A Survey of Vendor Software Assurance Practices

Abstract

Books and articles frequently exhort developers to build secure software by designing security in. A few large companies (most notably Microsoft) have completely reengineered their development process to include a focus on security. However, for all except the largest vendors, software security (or software assurance) is a relatively recent phenomenon, and one with an uncertain payoff. In this paper, we examine what real vendors do to ensure that their products are reasonably secure. Our conclusion is that software vendors put significant energy into software security, but there is significant variation in where they invest their money.