Stefan,
I have been doing application security assessment for several clients, and
my conclusion
is:
1) there are no security requirements for the system and if they exist they
are mostly technical: we will be using an authentication
system, we will be using a firewall
2) If there are security requirements they have not been based on proper
functional risk analysis
3) Technologies are selected for the technology sake and not based on sound
risk management principles
4) Lack of securing coding guidelines
5) Lack of security testing
we can continue at infinitum
So my overall conclusion:
Don't blame the programmers because when they start working it is in most
cases already too late, but
let's start by evangilizing to the people that have more decisional power.
Then start to evangelize
the application architects and designers, functional requirements
gatherers, ...
What is needed is "making companies risk management" aware, and security is
only one single dimension.
This represents my personal view and may not reflect the opinion of my
employer.
Regards,
-- Dirk
Stefan Schildt
<stefan.schildt@p To: secprogat_private
iceng.se> cc:
Subject: Re: Standards for developing secure software
08/01/2003 08:55
"Steven M. Christey" wrote:
> David Wheeler said:
>
> >The problem is that developers don't grok _ANY_ of the books.
>
> I wonder if some of this has to do with how the books are laid out.
I doubt thatīs the main reason.
I deal with leading programmers, and it seems to me that they are very
well trained to always think about performance in terms of memory and
CPU
usage. They rarely never are trained to think about security from line
one.
When pressing them to do so, this is considered to be a burden. Almost
like when the teacher forced you to make your first flowchart instead of
just launching the it all in the code editor.
When asking why I seem to get three answers:
(1) Many programmers see security as something extremly difficult. This
leads them to give up before they even started.
(2) "It wonīt happen to my application anyway"
(3) This is a job for the network and technet-guys to do.
The common ground is that this is not part of what they think is an
important part of an application. It doesnīt seem to be part of their
professional pride in the same way as saving memory and CPU power is.
This
in turn seems logical if you look at the world ten years back: no
networks, expensive memory and slow CPU:s.
So what we need is a wake up call, with lots of missionary work. The
main
thing I would say is that all the people devoted to this list should
also
be active in other forums for programmers. The programmers want come
here
fast enought, so we should come to them.
/Stefan
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