I accidentally hijacked this thread with S/MIME last night.  Mailman can't do 
base64 encoding.  Oops....

________________________________
From: Gary McGraw
To: 'mike.bober...@gmail.com' ; 'davel...@microsoft.com'
Cc: 'SC-L@securecoding.org' ; 'dustin.sulli...@informit.com'
Sent: Mon Dec 21 19:20:18 2009
Subject: Re: [SC-L] InformIT: You need an SSG

Hi mike,

The BSIMM calls out "security features and design" explicitly, and covers that 
good idea. (Though watch out for generic one-size-fits-all solutions.)  An SSG 
helps with creation, review, and roll out of such.

Calling an SSG a "committee" is pretty hilarious.  I doubt any of the 100 
microsoft SSG members think they are a committee.   Hey ladd, how goes the SDL 
committee?

gem

________________________________
From: Mike Boberski
To: Gary McGraw
Cc: Secure Code Mailing List ; Dustin Sullivan
Sent: Mon Dec 21 19:01:37 2009
Subject: Re: [SC-L] InformIT: You need an SSG
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 <http://www.cigital.com>
podcast www.cigital.com/silverbullet <http://www.cigital.com/silverbullet>
blog www.cigital.com/justiceleague <http://www.cigital.com/justiceleague>
book www.swsec.com <http://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.
_______________________________________________



------ End of Forwarded Message

_______________________________________________
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.
_______________________________________________

Reply via email to