Secure Software Development in the Era of Fluid Multi-party Open Software and Services
This work tackles the problem of adapting security practices for developers and organizations in fast-paced, multi-party software environments, but it is incremental as it builds on existing approaches.
The paper addresses the challenge of ensuring security and privacy in modern software development, which relies on rapidly changing third-party components, by proposing a shift from process-based to artifact-based security assurance and advocating for more incremental, automated, and decentralized evaluation methods.
Pushed by market forces, software development has become fast-paced. As a consequence, modern development projects are assembled from 3rd-party components. Security & privacy assurance techniques once designed for large, controlled updates over months or years, must now cope with small, continuous changes taking place within a week, and happening in sub-components that are controlled by third-party developers one might not even know they existed. In this paper, we aim to provide an overview of the current software security approaches and evaluate their appropriateness in the face of the changed nature in software development. Software security assurance could benefit by switching from a process-based to an artefact-based approach. Further, security evaluation might need to be more incremental, automated and decentralized. We believe this can be achieved by supporting mechanisms for lightweight and scalable screenings that are applicable to the entire population of software components albeit there might be a price to pay.