There’s obviously more to security than humans, technology, and vendors with all of their implementations and expertise. At Heroku we believe that security is a byproduct of excellence in engineering.

All too often, software is written solely with the happy path in mind, and security assurances of that software has its own dangerous assumptions. A mature security program should challenge assumptions of security controls, move to testing continuously, and prepare for the unexpectable.

This means asking hard questions about the bigger picture. Think bigger than the development lifecycle, backing away from the fixations of confirming effective corrections and remediations. This means taking...

This blog post is adapted from a talk given by Joe Kutner at Devoxx 2018 titled "10 Mistakes Hackers Want You to Make."

Building self-defending applications and services is no longer aspirational--it’s required. Applying security patches, handling passwords correctly, sanitizing inputs, and properly encoding output is now table stakes. Our attackers keep getting better, and so must we.

In this blog post, we'll take a look at several commonly overlooked ways to secure your web apps. Many of the examples provided will be specific to Java, but any modern programming language will have equivalent tactics.

1. Ensure dependencies are up-to-date

Every year, OWASP, a group of...

Today we're excited to announce Site-to-Site Virtual Private Network (VPN) support for Heroku Private Spaces. Heroku customers can now establish secure, site-to-site IPsec connections between Private Spaces on Heroku and their offices, datacenters and deployments on non-AWS clouds.

VPN is a powerful, proven and widely-adopted technology for securely combining multiple networks (or adding individual hosts to a network) over encrypted links that span the public Internet. VPN is well-understood and in use by most enterprise IT departments, and is supported on all major cloud providers and by a range of hardware and software-based systems.

Today we’re announcing a powerful new network control for apps running in Heroku Private Spaces: Internal Routing. Apps with Internal Routing work exactly the same as other Heroku apps, except the web process type is published to an endpoint that’s routable only within the Private Space and on VPC and VPN peered networks (see the Private Space VPN support companion post). Apps with Internal Routing are impossible to access directly from the public internet, improving security and simplifying management and compliance checks for web sites, APIs and services that must not be publicly accessible.

Seccomp (short for secure computing mode) is a useful feature provided by the Linux kernel since 2.6.12. It is used to limit the system calls a process can make. Seccomp has been implemented by numerous projects such as Docker, Android, OpenSSH and Firefox to name a few.

In this blog post, I am going to show you how you can take advantage of this Golang security feature by implementing your own seccomp filters, at runtime, for a Go binary on your Dyno.

What is Seccomp?

Seccomp gives developers control over the system calls a process can make. System calls are how processes request services from the Linux kernel. If a Golang binary wants to open a file, it sends a syscall to the kernel—...