Controls Against Program Threats

Controls Against Program Threats

The picture we have just described is not pretty. There are many ways a program can fail and many ways to turn the underlying faults into security failures. It is of course better to focus on prevention than cure; how do we use controls during software developmentthe specifying, designing, writing, and testing of the programto find and eliminate the sorts of exposures we have discussed? The discipline of software engineering addresses this question more globally, devising approaches to ensure the quality of software. In this book, we provide an overview of several techniques that can prove useful in finding and fixing security flaws. For more depth, we refer you to texts such as Pfleeger et al. and Pfleeger and Atlee.

In this section we look at three types of controls: developmental, operating system, and administrative. We discuss each in turn.

Developmental Controls

Many controls can be applied during software development to ferret out and fix problems. So let us begin by looking at the nature of development itself, to see what tasks are involved in specifying, designing, building, and testing software.