Secure by Design

Design choices can create or remove entire classes of risk before code reaches production. Examples include choosing memory-safe components, separating trust boundaries, limiting privileges, protecting secrets, requiring authenticated administrative access, and reducing exposed services.

Threat modeling helps teams identify assets, trust assumptions, entry points, abuse cases, and potential impacts while architecture can still change. Security testing remains necessary, but it does not substitute for decisions made during design.

Teams translate the principle into requirements, architecture reviews, dependency controls, code review, security testing, release criteria, telemetry, update mechanisms, and vulnerability handling. They also consider how a customer can deploy and operate the product without needing uncommon expertise to activate basic safeguards.

Lifecycle responsibility continues after release. Manufacturers need a process for receiving vulnerability reports, issuing fixes, communicating risk, and supporting safe updates throughout the supported product lifetime.

• Security requirements and threat modeling
• Architecture that limits trust and privilege
• Engineering, dependency, and release controls
• Vulnerability disclosure, updates, and support

Secure by design concerns decisions made throughout planning, architecture, implementation, testing, and support. Secure by default means the initial configuration uses safer settings without requiring a customer to find and enable basic protections.

A product can satisfy one principle poorly while addressing the other. Strong architecture can still ship with risky default settings, while secure defaults cannot correct a feature whose design grants unnecessary privilege or exposes sensitive operations.