How Can You Tell It Is Written Securely?

[stephencraig.evans at gmail.com (Stephen Craig Evans)]

Hi Mark,

What I have seen is that the organization develops security
standards/guidelines and secure coding guidelines tailored to the org.
If the org is big enough to have its own security team, then they do
it; if not, then they hire consultants to do it. It's not too
difficult to find out amongst the consultants who has the experience
and who doesn't.

Those standards and guidelines are updated either every year or two,
or before the next big project.

External consultant(s) - not the internal security team within the
organization (if it exists) - then does audits at milestones of the
project implemented by the outsourcing organization and reports on the
conformance to the guidelines and standards, and anything else that
might have been left out (which then results in updated standards and
guidelines). For non-conformant issues, the 3 groups get together and
decide what to do about it. If a direct solution is not possible,
often other security controls can be tweaked or enhanced to make that
particular risk acceptable or eliminated.

This type of system has clear separation of duties.

Stephen

On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 10:03 AM, Mark Rockman <mrockman at acm.org> wrote:
> OK.  So you decide to outsource your programming assignment to Asia and
> demand that they deliver code that is so locked down that it cannot
> misbehave.  How can you tell that what they deliver is truly locked down?
> Will you wait until it gets hacked?  What simple yet thorough inspection
> process is there that'll do the job?  Doesn't exist, does it?
>
>
> MARK ROCKMAN
> MDRSESCO LLC
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