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 <g...@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 > podcast www.cigital.com/silverbullet > blog www.cigital.com/justiceleague > book www.swsec.com > > _______________________________________________ > 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. > _______________________________________________ >
_______________________________________________ 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. _______________________________________________
