Models of software systems are used throughout the software development lifecycle. Dataflow diagrams (DFDs), in particular, are well-established resources for security analysis. Many techniques, such as threat modelling, are based on DFDs of the analysed application. However, their impact on the performance of analysts in a security analysis setting has not been explored before. In this paper, we present the findings of an empirical experiment conducted to investigate this effect. Following a within-groups design, participants were asked to solve security-relevant tasks for a given microservice application. In the control condition, the participants had to examine the source code manually. In the model-supported condition, they were additionally provided a DFD of the analysed application and traceability information linking model items to artefacts in source code. We found that the participants (n = 24) performed significantly better in answering the analysis tasks correctly in the model-supported condition (41% increase in analysis correctness). Further, participants who reported using the provided traceability information performed better in giving evidence for their answers (315% increase in correctness of evidence). Finally, we identified three open challenges of using DFDs for security analysis based on the insights gained in the experiment.
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）
Component-based development is one of the core principles behind modern software engineering practices. Understanding of causal relationships between components of a software system can yield significant benefits to developers. Yet modern software design approaches make it difficult to track and discover such relationships at system scale, which leads to growing intellectual debt. In this paper we consider an alternative approach to software design, flow-based programming (FBP), and draw the attention of the community to the connection between dataflow graphs produced by FBP and structural cau…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) is a popular quality assurance technique in software engineering. However, integrating SAST tools into industry-level product development and security assessment poses various technical and managerial challenges. In this work, we reported a longitudinal case study of adopting SAST as a part of a human-driven security assessment for an open-source e-government project. We described how SASTs are selected, evaluated, and combined into a novel approach for software security assessment. The approach was preliminarily evaluated using semi-structured interv…
Several disastrous security attacks can be attributed to delays in patching software vulnerabilities. While researchers and practitioners have paid significant attention to automate vulnerabilities identification and patch development activities of software security patch management, there has been relatively little effort dedicated to gain an in-depth understanding of the socio-technical aspects, e.g., coordination of interdependent activities of the patching process and patching decisions, that may cause delays in applying security patches. We report on a Grounded Theory study of the role of…
Digital transformation is a hot topic in the current global environment as a large number of organizations have been working to adopt digital solutions. Software engineering has also emerged to be a more important role as a large number of systems, either traditional or smart, are dependent on the software that collects, store, and process data. The role of software engineers has also become crucial in digital transformation. In this regard, this paper aims to examine the trends of software engineering and the role of software engineers in digital transformation. In addition to this, this pape…
Context: Software security patch management purports to support the process of patching known software security vulnerabilities. Given the increasing recognition of the importance of software security patch management, it is important and timely to systematically review and synthesise the relevant literature on this topic. Objective: This paper aims at systematically reviewing the state of the art of software security patch management to identify the socio-technical challenges in this regard, reported solutions (i.e., approaches, tools, and practices), the rigour of the evaluation and the indu…
As we are continuously depending on information technology applications by adopting electronic channels and software applications for our business, online transaction and communication, software security is increasingly becoming a necessity and more advanced concern. Both the functional and non-functional requirements are important and provide the necessary needs at the early phases of the software development process, specifically in the requirement phase. The aim of this research is to identify security threats early in the software development process to help the requirement engineer elicit…
Several studies have shown that automated support for different activities of the security patch management process has great potential for reducing delays in installing security patches. However, it is also important to understand how automation is used in practice, its limitations in meeting real-world needs and what practitioners really need, an area that has not been empirically investigated in the existing software engineering literature. This paper reports an empirical study aimed at investigating different aspects of automation for security patch management using semi-structured intervi…
The application of machine learning (ML) libraries has been tremendously increased in many domains, including autonomous driving systems, medical, and critical industries. Vulnerabilities of such libraries result in irreparable consequences. However, the characteristics of software security vulnerabilities have not been well studied. In this paper, to bridge this gap, we take the first step towards characterizing and understanding the security vulnerabilities of five well-known ML libraries, including Tensorflow, PyTorch, Sickit-learn, Pandas, and Numpy. To do so, in total, we collected 596 se…
Pushed by market forces, software development has become fast-paced. As a consequence, modern development projects are assembled from 3rd-party components. Security & privacy assurance techniques once designed for large, controlled updates over months or years, must now cope with small, continuous changes taking place within a week, and happening in sub-components that are controlled by third-party developers one might not even know they existed. In this paper, we aim to provide an overview of the current software security approaches and evaluate their appropriateness in the face of the change…
A Java File Security System (JFSS) [1] has been developed by us. That is an ecrypted file system. It is developed by us because there are so many file data breaches in the past and current history and they are going to increase day by day as the reports by DataLossDB (Open Security Foundation) organization, a non-profit organization in US so it is. The JFSS is evaluated regarding the two software engineering approaches. One of them is size metric that is Lines of Code (LOC) in the software product development. Another approach is the customer oriented namely User Satisfaction Testing methodolo…
To build a secure communications software, Vulnerability Prediction Models (VPMs) are used to predict vulnerable software modules in the software system before software security testing. At present many software security metrics have been proposed to design a VPM. In this paper, we predict vulnerable classes in a software system by establishing the system's weighted software network. The metrics are obtained from the nodes' attributes in the weighted software network. We design and implement a crawler tool to collect all public security vulnerabilities in Mozilla Firefox. Based on these data, …
The mass production of complex software has made it impossible to manually test it for security vulnerabilities. Automated security testing tools come in a variety of flavors, function at various stages of software development, and target different categories of software vulnerabilities. It is great that we have a plethora of automated tools to choose from, but it is a problem that their adoption and recognition are not prominent. The purpose of this study is to explore the possibilities of existing techniques while also broadening the horizon by exploring the future of security testing tools …
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…
To build secure software, developers often work together during software development and maintenance to find, fix, and prevent security vulnerabilities. Examining the nature of developer interactions during their security activities regarding security introducing and fixing activities can provide insights for improving current practices. In this work, we conduct a large-scale empirical study to characterize and understand developers' interactions during their security activities regarding security introducing and fixing, which involves more than 16K security fixing commits and over 28K securit…
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…
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 fo…
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…
