SEFeb 10, 2021Code
Enterprise-Driven Open Source Software: A Case Study on Security AutomationFlorian Angermeir, Markus Voggenreiter, Fabiola Moyón et al.
Agile and DevOps are widely adopted by the industry. Hence, integrating security activities with industrial practices, such as continuous integration (CI) pipelines, is necessary to detect security flaws and adhere to regulators' demands early. In this paper, we analyze automated security activities in CI pipelines of enterprise-driven open source software (OSS). This shall allow us, in the long-run, to better understand the extent to which security activities are (or should be) part of automated pipelines. In particular, we mine publicly available OSS repositories and survey a sample of project maintainers to better understand the role that security activities and their related tools play in their CI pipelines. To increase transparency and allow other researchers to replicate our study (and to take different perspectives), we further disclose our research artefacts. Our results indicate that security activities in enterprise-driven OSS projects are scarce and protection coverage is rather low. Only 6.83% of the analyzed 8,243 projects apply security automation in their CI pipelines, even though maintainers consider security to be rather important. This alerts industry to keep the focus on vulnerabilities of 3rd Party software and it opens space for other improvements of practice which we outline in this manuscript.
SEMay 27, 2021
Using Process Models to understand Security StandardsFabiola Moyón, Daniel Méndez, Kristian Beckers et al.
Many industrial software development processes today have to comply with security standards such as the IEC~62443-4-1. These standards, written in natural language, are ambiguous and complex to understand. This is especially true for non-security experts. Security practitioners thus invest much effort into comprehending standards and, later, into introducing them to development teams. However, our experience in the industry shows that development practitioners might very well also read such standards, but nevertheless end up inviting experts for interpretation (or confirmation). Such a scenario is not in tune with current trends and needs of increasing velocity in continuous software engineering. In this paper, we propose a tool-supported approach to make security standards more precise and easier to understand for both non-security as well as security experts by applying process models. This approach emerges from a large industrial company and encompasses so far the IEC62443-4-1 standard. We further present a case study with 16 industry practitioners showing how the approach improves communication between development and security compliance practitioners.
SEMay 27, 2021
How to Integrate Security Compliance Requirements with Agile Software Engineering at Scale?Fabiola Moyón, Daniel Méndez Fernández, Kristian Beckers et al.
Integrating security into agile software development is an open issue for research and practice. Especially in strongly regulated industries, complexity increases not only when scaling agile practices but also when aiming for compliance with security standards. To achieve security compliance in a large-scale agile context, we developed S2C-SAFe: An extension of the Scaled Agile Framework that is compliant to the security standard IEC~62443-4-1 for secure product development. In this paper, we present the framework and its evaluation by agile and security experts within Siemens' large-scale project ecosystem. We discuss benefits and limitations as well as challenges from a practitioners' perspective. Our results indicate that \ssafe contributes to successfully integrating security compliance with lean and agile development in regulated environments. We also hope to raise awareness for the importance and challenges of integrating security in the scope of Continuous Software Engineering.