Software vendors are caught in a relentless 'time to market' race, driven by shareholder value, lack of regulations, and competition. This race has significantly contributed to a surge in software quality issues that are affecting all industries, underlining the gravity of the situation.
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72% Vulnerabilities due to Software
According to Terranovasecurity[1], 72% of vulnerabilities are caused by flaws in application coding, which is shocking. However, understanding the crucial role of project management in software development can help us understand the whole picture.
A balance of Time - Budget - Scope
As a software vendor, you must balance your efforts [2] between time, budget, and scope, ensuring the quality of your product. The challenging part of this balance is that they can only select two out of these three. As we see more software-related vulnerabilities and quality issues, software makers opt more often for fast and cheap, which can lead to issues such as frequent system crashes, data breaches, and costly rework in the later stages of the software life cycle.
The Knowledge Gap
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The fundamental challenge in the software industry is a knowledge gap about what "secure" means, how claims should be validated, and how to measure it. Unlike cars or other manufactured products, we can't use instruments to measure software quality. High software quality requires rigorous discipline, such as validating requirements early for every release to customers before deployment.
Ideas on how to solve the software security problem:
Investments in secure software development practices
Enforce security requirements specification and validation
Establish secure software maturity assessments and guidance to assist organizations on their secure software journey.
Integrate security quality gates.
Create transparency by sharing test approaches and results.
Consider using advancements in AI to detect software security flaws earlier.
CISA Secure by Design
In an effort to support secure software development Performetriks recently signed CISAs secure by design pledge. We truly believe security must be built in to every product instead of bolted on at the end of the development process.
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Please contact us anytime if you are interested in learning more about developing software with security in mind.Â
Keep up the great work!
References
[1] Terranovasecurity
[2] Resilient Cyber
[3] Reversinglabs