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How you can get developers on board with security starting today
09 Aug 2010Some people – including a brilliant colleague of mine – think security is not the job of software developers. In the grand scheme of things I think such an approach is shortsighted and bad for business. It’s kind of like an auto assembly line worker not being responsible for the quality of his work or citizens not being responsible for their own healthcare (oh wait!) or why the bottom 50% of income earners in the U.S. shouldn’t be responsible for paying their fair share. It’s always someone else’s problem. Sadly, “responsibilities” without ramifications is the way things are in most societies today.
Getting back to the point, getting developers on board with security – as we’ve seen over the past decade – is most certainly NOT one of those things that’s going to magically happen. So is it even possible to get developers on board with security? I think so. But you have to be smart about it. You can’t just say “You! Write secure code!” Ha, if it were only that easy. There are many gotchas along the way so you have to come up with a solid game plan. I wrote about the problem and some solutions in a new piece you may want to check out:
Getting developers on board with security – once and for all
Speaking of developers and security flaws, here are some more articles I’ve written recently for TechTarget’s SearchSoftwareQuality.com that you may be interested in:Application security checklist: Finding, eliminating SQL injection flaws (formerly hosted on searchSoftwareQuality.com)
Finding cross-site scripting (XSS) application flaws checklist
Happy reading and most of all, good luck!
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I’ve written/co-written 12 books on information security including:
