Step 8: No Back Doors
It’s common for developers and system administrators to want to put back doors into an application. A back door is a type of shortcut—a way for people to bypass security. Examples of back doors include secret command-line switches that start the application in an insecure mode, all-powerful developer logon accounts, and logon accounts with blank or easy-to-remember passwords. Back doors are usually created to speed up implementation (so developers don’t have to go through tedious security checks to test their code) or as a safeguard in case developers inadvertently lock themselves out of the system while developing it.
There are three major problems with putting in back doors:
Back doors hide usability problems. If the system ...
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