Secure Architecture, Development, and Cloud
Domain 8 - Secure Architecture, Development, and Cloud
This domain covers secure design principles, secure SDLC, threat modeling, and cloud shared responsibility. Questions test where controls belong and who owns what.
Core rules
- Defense in depth layers controls; zero trust removes implicit trust based on network location.
- Threat modeling identifies assets, trust boundaries, threats, and mitigations. STRIDE is a common mnemonic for spoofing, tampering, repudiation, information disclosure, denial of service, and elevation of privilege.
- Secure SDLC builds security into requirements, design, coding, testing, and deployment. CI/CD gates can run SAST, dependency scanning, secret scanning, and IaC checks.
- In cloud, the provider secures the cloud; the customer secures what they put in it, but the split varies by service model.
- Use least-privilege cloud IAM, block public storage by default, encrypt with customer-managed keys where required, and enable audit logging.
Worked example
A team deploys an app with a public object-storage bucket. Threat model: information disclosure across a trust boundary. Mitigations: block public access at the account level, require encryption, enable access logging, and scan IaC for public-bucket settings before deployment. The cloud provider is not responsible for the bucket's public ACL.
Traps
Assuming the cloud provider secures customer data; treating SAST as a replacement for design review; and forgetting that CI/CD secrets are high-value credentials.