Secure SDLC Policy

secure-sdlc.md·SOC 2 · CC8.1

Generate a Secure SDLC Policy covering threat modelling, code review, dependency and secrets scanning, and the testing gates a reviewer expects before release.

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What's in the policy

Defines how security is built into design, code review, testing, and release rather than bolted on afterwards.

✓Security requirements at design time

✓Threat modelling for significant changes

✓Peer code review and approval rules

✓Dependency, secrets, and static analysis scanning

✓Pre-release security testing gates

✓Development, staging, and production environment separation

Mapped toSOC 2 (CC8.1)ISO 27001 (A.8.25)OWASP

What the document actually says

These are the standing requirements every generated copy of the document is written from — the clause text itself, not a description of it. The document you receive is drafted on top of them: it expands on them and fills the current-state detail from your intake, and the generator is instructed to keep them, to state them fully, and never to claim a certification or invent a fact you did not supply.

What has to happen before anyone writes code

- Security and privacy requirements are considered during design; significant features receive a lightweight threat model. - Data flows involving customer or personal data are documented and minimized (collect and retain only what is needed). - Security-relevant designs (auth, tenancy isolation, cryptography) are reviewed before implementation.

SOC 2 CC8.1 · ISO 27001 A.8.25, A.8.26, A.8.27 — a threat model attached to significant features, and a short named list of designs — auth, tenancy isolation, cryptography — that may not be built until somebody has reviewed them.

The review gate, and the rule about secrets

- Developers follow secure-coding practices addressing the OWASP Top 10 (injection, broken access control, SSRF, etc.). - All code is peer-reviewed before merge, with security considered as part of review. - Secrets are never committed to source control; they are stored in a secrets manager and injected at runtime. Repositories are scanned for leaked secrets. - Input is validated and output encoded; authorization is enforced server-side on every request.

SOC 2 CC8.1 · ISO 27001 A.8.28 · OWASP Top 10 — review is named as a security step rather than a style check, and the secrets rule is stated twice over: keep them out of the repository, then scan the repository anyway.

What the pipeline runs, and where real customer data may not go

- Automated tests run in CI; security testing (SAST and/or dependency scanning) is integrated into the pipeline. - Third-party dependencies are inventoried and continuously monitored for known vulnerabilities; vulnerable dependencies are updated per the Vulnerability Management Policy. - Significant releases and customer-facing applications undergo periodic penetration testing (at least annually and after major changes). … Development, staging, and production environments are separated. Production customer data is not used in development or test environments unless it is anonymized or explicitly approved with equivalent protection.

SOC 2 CC7.1/CC8.1 · ISO 27001 A.8.8, A.8.29, A.8.31 — scanning belongs inside the pipeline rather than beside it, and the environment clause names the only two conditions under which production customer data may sit in a test environment.

GitHub + GitHub Actions + Dependabot

Filled in for a real stack

Placeholder

Code review & deployment: To be confirmed. Vulnerability management: To be confirmed.

Resolved

Code review & deployment: branch protection on main requires one approving review from a second engineer plus a green GitHub Actions run, and nobody pushes to main. Vulnerability management: Dependabot alerts triaged weekly and CodeQL run on every pull request, with critical advisories patched before the next release.

What the auditor asks for alongside it

A review where somebody raised a security concern, rather than clicking approve.

Your pull-request history, read against the secure-coding clause. Security is part of the review rather than a stage after it, and the OWASP Top 10 is named as what reviewers read for — so a comment questioning an authorization check is the evidence, and one-word approvals are the gap.

The threat model for the last significant feature you shipped.

The design note you wrote for it. This document supplies the trigger and the scope: significant features receive a lightweight threat model, and designs touching auth, tenancy isolation or cryptography are reviewed before implementation. The policy says which work owes one; the note is what gets sampled.

That the scanning in the pipeline is real, and that somebody acts on what it returns.

Your CI configuration, and the drafted questionnaire answers beside it. Where a question lands on the vulnerability-management topic — the one keyed to patching and scanning — the draft is built from the vulnerability management process you enter at intake and quotes it back, the same text this document prints under Current implementation.

Proof the running application was tested from outside, not only reviewed on the way in.

The penetration test report. Its methodology is written against the OWASP Testing Guide — reconnaissance, configuration and authentication review, access-control testing, then validation of what turned up — the external counterpart to the OWASP Top 10 this policy asks developers to code against.

Where these documents go stale

A secure SDLC policy describes a pipeline, and pipelines get edited by people not reading it. A dependency scanner starts failing on a transitive advisory nobody can fix, so the job is marked non-blocking and stops gating anything. A repository is created outside the organisation and inherits none of its scanning defaults. Threat modelling lasts as long as the person who started it. Secrets scanning is added and the alerts route to a channel nobody joined. None of it edits a word of the document; all of it makes the document wrong. What re-validates it is reading the clauses against the settings: confirm the security job is a required check rather than an advisory one, walk the repository list for the ones created outside the defaults, and regenerate the document when your code review and vulnerability management answers change.

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Secure SDLC Policy, answered

What is a secure SDLC policy?

A secure SDLC policy states how security is built into each phase of software development — design, coding, review, testing, release — rather than tested for at the end. It is the document a reviewer opens to learn whether security is a stage in how you work or an event that happens to you.

What should a secure SDLC policy include?

A complete secure SDLC policy covers threat modelling for significant features, documented data flows, secure-coding standards tied to a named list such as the OWASP Top 10, mandatory peer review before merge, a secrets rule, automated security testing inside the pipeline, dependency monitoring, and separated development, staging and production environments.

How is this different from the change management policy?

Secure SDLC governs how software gets built: the threat model, the coding standard, the review, the scanners. Change management governs the authorisation wrapped around a release — who signs it off, who may deploy it, how it is taken back out. Reviewers ask for both.

Does SOC 2 require a secure SDLC policy?

SOC 2 does not list documents. CC8.1 covers the whole life of a change, from how it is designed to how it is approved and released, and most auditors accept two documents against it — one for how software is engineered, one for how a release is controlled. This is the first of those.

Does it cover AI-assisted or AI-generated code?

The Secure SDLC Policy applies its gates to code regardless of who or what authored it: peer review before merge, secrets kept out of the repository, static analysis and dependency scanning in the pipeline. Rules about which AI tools your engineers may use for that authoring sit in the AI Acceptable Use Policy.

Does the policy name specific scanning tools?

No. The Secure SDLC Policy requires security testing — static analysis, dependency scanning, or both — to be integrated into the pipeline, and leaves the product choice to you. What you actually run lands in the Current implementation section, written from the code review and vulnerability management answers you give at intake.

How does Pentest Today generate the policy?

Answer a short intake about your stack and we generate a tailored draft — not a blank template — pre-mapped to the controls your framework requires. You review, edit, and export it.

Can I edit the generated policy?

Yes. Every document is a starting draft you can edit, brand, and export. It's written to be review-ready but stays fully under your control.

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