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3 items tagged "Touchpoints"

Related tags: Software [+], Security [+]

Justice League

Strengthening Software Security through collaboration

Posted: September 16th, 2008, 12:03pm CDT by Guest

Tags: Software Security Touchpoints [edit]

This is a guest post from Brian Mizelle, a managing principal at Cigital.

Today, Microsoft announced the launching of its SDL Pro Network. Cigital is proud to be part of this pilot offering, and pleased to continue to take the message (and the delivery) of software security to the market. As a network of independent software security professionals, the SDL Pro Network will collectively take our best of breed experiences and work collaboratively to develop unified service offerings around Microsoft’s SDL methodology.

At Cigital we are proud of our extensive experience running more than six large-scale enterprise software security initiatives spanning customers in financial services, independent software vendors, and embedded systems. We have trained several thousand developers, architects and executives on the fundamentals of software security. We have rolled out tools and best practices for many of our best customers. We have helped to grow the software security market from its infancy. Cigital is the largest and most experienced software security services provider in the world, and we look forward to continuing our market leadership through our partnership with Microsoft.

The number of firms delivering software security services is small and forms a tightly knit community, including companies of varying sizes, experience and areas of expertise. As a group, we have all read and embraced the three top software security methodologies, including CLASP from OWASP, the Touchpoints from our own CTO Dr. Gary McGraw, and of course, Microsoft’s SDL. Regardless of what flavor of methodology our customers subscribe to, we all share the common goal of educating and delivering services that protect our clients’ assets and good name through better software security. Collaborative efforts that bring together the best minds in the business can only help improve what we do with our own customers and broaden our thoughts on the subject.

Kudos to Microsoft for pulling the SDL Pro Network together. Our clients will all benefit from the experience…stay tuned to this space for more.
Software security is growing

Posted: August 12th, 2008, 4:40pm CDT by gem

Tags: Software Security Touchpoints [edit]

In April 2007, I published a darkreading article on the size of the software security space with some analysis of what was happening. It took me a bit longer to gather the numbers this year, but I finally got what I needed and published an informIT article recently explaining how software security is growing.

I am very optimistic about the growth of the software security field over the last few years. Things are certainly moving in the right direction (toward white box analysis instead of outside->in black box, out of the myopic focus on Web apps, and toward full-lifecycle programs based on the touchpoints). The numbers show this growth and these trends objectively.
On Open Source

Posted: January 9th, 2008, 11:00am CST by gem

Tags: Software Security Touchpoints [edit]
There has been a recent flurry of activity regarding security assurance on a hush-hush open source mailing list I lurk on. The debate recently has to do with formal methods versus code scanning… apples and oranges in my view. However, there’s a new flurry of press over Coverity’s use of their tool to analyze well-known globs of open source. (One poster suggested that passing a scan like this with flying colors means security has been attained… argh!)

Some pointers:

From Slashdot
Posted by: kdawson, on 2008-01-09 01:20:00

Stony Stevenson alerts us to a US Department of Homeland Security program in which subcontractors have been examining FOSS source code for security vulnerabilities. InformationWeek.com takes a glass-half-empty approach to reporting the story, saying that for FOSS code [1]on average 1 line in 1000 contains a security bug. From the article: ‘A total of 7,826 open source project defects have been fixed through the Homeland Security review, or one every two hours since it was launched in 2006…’ ZDNet Australia prefers to emphasize those FOSS projects that [2]fixed every reported bug, thus achieving a clean bill of health according to DHS. These include PHP, Perl, Python, Postfix, and Samba.

Firstly, I am a big fan of code scanning and believe that use of static analysis tools should always be one of the basic security steps integrated into every SDLC. However, there are huge problems with declaring security after passing a code scan with an arbitrary tool and a random set of rules. The most obvious issue is that security defects come in two flavors—bugs and flaws—each accounting for roughly 50% of defects in practice. Code scanning tools can only find bugs. Here are two stupid examples for effect: can a code scanning tool determine that no user authentication was performed? How about whether or not a playback attack will work?

The second most obvious problem is that the list of rules enforced by a static analysis engine can never be complete. Discussion about this is left as an exercise for the reader.

Architectural risk analysis (crazily called “threat modeling” by Microsofties) is, like code scanning, an essential software security best practice. Formal methods are one way to go about attacking the flaw problem. In the US we rely on flakier heuristic-based approaches such as the one we use at Cigital. But no matter the approach, we can’t ignore the architecture.

References
1. [www.informationweek.com]
2. [www.zdnet.com.au]