the verification, a verification error is thrown, preventing the execution of potentially unsafe code.

4. Secure Class Loading: Java’s secure class loading feature refers to the mechanism that ensures the loading and verification of classes in a controlled and secure manner. This process includes steps like:

• Access control, allowing only authorized classes or resources to be loaded.

• Class loading Sandbox, isolating the loaded classes from system resources and preventing them from accessing sensitive operations or executing malicious actions.

• Namespace enforcement, preventing malicious actors from forging and running classes with the same name as trusted classes and running them on the system, etc.

5. Security APIs: Java provides a range of APIs for secure network communication and simplified development of reliable Java code. These include:

• SSL/TLS that ensures encrypted communication.

• SASL that enables various authentication mechanisms.

• GSS-API that offers a framework for building secure client-server applications, etc.

These APIs enable developers to implement secure network protocols, authentication, and data integrity features in their Java applications efficiently.

Exploring the Paradox: AI and Java’s Ironical Relationship

With evolving digital technology, Java developers can improve their coding prowess and productivity by seeking innovative AI tools such as ChatGPT, OpenAI Codex, GitHub, Co-pilot, Code T5, Deepcode, etc.

These AI tools simplify the tasks involved in the coding process by generating human-like text (code) based on the received inputs. Also, these provide programming information, guidance, & alternatives, and suggest the best security practices.

AI tools make developers more efficient, but it’s important to understand that these solutions emphasize the ultimate responsibility of developers and programmers to write secure code. Thus, your codes would be as good as your intentions and depth of understanding.

So how do you write secured Java codes?

Top 5 Practices to Boost the Effectiveness and Reliability of Your Java Codes

1. Use Tested Libraries

Leveraging public libraries and frameworks while creating Java applications can introduce potential loopholes that malicious attackers can exploit. As you entrust your business to these libraries, it is crucial to choose reputable ones. You can achieve this by identifying your requirements, evaluating existing libraries, checking for vulnerabilities and updates, using dependency management tools, regularly updating libraries, and testing integration & compatibility.

2. Avoid Serialization

Since Cisco and Jenkins’ applications have highlighted vulnerabilities related to Java serialization, this process is being discontinued by organizations.

That’s why ensure that your applications don’t accept serialized Java objects – susceptible to attacks – regardless of whether the responsibility lies with a library or framework. Also, when making interfaces serializable, avoid accidental serialization of security-sensitive classes by using practices like subclassing or interface implementation.

3. Hash User Your Passwords

Storing passwords as plain text is a significant security risk. With Java, you can enhance security by using hash user passwords using a recommended algorithm like SHA-2 and adding a secure salt value. This would transform your password into an encrypted form using a predefined key specific to the Java application. Furthermore, by combining the password, key, and hashing algorithm, a unique hash value would be generated.

4. Error Handling and Logging

User error messages and log files can unintentionally expose your sensitive information like account or system details. With Java, you can mitigate this risk by displaying generic error messages to users. Additionally, while logging errors, ensure that these messages assist your support team in resolving issues without divulging information that attackers could exploit.

5. Prevent Injection Attacks

Injection attacks, such as SQL injection and XPath injection, pose a significant security risk in web applications. These attacks exploit vulnerabilities arising from insufficient user input validation.

With Java, you can prevent these injections by avoiding concatenating arguments in SQL statements with prepared statements, stored procedures, and whitelist input validation.

Additionally, you can prevent cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks by filtering inputs, encoding output, and using JavaScript Unicode escapes.

Why Is Java a Good Choice for AI and ML Developers?

The field of artificial intelligence (AI) encompasses a wide range of tools, languages, and libraries. There is no single best programming language for AI as it would depend on specific project requirements.

However, as per Evans Data, 37.8%^[i] developers use Java as the programming language for creating AI and ML-based applications.

Java is a popular choice for AI due to its scalability, cross-platform compatibility, extensive libraries, and strong community. Not just this, it also offers easy-to-code algorithms and support for large-scale projects.

Additionally, various AI libraries in Java such as Apache Jena, Neuroph, and Weka, cater to expert systems, neural networks, natural language processing, machine learning, genetic algorithms, and automatic programming.

With its advanced features like integration capabilities and enterprise-level support, Java enables businesses to build scalable, secure, and powerful applications. So work out the semantics of Java with a bigger picture at the forefront – operational efficiency, organizational growth, cost-effectiveness, and ROI.

Ready to Build Secure Software Code With Java and AI? Talk to Us!

References:

^[i] BlogsOracle