A Software Security Assessment System Based On Analysis of Vulnerabilities

The importance of software security technologies is increasingly being recognized with the increase in services available on the Internet. It is important to foster human resources with knowledge and skills relevant to software security technologies. This paper proposes a learning process for software security and a learning environment that supports the learning process. In the learning process, learners create artifacts for software security from artifacts created in a traditional software engineering course, without dealing with software security, by referring to the reference information for software security (standards, methodologies, guidelines, security patterns, and so on). The learning environment supports storage of (1) the artifacts created in a traditional software engineering course, (2) artifacts created in a software security course, (3) the reference information and the relationships between different pieces of the reference information, (4) the rationale and association of the reference information with the artifacts created in a software security course, and (5) review comments and their association with the artifacts created in a software security course.

Clean room software engineering is a formal software development method that can strictly engineer software development and eliminate defects before they can cause serious harm. The clean room software engineering model has its own advantages and disadvantages in use. To use it in traditional software engineering, it is necessary to clarify the relationship between it and traditional software engineering methods and practices. Based on the technology and principles of the clean room software process, this paper gets the advantages and disadvantages of the clean room. Corresponding the traditional method-based software process to the key technology of the clean room, making the traditional management-based software engineering method and the tailored clean room compatible, and the software engineering practice of the clean room software process is compared with the traditional software engineering practice. To discuss the clean room and traditional software engineering, in order to expand the use of clean room methods, improve the clean room software process, and improve the quality of software.

Background: Software testing and software security have become one of the most important parts of an application. Many studies have explored each of these topics but there is a gap wherein the relation of software security and software testing in general has not been explored. Objective: This study aims to conduct a systematic literature review to capture the current state-of-the-art in software testing related to security. Methods: The search strategy obtains relevant papers from IEEE Xplore and ScienceDirect. The results of the search are filtered by applying inclusion and exclusion criteria. Results: The search results identified 50 papers. After applying the inclusion/exclusion criteria, we identified 15 primary studies that discuss software security and software testing. We found approaches, aspects, references, and domains that are used in software security and software testing. Conclusion: We found certain approach, aspect, references, and domain are used more often in software security testing Keywords: Software security, Software testing, Security testing approach, Security threats, Systematic literature review

Object-oriented technology has been widely used in the area of computer software. However, traditional software testing techniques cannot perform effectively on object-oriented software. The differences between object-oriented software testing and traditional software testing are compared and elaborated from three aspects: testing model, testing software and testing cases.

Software vulnerabilities remain an ever-present problem. Factors such as software complexity, size, and diversity of vulnerabilities drive the need for automated vulnerability analysis solutions. Past vulnerability analysis methods struggle with nondeterminism and uncertainty introduced by the environment and external dependencies. To address this problem, we present our vulnerability analysis method Hy2, a double hybrid of runtime verification and model checking, and dynamic and static analysis. It approaches the problem of building an abstraction of program behavior with decompilation and uses full-system emulation to handle undecidability and address environmental side effects. We discuss the limitations of past vulnerability analysis methods that motivated Hy2's creation and detail its design and implementation. We present an evaluation of Hy2 on several real-world programs to demonstrate its practicality and effectiveness. We uncovered 18 reported and several unreported vulnerabilities in the programs evaluated and describe limitations and potential improvements to Hy2.

In today’s organizations, a vast amount of existing software systems is insecure, which results in compromised valuable assets and has negative consequences on the organizations. Throughout the years, many attempts have been made to build secure software systems, but the solutions proposed were limited to a few add-on fixes made after implementation and installation of the system.The contribution of the research in this thesis is a software security engineering methodology, called Controlled Security Engineering Process, which provides support to developers when developing more secure software systems by integrating software lifecycle and security lifecycle, and enhancing the control in the engineering process. The proposed methodology implements security in every phase of general software system engineering, i.e., requirement, design, implementation, and testing, as well as operation and maintenance to certify that software systems are built with security in mind.The Controlled Security Engineering Process methodology addresses security problems in the development lifecycle. Construction of a secure software system involves specific steps and activities, which include security requirements specifications of system behavior, secure software design, an analysis of the design, implementation, with secure coding and integration, and operating and maintenance procedures.The methodology incorporates software security patterns and control of the engineering process. The software security patterns can be used as security controls and information sources to demonstrate how a specific security task should be performed or a specific security problem solved. Many patterns can be implemented in an automated way, which can facilitate the work of software engineers.The control of the engineering process provides visibility over the development process. The control assures that authorised developers access legitimate and necessary information and projects’ documents by using authentication, and authorization.To support implementation of automated patterns and provide control over the engineering process, a design of a multi-agent system is provided. The multi-agent system supports implementation of patterns and extracting security information, and provides traceability in the engineering process. The security information is requirements, threats and security mechanisms that are provided by matching project documents, and traceability is achieved by monitoring and logging services.The Controlled Security Engineering Process methodology has been evaluated through interviews with developers, security professionals, and decision makers in different types of organizations but also through a case study which was carried out in an organization.

Due to the diversity of existing software vulnerability analysis methods, a unified index system is required if we are to accurately and comprehensively evaluate the analytic effects in order to further improve the level of analysis. Accordingly, this paper first proposes the principles and process necessary to construct an evaluation index system for software vulnerability analysis. Moreover, by focusing on the problems identified in previous relevant research, an evaluation index system for software vulnerability analysis methods that contains four aspects-accuracy, coverage, value and performance-is proposed; this system is more comprehensive and complete than existing achievements. Finally, using the vulnerability analysis testing framework, the indexes of the three different versions of cppcheck are measured. The results show that the proposed evaluation index system can be used for the comparative evaluation of different vulnerability analysis methods.

Security testing is a key technology for software security. The testing results can reflect the relationship between software testing and software security, and they can help program designers for evaluating and improving software security. However, it is difficult to describe by mathematics the relationship between the results of software functional testing and software nonfunctional security indexes. In this paper, we propose a mathematics model (MSMAM) based on principal component analysis and multiattribute utility theory. This model can get nonfunctional security indexes by analyzing quantized results of functional tests. It can also evaluate software security and guide the effective allocation of testing resources in the process of software testing. The feasibility and effectiveness of MSMAM is verified by experiments.

Remoteness and accessibility in the vulnerability analysis of regional road networks

Security affects every software component in different types of computing systems. Many vulnerabilities and attacks on software systems are due to security weaknesses in the software itself. During the process of software specification, development, or testing, security issues are either taken into consideration insufficiently or not at all. Such software, due to internal weaknesses is prone to new attacks. By teaching secure software engineering techniques for designing and developing software modules, students would learn systematic secure software development techniques, such as defect detecting and security testing. This paper presents a series of modules that are designed to be integrated into undergraduate software engineering courses from a security perspective. The goal of the modules is to teach the building of robust software security requirements, secure software design and development, and secure software verification through a secure software development lifecycle.

Software testing plays a vital role in software security because hackers attack on a system through back channels which they can easily find if there is any error or bug exists in the software. The software security failure can cause the unbearable loss for IT companies and other organizations. Cyber security is another big issue for computer users' personal data as all their information is vulnerable because of easy excess, visibility and availability. Therefore, software testing is also useful to secure the personal information. In this article, cyber security testing based on particle swam optimization algorithm (CST) is proposed for testing of software cyber security testing. CSTPSOA is a PSO base technique which is used to solve the complex multi-level problems and is also used for optimization. In the CST method PSO is used for the optimization of test cases for cyber security testing.

Vulnerability is a weakness which allow attacker to reduce a system's information assurance. Many security problems are caused by vulnerabilities. Part of them can be identified and assessed in virtue of vulnerability assessment tools. However, current vulnerability assessments involve in some drawbacks, such as high false positive rate, long assessing time and requirement of attack codes. Aiming at the problems above, we proposed a vulnerability assessment system based on OVAL (Open Vulnerability Assessment Language). And we optimize the assess method of OVAL definitions. Compared with traditional assessment system, and proved by our experiments it is of high accuracy, low assessing time as a result of host-deployed and OVAL.

Well-educated and technically skilled engineers, developers and programmers of secure software and Web systems are in high demand in industry these days. As a result, there is a need for a design and development of learning content aimed, on one hand, at software and Web security concepts, models, methods, algorithms, schemes, technologies, techniques, and tools used to design, develop, deploy, and maintain highly secure software and Web systems. On the other hand, due to multiple reports by professional societies, agencies and consulting firms in information/data security, students should obtain deep knowledge and excellent hands-on technical skills for a reliable protection of real-world software, Web and computer information systems against advanced types of modern computer attacks (that are, sometime, called Attacks 2.0). The purpose of this paper is to present designed, developed and tested elements of “Software and Web Applications Security” undergraduate and graduate courses that are based on active hands-on teaching approach; it is focused on developed learning framework for each type of computer attack discussed. This framework includes 1) analysis of relevant vulnerabilities in software and Web systems; 2) an overview of computer attack; 3) demonstration of an attack in a real time in lab environment; 4) attack's step-by-step algorithm (procedure); 5) software implementation of an attack; 6) prevention of an attack and defense mechanism(s); 7) advanced types of an attack; and 8) relevant hands-on exercises.

Product security is an on-going challenge for network equipment vendors. In this paper, we present a systematic methodology for some software vulnerability assessment and security function verification. Based on this approach, a scalable and adaptable automatic test system was implemented to test over a hundred production software releases over the past year. This paper describes the methodology, the framework, and the results.

The past decade has witnessed an explosive increase in the scale, intensity and sophistication of cyber attacks. While software vendors have significantly increased their efforts on security, they are almost always playing catch up. As a result, security-conscious organizations and individuals have come to expect their system administrators to deploy an array of tools and techniques to stay a step ahead of the hackers. While developer-oriented security tools rely mainly on static analysis, runtime analysis and policy enforcement are the mechanisms of choice in administrator-oriented tools. Runtime techniques offer increased automation and precision over static analysis, thus addressing the needs of administrators who don't have the time or resources needed to acquire extensive knowledge about the internals of a software system. In this talk, I will begin by summarizing some of the significant advances that have been achieved in the past few years in the context of software vulnerability mitigation, including buffer overflow defenses, and more recently, the impressive results that have been achieved using dynamic information-flow analysis for blocking the most popular exploits today, including SQL and command injection and cross-site scripting. I will then proceed to describe dynamic analysis and enforcement techniques aimed at another high-profile security problem faced today, namely, malware defense. Our initial target in this regard has been on dynamic analysis techniques for extracting high-level models of program behavior. These models could be used in a variety of applications such as intrusion detection, vulnerability analysis and security policy verification. More recently, interesting advances have been made in the context of security policy development, where a combination of static and dynamic analysis techniques have been developed to synthesize low-level, enforceable policies that achieve a high-level goal such as protecting system integrity. Finally, I will conclude the talk with a discussion of some research opportunities and challenges in software security.