Threat analysis in the software development lifecycle

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.

In todays world, software security has become essential for protecting the overall organizations operations. Mostly software development companies are adopting various strategies to build secure software to cope with the challenges of the client organization. Information become threatened due to connection with the cyber world, and it requires better security mechanisms. Software development organizations are receiving pressure from their clients to focus on the enhancement of security during the whole software development life cycle (SDLC). This protocol aims to review the literature in a systematic way to identify the state-of-the-art of software security to be considered by Global Software Development (GSD) vendor organizations during the development of a secure software as it evolves from requirements engineering to its final disposal. In order to improve security processes in the context of software development, our current research developed a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) protocol. Presently, we are in the implementation phase of the protocol for the development of secure software. The expected outcomes of this SMS will be a list of security measurements and their solutions to be incorporated by GSD vendor organizations in each phase of the SDLC. This will also give a direction for new research in this area.

Nowadays, there are different kinds of public knowledge bases for cyber security vulnerability and threat intelligence which can be used for IoT security threat analysis. However, the heterogeneity of these knowledge bases and the complexity of the IoT environments make network security situation awareness and threat assessment difficult. In this paper, we integrate vulnerabilities, weaknesses, affected platforms, tactics, attack techniques, and attack patterns into a coherent set of links. In addition, we propose an IoT security ontology model, namely, the IoT Security Threat Ontology (IoTSTO), to describe the elements of IoT security threats and design inference rules for threat analysis. This IoTSTO expands the current knowledge domain of cyber security ontology modeling. In the IoTSTO model, the proposed multi-source knowledge reasoning method can perform the following tasks: assess the threats of the IoT environment, automatically infer mitigations, and separate IoT nodes that are subject to specific threats. The method above provides support to security managers in their deployment of security solutions. This paper completes the association of current public knowledge bases for IoT security and solves the semantic heterogeneity of multi-source knowledge. In this paper, we reveal the scope of public knowledge bases and their interrelationships through the multi-source knowledge reasoning method for IoT security. In conclusion, the paper provides a unified, extensible, and reusable method for IoT security analysis and decision making.

The rapid pace of software development and deployment in today's digital world demands an integrated approach to security, particularly in Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. Traditional approaches to security, where it is added at the end of the development lifecycle, have proven inadequate in addressing the complexities and vulnerabilities introduced by fast-moving development cycles. DevSecOps (Development, Security, and Operations) represents an evolution of the DevOps culture that integrates security as an essential component throughout the development process, rather than as an afterthought. This paper explores the role of DevSecOps in ensuring continuous security integration within CI/CD pipelines, focusing on its principles, practices, and impact on both security and development efficiency. DevSecOps emphasizes the shift-left approach, where security is integrated early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities before they reach production. By embedding security practices into CI/CD workflows, organizations can achieve continuous security validation and testing in tandem with software development activities. Key components of a successful DevSecOps implementation include automated security testing, real-time vulnerability scanning, infrastructure as code (IaC) security, and threat intelligence integration. Through the use of tools like static application security testing (SAST), dynamic application security testing (DAST), and software composition analysis (SCA), DevSecOps facilitates the continuous monitoring of code, configurations, and infrastructure for security issues. This paper also examines the cultural shift required to adopt DevSecOps within development teams. It highlights the importance of fostering collaboration between development, security, and operations teams to ensure seamless integration of security practices into the CI/CD pipeline. By aligning security teams with development and operations, DevSecOps fosters a culture of shared responsibility for security, breaking down silos that traditionally hinder effective security integration.

Cybersecurity risks are increasing in frequency and complexity, but many organizations struggle to plan and implement adequate protections at all stages of the software development life cycle (SDLC). Security is frequently added at the end of development (afterthought), and making effective use of safeguard space is difficult for IT leaders. The purpose of this study is to produce an all‐encompassing framework to adopt and ensure security throughout each phase of the SDLC, from planning through maintenance. The aim is to minimize vulnerabilities and improve the resilience of software by making “security by design” a structure that not only adopts security elegantly as a living document but also is built to be part of the development process. This study adopted a mixed‐methods approach. The initial stage of inquiry involved a systematic literature review (SLR) to identify common cybersecurity issues associated with each SDLC phase. The SLR was followed by an empirical survey of 71 software professionals from a variety of organizations. The survey was designed to gather perceived threats, current practices, and challenges associated with software development for survey participants' organizations. The data collected were analyzed and reviewed statistically, through chi‐square tests and ANOVA, to profile the variance relative to the size of the organization, geographic region, and experience level of the practitioner. The results noted several high‐risk challenges across the SDLC: underfunded security controls, imprecise requirements, insecure architecture, software bugs (i.e., injection vulnerabilities), inadequate testing, misconfigured production environments, and unreliable maintenance. The proposed framework provides cybersecurity mitigation techniques for each stage of the SDLC, such as leveraging security‐oriented design patterns, secure coding policies (i.e., input validation and authentication protocols), robust testing (i.e., penetration testing and code review), and continuous monitoring after deployment. The implementation of these measures leads to a significant risk reduction in the overall organizational security posture. The framework is a formalized end‐to‐end approach to secure software development by embedding security throughout the cycle. Embedding security as a part of the process versus an afterthought at every stage of the cycle creates a risk reduction impact. This integrated approach also provides organizations with the opportunity to foresee and mitigate events earlier in the cycle, along with general compliance mandates (i.e., GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI‐DSS), to provide more resilient, trustworthy software systems.

Intelligent Vision Systems (IVS) are omnipresent in our daily life from social media apps to m-health services, from street surveillance cameras to airport e-gates, from drones to companion robots. Hence, IVS encompass any software which has a visual input processed by means of algorithm(s) involving Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods. The design and development of these IVS softwares has become an increasingly complex task, since vision-based systems have evolved into (semi-)autonomous AI systems, usually requiring effective and ethical data processing along with efficient signal processing and real-time hardware/software integration as well as User Experience (UX) and (cyber)security features. Consequently, IVS system development necessitates an adapted software development life-cycle (SDLC) addressing these multi-domain needs, whilst being developer friendly. Hence, we propose in this paper a new SDLC we called D7-R4 which allows developers to produce quality, new-generation IVS to be deployed in real-time and in real-world, unstructured environments.

New software systems need to comply with general standards for them to be useful, especially if they are integrating with legacy applications or part of a complete redesign using BPR. ISO 9000 is an international concept of standardization of quality that should be adopted in any major software development or implementation of a packaged software solution. Furthermore, this chapter shows how cyber security architecture requires integration with a firm’s SDLC, particularly within steps that include strategic analysis and design, engineering, and operations. The challenge of cyber security reaches well beyond architecture. It must address third-party vendor products that are part of the supply-chain of automation used by firms, not to mention access to legacy applications that likely do not have the necessary securities built into the architecture of these older, less resilient technologies. This challenge has established the need for an enterprise cyber security solution that addresses the needs of the entire organization.

Serious games provide a method for teaching students in an engaging, non-threatening way. To be useful educational tools, these games need to be designed with the lesson objectives in mind. This paper uses the Game Design Matrix to design a game from learning objectives. The lesson objectives focus on software development, security and operations (DevSecOps). DevSecOps requires judging the cost and risk trade offs between secure and unsecured software aspects including code, data and usability; devising a strategy to produce a system under threat; comprehending that partial security may equate to no security; and identifying examples of insecure code and methods of mitigating it. These lesson objectives combined with the teaching environment drive design decisions that produce a game that fits well into a graduate level course in secure software design and development. We evaluate the game in a graduate course on secure software design and development. Learner surveys confirm that DevSecOps conveys the learning objectives in an engaging way.

Software development productivity, code quality, and knowledge sharing have all increased dramatically with the use of AI code assistants like GitHub Copilot. These technologies provide real-time suggestions, expedite workflows, and speed up prototyping by utilising massive language models that have been trained on extensive code repositories. However, serious questions about software security, developer dependency, and ethical ramifications are brought up by their increasing use. The advantages and disadvantages of AI code helpers for safe software development are discussed in this study. It highlights how crucial human oversight, frequent security audits, ongoing model upgrades, and conformity to DevSecOps and OWASP guidelines are. In the end, software integrity cannot be jeopardised by including AI into development processes. In an increasingly automated development context, strategic implementation is crucial to maximising AI's benefits while protecting against new risks.

The software development process model or what is commonly called SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) is one of the Software Engineering (RPL) course materials in the Information Engineering Education (PTI) undergraduate study program where one of the competencies is understanding and knowing the concepts of device engineering software that can be applied in the software development life cycle which is summarized in the material for the SDLC software development process model. This material is the initial material that must be mastered by students to develop quality software. The use of interactive and interesting computer assisted learning media is expected to help the stages of the student learning process properly. This requires an interactive learning multimedia application. The purpose of this research is to develop interactive learning media as an alternative to independent learning tools to assist students in mastering the Software Development Process Model (SDLC) material for students and to find out the feasibility of multimedia application products for learning the Software Development Process Model (SDLC). The research and development methodology used in this research is Research and Development (R&D) with Borg and Gall's development steps which include: (1) Research and data collection; (2) Planning; (3) Development of product drafts; (4) Initial field trials; (5) Revision of trial results (6) Field trials; (7) Product improvement; (8) Field implementation test; (9) Completion of the final product; and (10) Dissemination of implementation. This methodology covers all matters relating to development to produce quality interactive learning media software. Based on the trials, the results obtained were 90.63 percent from media experts, 98.08 percent from material experts, 85.46 percent from initial field trials, 84.56 percent from field trials, and 86.27 percent from field implementation trials. The average value obtained is 89 percent based on the results of the overall data analysis. The conclusion of this research is that the development of multimedia applications for learning the Software Development Process Model (SDLC) is feasible as an independent learning medium. The product produced in this development research is a multimedia application for learning flash-based software development process (SDLC) models.

As more and more software applications are directly or indirectly accessible from the Internet, the importance of the security of these applications grows steadily. Hence, it is important that university curricula for computer scientists and software engineers include courses on secure software development. Such courses should make students familiar with the programming language technology, run-time support and available APIs for security, and they should also teach them how to use these technological means appropriately. The .NET framework is a good example of the current state-of-the-art support for secure development. The Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure (SSCLI) provides a source for some of the security related aspects of the framework. The paper describes how the secure software development course at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven uses the .NET framework and the SSCLI. An overview is given of the contents of the course, and a number of example project assignments based on .NET or the SSCLI are presented.

As interests in security increases, several software development lifecycle considering security have been proposed. Actual results of applying software development lifecycle considering security reduced threats have been reported. But to apply software development lifecycle considering security, requires expertise and experiences. In this paper a secure software development lifecycle applying integrated secure guide is proposed. Secure Guides such as Misuse Case, Security Patterns and Secure Coding are integrated in the proposed method. And then, by applying integrated Secure Guide in each software development phase, the security becomes available in every phase of software development. Since, proposed secure guide provides more security information than available secure guides, software developer can use more security information while they are developing software. As a result, it is expected that developers could consider security more easily when developing software even though developers lacks expertise in security or experience.

Modern vehicles are equipped with more than 100 Electrical Control Units (ECUs) with over 2500 signals to transmit internally. The application of advanced electronics and communication techniques helps a vehicle transform from an information island into a powerful distribution center. However, a large number of ECUs have introduced a wider range of security threats for vehicles. The attackers can compromise a vehicle remotely through a vulnerable ECU. How to evaluate the cyber security of in-vehicle ECUs has become an important issue. Current Threat Analysis and Risk Assessment (TARA) only carries out theoretical analysis on the potential threats and risks faced by the vehicle in the conceptual design phase of the lifecycle, but lacks the details of actual security evaluation. In this paper, we proposed a Cyber Security Evaluation Framework (CSEF) to independently evaluate the security of the in-vehicle ECUs, which is composed of the asset identification, the threat analysis, the risk assessment, and the security test. The proposed CSEF is applied to a pre-installed On-Bord Unit (OBU) to provide a use case. The use case show that the proposed CSEF is able to figure out assets, threats, risks behind threats, and vulnerabilities of OBU, playing an important role in guiding others to conduct security evaluation. Moreover, CSEF can be extended to evaluate the cyber security of other critical ECUs, such as the Telematic Box, the infotainment units, and the gateway.

Chapter 8 - Domain 8: Software development security

Drawing upon institutional theory, this article develops an extended model to test and verify the effects of external institutional pressures on Secure Software Development (SSD) assimilation and the roles of internal critical factors. The empirical results are based on 86 survey data from respondents of related organizations in United Kingdom, Hong Kong, and Mainland China who have related project experience about SSD. Results from partial least squares (PLS) analysis suggest that both mimetic and coercive pressures have indirect effects on SSD assimilation with the distal mediation of top management. Normative pressures positively affect SSD assimilation with the full mediation of secure software champion. Results also suggest that secure software champion plays another partial mediation between top management participation and SSD assimilation. This paper highlights the important role of secure software champion for its dually mediating effects on both external and internal forces during SSD assimilation process.