Today, Software is rarely developed “on the green field”: software developers are “composers” that build new system by combining existing solutions. Custom code is, in many development projects, a curiosity.

As a result, modern software depends on numerous third-party projects, which, sometimes, are as small as three lines of code or as large as several millions lines of code. On the one hand, these projects speed up the development. On the other hand, their use requires trust and care: with a few lines of code in an installation script, your development system can be attacked or a small vulnerability in a dependency can be the root cause of one of the largest data leaks of the last years.

Want to learn more? Attend my keynote at the International Workshop on Secure Software Engineering (SSE 2019). In my keynote, I will argue that the mature tools and techniques for developing secure software do not work well in an environment where software is composed instead of developed. By using real world examples of third-party components, I will make the case that research in secure software engineering needs to re-prioritize topics to be fit for a world of software composition.