Tagging Your Code with a Useful Assurance Label

With so many ways for software to be vulnerable, businesses needs a way to focus their assurance efforts on those potential vulnerabilities that are most dangerous to them and their software.  This talk will offer a new way to focus and organize your software vulnerability assessment and assurance efforts across the entire life-cycle of a project so that you target the most impactful weaknesses when they are most visible.  The approach can be done consistently across your enterprise and will have you looking for specific weaknesses at the point where you can gain the most assurance that you have dealt with them successfully. Matched to the activities of your development effort, this approach will have your team looking for those security weaknesses (CWEs) that are most discernable/findable in each of the different stages of a software development effort.  For example, when you have a live exemplar system available you should look for the weaknesses in design, configuration, code, or architecture that are findable through dynamic analysis, pen testing, or red teaming of that living system. Similarly, in the coding phase you want the emphasis to be looking for weaknesses that are findable by static analysis tools. The follow-on step to this approach is to use what you found and what you did to create “An Assurance Tag for Binaries", basically an assurance "food label" for the code of that project.  This talk will conclude with a discussion of what such a tag could look like, what it could capture, how the information could be obtained, whom would/could create them, and how they could be represented for humans and machines to use.