FW: InformIT: You need an SSG

[gem at cigital.com (Gary McGraw)]

I accidentally hijacked this thread with S/MIME last night.  Mailman can't do base64 encoding.  Oops....

________________________________
From: Gary McGraw
To: 'mike.boberski at gmail.com' ; 'daveladd at microsoft.com'
Cc: 'SC-L at securecoding.org' ; 'dustin.sullivan at informit.com'
Sent: Mon Dec 21 19:20:18 2009
Subject: Re: [SC-L] InformIT: You need an SSG

Hi mike,

The BSIMM calls out "security features and design" explicitly, and covers that good idea. (Though watch out for generic 
one-size-fits-all solutions.)  An SSG helps with creation, review, and roll out of such.

Calling an SSG a "committee" is pretty hilarious.  I doubt any of the 100 microsoft SSG members think they are a 
committee.   Hey ladd, how goes the SDL committee?

gem

________________________________
From: Mike Boberski
To: Gary McGraw
Cc: Secure Code Mailing List ; Dustin Sullivan
Sent: Mon Dec 21 19:01:37 2009
Subject: Re: [SC-L] InformIT: You need an SSG
Hi Gary.

To play devil's advocate:

Current organizational practices aside, I would say that organizations really need more and better toolkits and 
standards for developers to use, than they need more and better committees.

A toolkit example that comes to mind, to keep this email short: the highly-matrixed environment (and actually also the 
smaller environment, now that I think about it) where developers fly on and off projects.

Toolkits that enforce coding standards, and that are treated like any other module of the application in terms of care 
and feeding, are the only things that give security a fighting chance in environments like those.

Best,

Mike B.


On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 8:24 AM, Gary McGraw <gem at cigital.com> wrote:
hi sc-l,

This list is made up of a bunch of practitioners (more than a thousand from what Ken tells me), and we collectively 
have many different ways of promoting software security in our companies and our clients.  The BSIMM study 
<http://bsi-mm.com> focuses attention on software security in large organizations and just at the moment covers the 
work of 1554 full time employees working every day in 26 software security initiatives.  One phenomenon we observed in 
the BSIMM was that every large initiative has a Software Security Group (SSG) to carry out and lead software security 
activities.

I wrote about our observations around SSGs in this month's informIT article:

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1434903

Simply put, an SSG is a critical part of a software security initiative in all companies with more than 100 developers. 
 (We're still not sure about SSGs in smaller organizations, but the BSIMM Begin data (now hovering at 75 firms) may be 
revealing.)

Cigital's SSG was formed in 1997 (with John Viega, Brad Arkin, and me as founding members).  Since its inception, we've 
helped plan, staff, and carry out ten large software security initiatives in customer firms.  One of the most important 
first tasks is establishing an SSG.

Merry New Year everybody.

gem

company www.cigital.com <http://www.cigital.com>
podcast www.cigital.com/silverbullet <http://www.cigital.com/silverbullet>
blog www.cigital.com/justiceleague <http://www.cigital.com/justiceleague>
book www.swsec.com <http://www.swsec.com>

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