Prof. Dr. Eric Bodden

The workshop was an opportunity to share experiences and ideas about developing secure software using the agile processes. Achim Bruker opened the sessions with an overview of the experience of SAP in developing secure software. This was followed by a talk given by Jesus Choliz about the application of Microsoft Secure Software Development process to develop secure systems for election management. Lotfi ben Othmane continued the discussion by showing how to use the B method to detect inconsistencies of access policies in the context of incremental software development. Next, Prof. Juha Röning gave an overview about his experience in developing a security fuzzing software and their use in agile processes. The spin-off that they created out of the project was recently sold to Synopsis.

In the afternoon session, Hela Oueslati discussed the challenges of developing secure software that she found in the literature and the evaluation of the validity of these challenges with respect to the agile values and principles and security practices. She asked the participants to help her in her future empirical studies about the topic. The presentation was followed by the talk of Clemens Teichmann, who shared the experience of his team in evaluating threat modeling methods for fitness to agile development processes used by their clients.

Afterwards, the attendees discussed the common point raised in the talks: the fast feedback and adaptation that agile processes offer helps development teams reducing the cost of developing secure software. Early identification of vulnerabilities allows for fixing them fast (It is easier to fix new code). In addition, development teams can develop, early in the projects, secure programming APIs or techniques to avoid the vulnerabilities they encounter in future development.

Cross-posted from SEEBlog