Darkreading: Getting Started

[gem at cigital.com (Gary McGraw)]

Hi Andy,

Good point about 4 (tool first).  Sometimes security feature rollout can provide a good impetus.  We saw that too, 
focused around crypto for PCI with one of our major customers.

The only real danger with following that path is that you tend to emphasize that security is a feature (and only a 
feature), which as we all know is a big misunderstanding among dev people.

gem

company www.cigital.com
podcast www.cigital.com/silverbullet
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-----Original Message-----
From: Andy Steingruebl [mailto:steingra at gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2008 10:59 PM
To: Secure Coding Mailing List (SC-L at securecoding.org)
Cc: Gary McGraw
Subject: Re: [SC-L] Darkreading: Getting Started

On Jan 9, 2008 4:48 PM, Gary McGraw <gem at cigital.com> wrote:
> hi sc-l,
>
> One of the biggest hurdles facing software security is the problem of how to get started, especially when faced with 
> an enterprise-level challenge.  My first darkreading column for 2008 is about how to get started in software 
> security.  In the article, I describe four approaches:
> 1. the top-down framework;
> 2. portfolio risk;
> 3. training first; and
> 4. leading with a tool.

Gary,

I had success with #4, but not using the tools we usually think of for bootstrapping a program, namely static analysis 
or testing tools.
When I took the position they had already settled on using Netegrity's Siteminder product for a common authentication 
and authorization scheme across all of the applications.  I managed to get them to settle on doing a quasi-RBAC with 
Siteminder, using it almost as an identity service as well.

Settling on one common high-quality authentication and authorization tool/framework had three effects:

 1. It removed these services from the realm of development. They just had to integrate with it, but didn't have to 
figure out all of the corner cases to password changes, etc. that so often crop up, and people mess up in homegrown 
approaches.

 2. It convinced developers to build clean interfaces in their code for things like authorization to call out 
externally and/or have the data provided to them in a standard fashion.  By settling on RBAC it also helped a lot with 
role and permission modeling that did need to happen in the app.

 3. In a shop that usually wanted to do everything itself, it broke that cycle and people got used to not having to 
write everything from scratch.

It was a bit of a non-standard way to use a tool to bootstrap a security program.  They essentially got sold Netegrity 
originally for the wrong reasons, but they picked it and in implementing it correctly did themselves a huge service.

Just one data point on leading with a tool that focused more on architecture and design than it did on finding defects.

--
Andy Steingruebl
steingra at gmail.com