Using the Software Assurance Maturity Model (OpenSAMM) as a framework, this course walks through the major components of a comprehensive software security program and highlights open source and other freely-available tools that can be used to help implement the activities involved in such a program. The focus of the course is on providing hands-on demonstrations of the tools with an emphasis on integrating tool results into the overall software security program. Attendees should finish the course with a solid understanding of the various components of a comprehensive software security program as well as hands-on exposure to a variety of freely-available tools that they can use to implement portions of these programs.
Identifying application-level vulnerabilities via scanning, penetration tests and code reviews is only the first step in actually addressing the underlying risk. Managing vulnerabilities for applications is more challenging than dealing with traditional infrastructure-level vulnerabilities because they typically require the coordination of security teams with application development teams. The process also means that security managers need to get time from developers during already-cramped development and release schedules. In addition, fixes require changes to custom application code and application-specific business logic rather than the patches and configuration changes that are often sufficient to address infrastructure-level vulnerabilities. This presentation will illustrate the communication difficulties between security and development teams, and how this usually results in unactionable reports and fewer vulnerabilities remediated. In addition, the presentation will walk through an example workflow of addressing application vulnerabilities as software defects. This will be based on freely-available tools and show specific examples of how vulnerabilities can be grouped together, false positives can be culled out, and vulnerabilities transitioned to software defects, as well as how security managers can monitor and verify progress.
