This work aims at discussing the complexity aspect of software while demonstrating its relationship with security. Complexity is an essential part of software; however, numerous studies indicate that they increase the vulnerability of the software systems and introduce bugs in the program. Many developers face difficulty when trying to understand the complex components of software. Complexity in software increases when objects in the software are used to design a more complex object while creating a hierarchical complexity in the system. However, it is necessary for the developers to strive for minimum complexity, as increased complexity introduces security risks in the software, which can cause severe monetary and reputational damage to a government or a private organization. It even causes bodily harm to human beings with various examples found in previous years where security breaches led to severe consequences. Hence it is vital to maintain low complexity and simple design of structure. Various developers tend to introduce deliberate complexities in the system so that they do not have to write the same program twice; however, it is getting problematic for the software organizations as the demands of security are continually increasing.
Lack of security expertise among software practitioners is a problem with many implications. First, there is a deficit of security professionals to meet current needs. Additionally, even practitioners who do not plan to work in security may benefit from increased understanding of security. The goal of this paper is to aid software engineering educators in designing a comprehensive software security course by sharing an experience running a software security course for the eleventh time. Through all the eleven years of running the software security course, the course objectives have been compre…
Nowadays, the use of agile software development methods like Scrum is common in industry and academia. Considering the current attacking landscape, it is clear that developing secure software should be a main concern in all software development projects. In traditional software projects, security issues require detailed planning in an initial planning phase, typically resulting in a detailed security analysis (e.g., threat and risk analysis), a security architecture, and instructions for security implementation (e.g., specification of key sizes and cryptographic algorithms to use). Agile softw…
The software supply chain involves a multitude of tools and processes that enable software developers to write, build, and ship applications. Recently, security compromises of tools or processes has led to a surge in proposals to address these issues. However, these proposals commonly overemphasize specific solutions or conflate goals, resulting in unexpected consequences, or unclear positioning and usage. In this paper, we make the case that developing practical solutions is not possible until the community has a holistic view of the security problem; this view must include both the technical…
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is a type of software service delivery model which encompasses a broad range of business opportunities and challenges. Users and service providers are reluctant to integrate their business into SaaS due to its security concerns while at the same time they are attracted by its benefits. This article highlights SaaS utility and applicability in different environments like cloud computing, mobile cloud computing, software defined networking and Internet of things. It then embarks on the analysis of SaaS security challenges spanning across data security, application se…
In this work, we briefly introduce and discuss some of the diversity measures used in Ecology. After a succinct description and analysis of the most relevant ones, we single out the Shannon-Weiner index. We justify why it is the most informative and relevant one for measuring software diversity. Then, we show how it can be used for effectively assessing the diversity of various real software ecosystems. We discover in the process a frequently overlooked software monopoly, and its key security implications. We finally extract some conclusions from the results obtained, focusing mostly on their …
Software has become an integral part of everyday life. Everyday, millions of people perform transaction through internet, ATM, mobile phone, they send email and Egreetings, and use word processing and spreadsheet for various purpose. People use software bearing in mind that it is reliable and can be trust upon and the operation they perform is secured. Now, if these software have exploitable security hole then how can they be safe for use. Security brings value to software in terms of peoples trust. The value provided by secure software is of vital importance because many critical functions ar…
In its Vision and Strategy for Software for Science, Engineering, and Education the NSF states that it will invest in activities that: "Recognize that software strategies must include the secure and reliable deployment and operation of services, for example by campuses or national facilities or industry, where identity, authentication, authorization and assurance are crucial operational capabilities." and "Result in high-quality, usable, secure, vulnerability-free, sustainable, robust, well-tested, and maintainable/evolvable software; and which promotes the sustainability of solid and useful o…
Actually Information security becomes a very important part for the organization's intangible assets, so level of confidence and stakeholder trusted are performance indicator as successes organization. Since information security has a very important role in supporting the activities of the organization, we need a standard or benchmark which regulates governance over information security. The main objective of this paper is to implement a novel practical approach framework to the development of information security management system (ISMS) assessment and monitoring software, called by I-SolFram…
Software debloating is an emerging field of study aimed at improving the security and performance of software by removing excess library code and features that are not needed by the end user (called bloat). Software bloat is pervasive, and several debloating techniques have been proposed to address this problem. While these techniques are effective at reducing bloat, they are not practical for the average user, risk creating unsound programs and introducing vulnerabilities, and are not well suited for debloating complex software such as network protocol implementations. In this paper, we propo…
In this position paper we advocate software model checking as a technique suitable for security analysis of mobile apps. Our recommendation is based on promising results that we achieved on analysing app collusion in the context of the Android operating system. Broadly speaking, app collusion appears when, in performing a threat, several apps are working together, i.e., they exchange information which they could not obtain on their own. In this context, we developed the Kandroid tool, which provides an encoding of the Android/Smali code semantics within the K framework. Kandroid allows for sof…
In recent years, the World Economic Forum has identified software security as the most significant technological risk to the world's population, as software-intensive systems process critical data and provide critical services. This raises the question of the extent to which German companies are addressing software security in developing and operating their software products. This paper reports on the results of an extensive study among developers, product owners, and managers to answer this question. Our results show that ensuring security is a multi-faceted challenge for companies, involving…
With the increasing usage of open-source software (OSS) components, vulnerabilities embedded within them are propagated to a huge number of underlying applications. In practice, the timely application of security patches in downstream software is challenging. The main reason is that such patches do not explicitly indicate their security impacts in the documentation, which would be difficult to recognize for software maintainers and users. However, attackers can still identify these "secret" security patches by analyzing the source code and generate corresponding exploits to compromise not only…
Secure software engineering is a fundamental activity in modern software development. However, while the field of security research has been advancing quite fast, in practice, there is still a vast knowledge gap between the security experts and the software development teams. After all, we cannot expect developers and other software practitioners to be security experts. Understanding how software development teams incorporate security in their processes and the challenges they face is a step towards reducing this gap. In this paper, we study how financial services companies ensure the security…
Different security issues are a common problem for open source packages archived to and delivered through software ecosystems. These often manifest themselves as software weaknesses that may lead to concrete software vulnerabilities. This paper examines various security issues in Python packages with static analysis. The dataset is based on a snapshot of all packages stored to the Python Package Index (PyPI). In total, over 197 thousand packages and over 749 thousand security issues are covered. Even under the constraints imposed by static analysis, (a) the results indicate prevalence of secur…
Security holds an important role in a software. Most people are not aware of the significance of security in software system and tend to assume that they will be fine without security in their software systems. However, the lack of security features causes to expose all the vulnerabilities possible to the public. This provides opportunities for the attackers to perform dangerous activities to the vulnerable insecure systems. This is the reason why many organizations are reported for being victims of system security attacks. In order to achieve the security requirement, developers must take tim…
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) application provide a whole new set of possibilities to drive efficiency of industrial production forward. However, with the higher degree of integration among systems, comes a plethora of newthreats to the latter, as they are not yet designed to be broadly reachable and interoperable. To mitigate these vast amount of new threats, systematic and automated test methods are necessary. This comprehensiveness can be achieved by thorough threat modeling. In order to automate security test, we present an approach to automate the testing process from threat modeli…
Software defined networking (SDN) has been adopted to enforce the security of large-scale and complex networks because of its programmable, abstract, centralized intelligent control and global and real-time traffic view. However, the current SDN-based security enforcement mechanisms require network managers to fully understand the underlying configurations of network. Facing the increasingly complex and huge SDN networks, we urgently need a novel security policy management mechanism which can be completely transparent to any underlying information. That is it can permit network managers to def…
To avoid software vulnerabilities, organizations are shifting security to earlier stages of the software development, such as at code review time. In this paper, we aim to understand the developers' perspective on assessing software security during code review, the challenges they encounter, and the support that companies and projects provide. To this end, we conduct a two-step investigation: we interview 10 professional developers and survey 182 practitioners about software security assessment during code review. The outcome is an overview of how developers perceive software security during c…
Over the past five years, there has been considerable growth and established value in the practice of modeling automotive software requirements. Much of this growth has been centered on requirements of software associated with the established functional areas of an automobile, such as those associated with powertrain, chassis, body, safety and infotainment. This paper makes a case for modeling four additional attributes that are increasingly important as vehicles become information conduits: security, privacy, usability, and reliability. These four attributes are important in creating specific…
This study examines the traditional approach to software development within the United Kingdom Government and the accreditation process. Initially we look at the Waterfall methodology that has been used for several years. We discuss the pros and cons of Waterfall before moving onto the Agile Scrum methodology. Agile has been adopted by the majority of Government digital departments including the Government Digital Services. Agile, despite its ability to achieve high rates of productivity organized in short, flexible, iterations, has faced security professionals disbelief when working within th…
Implementing software security practices is a critical concern in modern software development. Industry practitioners, security tool providers, and researchers have provided standard security guidelines and sophisticated security development tools to ensure a secure software development pipeline. But despite these efforts, there continues to be an increase in the number of vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious hackers. There is thus an urgent need to understand why developers still introduce security vulnerabilities into their applications and to understand what can be done to mot…
Information protection is becoming a focal point for designing, creating and implementing software applications within highly integrated technology environments. The use of a safe coding technique in the software development process is required by many industrial IT security standards and policies. Despite current cyber protection measures and best practices, vulnerabilities still remain strong and become a huge threat to every developed software. It is crucial to understand the position of secure software development for security management, which is affected by causes such as human security-…
Software components for on-board architectures in the space domain are increasingly reliant on Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS), Open Source (OSS) or other third party software products. However, these software components often have not been built with mission critical requirements in mind. Development project teams incorporating these products have limited knowledge of or control over the processes applied during the design, implementation, testing and maintenance of selected COTS/OSS software products. These constraints generate uncertainty of potential software induced failures. Moreover, th…
Security and privacy are often neglected in software development, and rarely a priority for developers. This insight is commonly based on research conducted by researchers and on developer populations living and working in the United States, Europe, and the United Kingdom. However, the production of software is global, and crucial populations in important technology hubs are not adequately studied. The software startup scene in Turkey is impactful, and comprehension, knowledge, and mitigations related to software security and privacy remain understudied. To close this research gap, we conducte…
Integrating security into agile software development is an open issue for research and practice. Especially in strongly regulated industries, complexity increases not only when scaling agile practices but also when aiming for compliance with security standards. To achieve security compliance in a large-scale agile context, we developed S2C-SAFe: An extension of the Scaled Agile Framework that is compliant to the security standard IEC~62443-4-1 for secure product development. In this paper, we present the framework and its evaluation by agile and security experts within Siemens' large-scale pro…
Secure development process is a procedure taken by developers to ensure the programs developed are following the general security standards and will always be up to date so that the outcomes are well secured and obedient. As a software developer, it is very crucial to implement and develop a highly secured and reliable program for clients and users. In this current digital world where everything is advancing faster than we can ever think of, most of the old security policies can no longer be implemented alone. The consequences and impacts that could be brought upon a company are really huge if…
