Analysis of Existing Software Cognitive Complexity Measures

In order to maintain the quality of software, it is important to measure it complexity. This provides an insight into the degree of comprehensibility and maintainability of the software. Measurement can be carried out using cognitive measures which are based on cognitive informatics. A number of such measures have been proposed in literature. The goal of this article is to identify the features and advantages of the existing measures. In addition, a comparative analysis is done based on some selected criteria. The results show that there is a similar trend in the output obtained from the different measures when they are applied to different examples. This makes it easy for adopting organisations to readily choose from the options based on the availability of tool support.

LDAP Vulnerability Detection in Web Applications

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is commonly used in web applications to provide lookup information and enforcing authentication. Web applications may suffer from LDAP injection vulnerabilities that can lead to security breaches such as login bypass and privilege escalation. This paper1 proposes OCL fault injection-based detection of LDAP injection attacks. The authors extract design-level information and constraints expressed in OCL and then randomly alter them to generate test cases that have the capability to uncover LDAP injection vulnerabilities. The authors proposed approaches to implement test case generation, and they used one open source PHP application and one custom application to evaluate the proposed approach. The analysis shows that this approach can detect LDAP injection vulnerabilities.

Risk Centric Activities in Secure Software Development in Public Organisations

When working with software security in a risk-centric way, development projects become equipped to make decisions on how much security to include and what type of security pays off. This article presents the results of a study made among 23 public organisations, mapping their risk-centric activities and practices, and challenges for implementing them. The authors found that their software security practices were not based on an assessment of software security risks, but rather driven by compliance. Additionally, their practices could in many cases be characterised as arbitrary, late and error driven, with limited follow up on any security issues throughout their software development projects. Based on the results of the study, the authors identified the need for improvements in three main areas: responsibilities and stakeholder cooperation; risk perception and competence; and, practical ways of doing risk analysis in agile projects.

A Database of Existing Vulnerabilities to Enable Controlled Testing Studies

From holding worldwide companies' information hostage to keeping several distributed systems down for hours, the last years were marked by several security attacks which are the result of complex software and its fast production. There are already tools which can be used to help companies detect vulnerabilities responsible for such attacks. However, their reliability is still not the best and well discriminated. In software testing, researchers tend to use hand-seeded test cases or mutations due to the challenges involved in the extraction or reproduction of real test cases which might not be suitable for testing techniques, since both approaches can create samples that inadvertently differ from the real vulnerabilities and thus might lead to misleading assessments of the tools' capabilities. The lack of databases of real security vulnerabilities is an issue since it hampers the tools' evaluation and categorization. To study these tools, the researchers created a database of 682 real test cases which is the outcome of mining 248 repositories for 16 different vulnerability patterns.

Goal Modelling for Security Problem Matching and Pattern Enforcement

This article describes how earlier detection of security problems and the implementation of solutions would be a cost-effective approach for developing secure software systems. Developing, gathering and sharing similar repeatable programming knowledge and solutions has led to the introduction of Patterns in the 90's. The same concept has been adopted to realise reoccurring security knowledge and hence security patterns. Detecting a security problem using the patterns in requirements models may lead to its early prevention. In this article, the authors have provided an overview of security patterns in the past two decades, followed by a summary of i*/Tropos goal modelling framework. Section 2 outlines model-driven development, meta-models and model transformation, within the context of requirements engineering. They have summarised security access control types, and formally described role-based access control (RBAC) in particular as a pattern that may occur in the stakeholder requirements models. Then the authors used the i* modelling language and some elements from its constructs - model-driven queries and transformations - to describe the pattern enforcement. This is applied to a number of requirements models within the literature, and the pattern-based transformation tool they designed has automated the detection and resolution of this security pattern in several goal-oriented stakeholder requirements. Finally, the article also reflects on a variety of existing applications and future work.

Self-Modifying Code

This article describes how code obfuscation techniques aim to conceal the functionality of a program by mystifying the code so that it is unreadable or in an incomprehensible format. Since the objective of this article is to make a program obfuscated, the source code shall appear like normal native code and should be perfectly readable. As nobody can guess that the code is an obfuscated one, obviously it will be very tough to analyze. Nowadays, a lot of programs protect themselves from being analyzed by hiding their behaviors or compressing their semantics by using obfuscation techniques. On the contrary, self-modifying code (SMC) can challenge one's intellect to discover the real intrinsic meaning of the source code as it is difficult and strenuous to analyze, since the code gets modified dynamically during runtime. Hence, this article brings into play the underlying concepts of self-modifying codes for obfuscating the programs to construct a much better code protection model. Some techniques like indirect memory addressing, register renaming, direction-changing of instructions, segment ignoring, modification of registry content and many more are expounded in this article by using Assembly-level language, which is binary obfuscation.

Designing Secure and Privacy-Aware Information Systems

Pervasiveness of information systems is well underway, redefining our social and economic relationships. This technological revolution has generated enormous capabilities, but also enabled the creation of new vulnerabilities and threats. A major challenge in the field of information systems is therefore, to ensure the trustworthiness of the underlying technologies that make possible the generation, collection, storage, processing and transmission of user data at rates more intensive than ever before. Trust in information systems depends on different aspects, one of which is the security of user's data. Data security is referred as the protection of user's data from corruption and unauthorized access. Another important aspect of trust is the protection of user's privacy. Protecting privacy is about complying with user's desires when it comes to handling personal information. Without security to guarantee data protection, appropriate uses of that data cannot be realized. This implies that security and privacy issues are inherently intertwined and should be viewed synergistically. The aim of this paper is to elevate modern practices for ensuring security and privacy during software systems analysis and design. To this end, the basic security and privacy requirements that should be considered are introduced. Additionally, a number of well known methods in the research area of requirements engineering which focus on eliciting and modeling security and privacy requirements are described. Finally, a comparative analysis between these methods is presented.

Design Patterns and Design Quality

Design patterns are reusable software design solutions to object-oriented programs. Since the initial introduction of the 23 well-known design patterns in 1995, more and more patterns have been identified and utilized in the software industry. The benefits of applying design patterns include reducing development cost, improving code quality, and standardizing the integration and maintenance processes. Therefore, using design patterns is becoming a common practice to build both commercial software and open-source products. Although most design patterns are considered creative solutions to some difficult design problems, not all of them are necessarily the best with respect to all different software quality measures, such as program complexity. This paper studies 13 commonly employed design patterns in software industry. First, these 13 patterns are analyzed theoretically about their design complexity in comparison to the conventional solutions. Second, empirical studies are performed on five open-source Java projects to investigate the correlations between design patterns and class structural quality. Finally, these 13 design patterns are evaluated by software programmers who have experience of using all of them. Overall, this study finds that although some design patterns are considered useful, creative, and significant compared to conventional solutions based on user experience, pattern-involved classes are more complex than pattern-free classes, both theoretically and empirically. The authors accordingly recommend a balanced approach to using design patterns: design quality, cost, development time, and product quality should all be considered, when design patterns are utilized.

Introducing a Novel Security-Enhanced Agile Software Development Process

In this paper, a novel security-enhanced agile software development process, SEAP, is introduced. It has been designed, tested, and implemented at Ericsson AB, specifically in the development of a mobile money transfer system. Two important features of SEAP are 1) that it includes additional security competences, and 2) that it includes the continuous conduction of an integrated risk analysis for identifying potential threats. As a general finding of implementing SEAP in software development, the developers solve a large proportion of the risks in a timely, yet cost-efficient manner. The default agile software development process at Ericsson AB, i.e. where SEAP was not included, required significantly more employee hours spent for every risk identified compared to when integrating SEAP. The default development process left 50.0% of the risks unattended in the software version that was released, while the application of SEAP reduced that figure to 22.5%. Furthermore, SEAP increased the proportion of risks that were corrected from 12.5% to 67.9%, a more than five times increment.

A Lightweight Measurement of Software Security Skills, Usage and Training Needs in Agile Teams

Although most organizations understand the need for application security at an abstract level, achieving adequate software security at the sharp end requires taking bold steps to address security practices within the organization. In the Agile software development world, a security engineering process is unacceptable if it is perceived to run counter to the agile values, and agile teams have thus approached software security activities in their own way. To improve security within agile settings requires that management understands the current practices of software security activities within their agile teams. In this study, the authors have used a survey instrument to investigate software security usage, competence, and training needs in two agile organizations. They find that (1) The two organizations perform differently in terms of core software security activities, but are similar when secondary activities that could be leveraged for security are considered (2) regardless of cost or benefit, skill drives the kind of activities that are performed (3) Secure design is expressed as the most important training need by all groups in both organizations (4) Effective software security adoption in agile setting is not automatic, it requires a driver.