Gary, Good interview.
The discussion on being unable to develop trust relationships with contractors who release exploits was interesting, and I wished that there was more discussion on that point. I would have thought signing a contract made it easier to sue for breach of contract than untested laws (or bad laws like the UK's RIPA), so much so you'd really think twice as well as the negative downside of being considered untrustworthy with confidential data - which is like a plague to any consultancy business. I really wish Ms Davidson had gone into detail on their SDL, as to what is really in there, and where we could read it and review it. Oracle's is an interesting turn around considering back in 2005 / 2006, the research community and Oracle's relationship was at an all time low, essentially begging Oracle to put in an SDL and address the security defects properly without outside folks finding them first. I have since read that fences have been somewhat mended between researchers, such as David Litchfield, and Oracle. I still wince at that episode - it was entirely unprofessional of Oracle to attack Litchfield, who was practicing responsible disclosure for up to 600-800 days, when 30 is the norm. I personally was extremely unimpressed with Oracle's approach of shooting the messenger rather than fixing the product. I must admit that episode led me to dismiss Oracle as the walking dead as they obviously couldn't be trusted with data of value, and so didn't follow news about Oracle ... until this interview. I'm glad they're now using automated SCA tools and fuzzers, they're now finding most of the security issues themselves, have an internal review team, and my personal favorite - developer awareness / education. This is a 180 degree turnaround from the prior to 2005/2006 era. I particularly like that she's going to the universities and ask them to teach coding security. This is what they SHOULD have been doing rather than attacking the research community. I'm glad that Oracle is now drinking the kool aid and treating security as a fundamental software engineering requirement. It's about time. thanks, Andrew van der Stock Lead Author, OWASP Guide to Writing Secure Applications and OWASP Top 10 _______________________________________________ Secure Coding mailing list (SC-L) SC-L@securecoding.org List information, subscriptions, etc - http://krvw.com/mailman/listinfo/sc-l List charter available at - http://www.securecoding.org/list/charter.php SC-L is hosted and moderated by KRvW Associates, LLC (http://www.KRvW.com) as a free, non-commercial service to the software security community. _______________________________________________