The recording of the webinar on the benefits of applying security testing as early as possible in software development are now available online.
Security testing is an important part of any security development life-cycle (SDLC) and, thus, should be a part of any secure software development life-cycle. Still, security testing is often understood by an activity done by security testers in the time between “end of development” and “offering the product to customers”.
Learning from traditional testing that the fixing of bugs is the more costly the later it is done in development, we believe that security testing should be integrated into the daily development activities.
Based on the SDLC of a large software vendor, we will present the benefits of early security testing and discuss what is necessary to achieve a “security testing as development activity” approach.
The webinar was hosted by Checkmarx.
I am looking forward to my first OWASP meeting in Sheffield (it’s actually the second meeting of the Sheffield OWASP Chapter). I will give a talk on my experiences in introducing and implementing a security testing strategy within a large (more than 25000 developers) and international software development team. There will be even more interesting talks (as well as free beer in pizza).
For example,
Looking forward to a great OWASP meeting in Sheffield (and I am sure it will not be the last one)!
Got lost in overwhelmingly large amount security testing research? Do not worry, there is help.
We are happy to announce that our survey on security testing has been published. We do not only provide an overview of the currents state of the art in security testing research, we also explain the role of security testing a secure software development process and discuss the various security testing approaches in the context of a multi-tiered web application.
In particular, we discuss the following security testing techniques:
Everybody developing software should, in fact, accept the challenge to develop secure software. This is not an easy challenge: it requires an end-to-end security development life-cycle (SDLC) that nicely integrates with your software development processes.
Security testing is an important part of any security development life-cycle (SDLC) and, thus, should be a part of any software development life-cycle. Still, security testing is often understood by an activity done by security testers in the time between “end of development” and “offering the product to customers”. Fixing bugs that late in the development process is not only expensive, it also conflicts with agile development in general and the DevOps model in particular.
SAP’s Security Testing Strategy enables developers to find security vulnerabilities early by applying a variety of different security testing methods and tools. When you want to integrate security testing into your (agile) software development, the most people emphasize how important a security awareness program for both developers and mangers is. While security awareness is important, our experience is that developer awareness is even more important! Listen to your developers and help them. Recall, building secure systems is much more difficult than finding a successful attack.
Do not expect your developers to become security experts (or penetration testers) – expect them to become security aware and help them with development friendly tools that spot security vulnerabilities early during development and that are nicely integrated into the tools and workflows used by the developers. And, finally, make the process of fixing issues as easy and painless as possible. The effort for fixing an issue should not be the main reason for not fixing something. If you want to learn more about SAP’s Security Testing Strategy, you can watch my presentation at the OWASP AppSec 2014 on youtube (slides are also available).