Summary
- ENISA has published a secure-by-design and secure-by-default playbook for SMEs developing products with digital elements.
- The guidance translates product security principles into actions across engineering, release, maintenance, and vulnerability handling.
- The playbook adds practical support for organisations preparing for Cyber Resilience Act obligations.
ENISA has published a secure-by-design and secure-by-default playbook for small and medium-sized enterprises developing products with digital elements, giving manufacturers a practical route into product security work as European regulatory expectations rise.
The 30 July publication, titled ENISA Secure by Design and Default Playbook, is aimed at SMEs that manufacture, develop, or support connected products and software. It is also relevant to suppliers, integrators, and service providers whose work becomes part of a product’s lifecycle.
Rather than treating secure by design as a slogan, the playbook sets out principles and actions that can be applied across engineering, product, and release processes. ENISA says many organisations, especially SMEs, face distinct challenges when applying secure-by-design and secure-by-default concepts consistently. Smaller manufacturers often have limited security engineering capacity, thinner documentation, and release processes built around speed rather than formal assurance.
The guidance arrives as the EU’s Cyber Resilience Act moves from legal framework into operational preparation. The Act will place product security duties on manufacturers of products with digital elements, including requirements around vulnerability handling, documentation, support, and lifecycle responsibility. ENISA has already published related SME material covering cyber resilience maturity, CRA readiness, and software bills of materials, creating a broader support package for smaller organisations preparing for the regime.
Secure defaults are a central part of that shift. Products shipped with excessive privileges, weak authentication, exposed services, limited logging, or optional security features that remain disabled can create risk before the buyer has configured anything. Those defaults matter in consumer, enterprise, public-sector, healthcare, industrial, and infrastructure settings, particularly where devices and software stay in service for years.
The playbook also moves product security into ordinary governance. A late-stage penetration test cannot carry all responsibility for design choices made months earlier. Secure development requires ownership of security assumptions, threat modelling that changes architecture, release checks that block preventable weaknesses, and vulnerability handling that continues after sale or deployment.
Enterprise buyers will feel the effect through procurement. As CRA obligations influence market behaviour, buyers will ask for evidence that products were designed, built, configured, and maintained securely. That evidence may include lifecycle documentation, secure update processes, vulnerability disclosure channels, component inventories, and proof that products do not depend on avoidable insecure defaults.
SMEs will not all be able to copy the product security programmes of large vendors. ENISA’s playbook gives them a more usable starting point: clear actions that can be embedded into existing processes without assuming mature security teams or heavy compliance machinery.
The practical test will come in implementation. Manufacturers need to turn the playbook into engineering habits, while buyers need to ask for enough evidence to distinguish built-in security from superficial compliance language. The direction of travel is clear: product security is becoming part of ordinary market access, not an optional feature added after release.
