Tools: Evaluation Criteria

[gunnar at arctecgroup.net (Gunnar Peterson)]

I recommend "Security Design Patterns" by Bob Blakley and Craig Heath

http://www.opengroup.org/publications/catalog/g031.htm

Like any good patterns work, it makes a number of implicit actions, explicit
and gives you a way to see how they fit together and when you may choose
certain paths. For example section 8.8 on secure proxy patterns, is the best
treatment on the subject I have seen. It discusses seven distinct approaches
to secure proxies (delegation, impersonation, and so on), it was written in
the days before federation and user centric identity, so it would be nice to
update it with that.

-gp

On 5/24/07 6:45 AM, "Wall, Kevin" <Kevin.Wall at qwest.com> wrote:

> James McGovern wrote...
>
> > Maybe folks are still building square windows because we haven't
> > realized how software fails and can describe it in terms of a pattern.
> > The only pattern-oriented book I have ran across in my travels is the
> > Core Security Patterns put out by the folks at Sun. Do you think we
> > should stop talking solely about code and start talking about how
> > vulnerabilities are repeatedly introduced and describe using patterns
> > notation?
>
> You might want to check out securitypatterns.org, and more specifically,
>     http://www.securitypatterns.org/patterns.html
> which mentions a few other books.
>
> I think there are a few other books by Markus Schumacher, one of which
> was based on his doctoral dissertation that is not shown there.
>
> As to your question, should we stop talking _SOLEY_ about code? Probably,
> yes. But I think the reason we don't is two-fold -- the first is that most
> of us view that as the easy-part, the low-hanging fruit so-to-speak. The
> second is that the development community for the most part, still doesn't
> seem to be applying the securing CODING principles, so many of us think
> it would be premature to move on to try to teach them secure design
> principles, developing security reqts with abuse cases, etc., threat modeling,
> etc. From a personal POV, I think that's something that a small team of
> security specialists can handle. (At least it mostly works here. Security
> evaluations are mandatory shortly after the design is complete.) But we
> can't possibly do manual code inspections with a small security team,
> so we try to instruct (alas, w/out too much success) developers secure
> coding practices to avoid the problems at that level in the first place.
>
> -kevin
> ---
> Kevin W. Wall  Qwest Information Technology, Inc.
> Kevin.Wall at qwest.com Phone: 614.215.4788
> "The reason you have people breaking into your software all
> over the place is because your software sucks..."
>  -- Former whitehouse cybersecurity advisor, Richard Clarke,
>     at eWeek Security Summit
>
>
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-- 
Gunnar Peterson, Managing Principal, Arctec Group
http://www.arctecgroup.net

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