Engineering Secure Complex Software Systems and Services

(1)

University

Engineering Secure Complex Software

Systems and Services

Preparation of FP7-ICT WP 2009-2010 - Mini-Concertation Meeting

Henrique Madeira

University of Coimbra

(2)

Question 1

• Secure software engineering tends to be seen as a software lifecycle where

a special emphasis is placed on software security in each phase.

Best

practices

can continuously be improved.

• But secure software engineering should deal with a few facts:

– Developing software is still a human intensive and error prone process… secure coding is hard to achieve.

– Available verification and validation techniques and tools are not perfect.

– Component based SW development (COTS and custom components) is a solid trend… but the impact on security of using COTS is difficult to estimate.

– Security is not a one-time issue… continuous monitoring and management of security configuration settings at runtime is essential.

What should secure software engineering deal with, in

addition to software engineering, to ensure the development

of secure complex software systems and services?

(3)

Question 1

• Secure software engineering tends to be seen as a software lifecycle where

a special emphasis is placed on software security in each phase.

Best

practices

can continuously be improved.

• But secure software engineering should deal with a few facts:

What should secure software engineering deal with, in

addition to software engineering, to ensure the development

of secure complex software systems and services?

(4)

Question 1

• Secure software engineering tends to be seen as a software lifecycle where

a special emphasis is placed on software security in each phase.

Best

practices

can continuously be improved.

• But secure software engineering should deal with a few facts:

What should secure software engineering deal with, in

addition to software engineering, to ensure the development

of secure complex software systems and services?

26 30 17 7 16 1 17 3

Vulnerability Scanner 1 = Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner 4 Vulnerability Scanner 2 = Watchfire AppScan 7 (aquired by IBM)

Vulnerability Scanner 3 = Spi Dynamics WebInspect 6.32 (aquired by HP) Vulnerability Scanner 3 (detected 73/117) Vulnerability Scanner 1 (detected 51/117) Vulnerability Scanner 2 (detected 27/117) Detected by manual scanning only

(5)

Question 2

• Security is a very broad area

– cryptography, security protocols, access control, information flow, code obfuscation, software security, network security, intrusion detection, etc…

• Security software

– Software whose primary functionality is to implement a security protocol or mechanism, or a security technique Æ good examples of successful mechanisms and techniques

• Security of software

– Software that does not contain vulnerabilities and functions correctly under malicious use Æ secure coding is still a software engineering problem

• Verification and Static Analysis

Æ

lots of progress but far from being effective

• We still don’t know…

– How to measure security

– How to benchmark security (of components or systems)

What is the state of the art today in engineering secure

software systems (from a research and an industrial

practice perspective)?

(6)

Question 3

• Complexity of software

• Human issues (in development and maintenance)

–

Development of software is still a quite manual process (in spite of all

formal methods available…).

–

System management is crucial to security… and again still very

manual.

• Development based on the integration of components (often

unsecure or even malicious) is a challenge to security. Reuse

issues.

• Adaptation to uncertainty in complex networked systems

• We don’t really know how to assess and compare security

(and resilience and dependability…).

What are the main problems we face today in the field?

(From a research and an industrial practice perspective)?

(7)

Question 5

• Quantifiable resilience and security: measurement,

assessment, and validation of resiliency and security.

• Resilient, secure and dependable dynamic infrastructures and

systems

–

Adaptable to changes

–

Made of dynamic mixture of components built by different parties

–

Resilient adaptation in contrast to static provable dependability

• Component benchmarking (security, resilience)

• Risk/cost assessment (security, resilience)

Where should we focus our future research efforts in the

coming 5-10 years

Æ

What should be the major new research

directions? How to achieve them (in terms of mobilising a

(8)

Question 5

• How to achieve this:

– Projects, consortia, councils that bring together people from

different areas of expertise

– Create context for component certification (cost control…)

– Industry and research effort

– Invest on better tools

– Plans to educate programs for security

Where should we focus our future research efforts in the

coming 5-10 years

Æ

What should be the major new research

directions? How to achieve them (in terms of mobilising a