ProPublica is a national journalistic treasure, and recent reporting on the software industry is a terrific impetus to drive much needed change. I sat in on many bug triage discussions over twenty years ago working at Microsoft, and despite great technology advances, the way these decisions are made appears to be little evolved. My purpose here is not to judge what transpired and who is at fault, but to glean from the reporting better software practices so we can at least learn from these events.
[Read More]See latest writings about software security and a little miscellania.
Kohnfelder, Loren. Designing Secure Software: A Guide for Developers. No Starch Press, 2021.
Designing Secure Software consolidates more than twenty years of experience into a concise, elegant guide to improving the security of technology products. Written for a wide range of software professionals, it emphasizes building security into software design early and involving the entire team in the process.
The book begins with a discussion of core concepts, covering trust, threats, mitigation, secure design patterns, and cryptography. The second part, perhaps this book’s most unique and important contribution to the field, covers the process of designing and reviewing a software design with security considerations in mind. The final section details the most common coding flaws that create vulnerabilities, making copious use of code snippets written in C and Python to illustrate implementation vulnerabilities.
You’ll learn how to:
- Identify important assets, the attack surface, and the trust boundaries in a system
- Evaluate the effectiveness of various threat mitigation candidates
- Work with well-known mitigations and secure design patterns
- Understand and prevent vulnerabilities like XSS and CSRF, memory flaws, and more
- Use security testing to proactively identify vulnerabilities introduced into code
- Review a software design for security flaws effectively and without judgment
“The writing in this book is very clear and easy reading, and the examples used are both captivating and easy to understand. Kohnfelder does a great job of making a point that is easy to understand, and most of the chapters could stand alone for developers just working in that one particular area.” (read the full review)
Trusting AI
- (220 words) June 2024 – Loren Kohnfelder
Whether or not this unscientific test is reliable, asking generative AI if a mushroom is safe to eat — it misclassified a highly toxic variety that looks like a common edible one — is a terrible idea if you are prepared to eat according to what it says. This illustrates my rule of thumb:
[Read More]Further security discussions
- (500 words) May 2024 – Loren Kohnfelder
This article is a continuation of Better Security Discussions.
This analysis can be extended by considering potential mitigations for additional threats.
[Read More]
Better security discussions
(900 words) May 2024 – Loren Kohnfelder
We understand software security best through specific threats and mitigations, articulated by threat models shared openly. Without this context we avoid much needed meaningful security discussions.
[Read More]