Security Think Tank: A brief history of (secure) coding | Computer Weekly
Summary
IBM mainframe coding was about writing COBOL/PLI programmes scheduled to run as overnight batch processes to read / update large complex hierarchical databases. Effective troubleshooting required awareness of architecture and at the network level – Load Balancers, DNS, port mapping, reverse proxy servers, domain navigation, certificates etc. API development means securely transferring packages of data between systems either via system-to-system RFC or webservices, and often through additional middleware or service mediation layers. It requires an understanding the full journey of API, often with data packets that are transformed from the source system to a different format that can be received by the destination, as well as the identity tokens exchange such as SAML 2.0 to OAuth 2.0. To avoid large numbers of false positives, thresholds need to be configured to ignore or set a warning for code that is secure but written using an obsolete technique.
